Hindus have welcomed renowned museum Louvre Abu Dhabi for holding yoga sessions; and are urging all major world museums to launch yoga on their premises.

 

Called “Yoga under the dome”, these yoga sessions claim to “help you calm your mind and find inner peace” in a “truly unique setting in which to explore the healing power of nature and art”.

 

Distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, termed it as a step in the positive direction to make yoga available at such an inspiring museum location and blending yoga with art.

 

Yoga, referred as “a living fossil”, was a mental and physical discipline, for everybody to share and benefit from, whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization; Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, noted.

 

Rajan Zed further said that yoga, although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. According to Patanjali who codified it in Yoga Sutra, yoga was a methodical effort to attain perfection, through the control of the different elements of human nature, physical and psychical.

 

According to a report of US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: “Yoga is the most popular complementary health approach in the United States - used by 14.3% of the adult population, or 35.2 million people”. According to US National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. Yoga was the repository of something basic in the human soul and psyche, Zed added.

 

Louvre Abu Dhabi, whose origins date back to 2007, prides in being a “Mindful Museum” and describes itself as a “symphony in concrete, water and the subtle play of reflected light” and “one of the modern urban wonders of the world”. Its mission includes “to create human connections through art, dating from prehistory to the present”. Manuel Rabaté is the Director.