We needed a break. So we left campus and headed east, past the ritzy Hollywood night club scene to trendy Crunch Gym. We were drawn by a new kind of flying yoga called "Wings." Most of us have been wanting to be able to levitate and fly for a long time. (The others prefer the power of invisibility). What we found was that hanging upside down like a bat in a stretchy cocoon of high tensile cloth is fantastic.
Crunch describes the future trend: "Stretch further and hold challenging postures longer using a flowing fabric hammock as your only prop. With the fabric as a soft trapeze, you'll learn simple suspension techniques to move into seemingly impossible inverted poses to relieve compressed joints and align the body from head to toe." Close your eyes and fly. Then go downstairs and take a regular yoga class to get grounded again. More>>
Why did we go? Julia Roberts isn't the only "Hindu." We're all Veda-reading India-loving yogis now (with or without knowing it), and as Buddhists we've gone even beyond that.
Hindu Julia Roberts models for Boticelli (who painted the "Birth of Venus") in a British commercial. Now housewives do yoga on Wii and buy icons of Shiva the Destroyer at Pier 1 Imports and T-shirts from Target emblazoned with the “OM” symbol.
From yoga to Julia Roberts, Hinduism goes mainstream
Brett Buckner (The Star Anniston Star, Jan. 29, 2011)
Julia Roberts shouldn’t be the icon conjured up when envisioning humanity’s oldest living religion. And yet the star of "Eat, Pray, Love" [the terrible movie, not the great book], about a woman’s spiritual journey through India and other places, became just that when she revealed that she, her husband, and their three children were Hindu.
Not since George Harrison [of the Beatles] introduced the world to Indian mysticism in the 1960s has the 6,000-year-old faith experienced such headlines.
Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, J.D Salinger [author of The Catcher in the Rye], pop star Katy Perry, and NFL running back Rickie Williams all practiced some form of Hinduism. Britney Spears had her 4-month-old son blessed in a Hindu temple. It was Gandhi who transformed the Hindu ideal of ahimsa, nonviolence toward all living beings, into a political and social movement that later inspired Martin Luther King Jr. More>>
