Everyone is well aware of the word ‘Yoga‘ that was originated in India. India is home to Yoga practice. Yoga is an ancient physical, mental and spiritual practice. The word ‘Yoga‘ derives from Sanskrit root “yuj” which means ‘to unite’.
It was Prime Minister Narendra Modi who first proposed the proposal to declare June 21 as International Yoga day while addressing the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2014. Prime Minister Narendra Modi says, “Yoga is above religion, caste, colour, gender and region — it is above everything. We should make efforts to take Yoga from cities to villages and tribal areas. Let our motto be Yoga for peace, harmony and progress,”
Yoga is a system that requires much more involvement than any other forms of things that we do. Modern science claims that the whole existing is just one energy. The word Yoga means ‘union’. What is the union? If you want to know the union of existence, if you want to know the awareness of what it is, not leaving it, If you can experience everything around you then we say you are in Yoga.
In a proud moment, the world’s first Yoga University outside India has been built in the USA. The University has been named after the Vivekananda Yoga University (VAYU). The first campus of the university was established in Los Angeles with a budget of $5 million. It is a matter of pride for India that the world’s first Yoga University has been constructed outside India that too in the United States of America.
Sree Sreenath, a Professor from Case Western University, would be its president and Indian Yoga guru H R Nagendra would be its chairman, the university said in a statement.
As Swami Vivekananda said education is the manifestation of perfection already in man, VAYU aims at providing man-making and nation-building education by promoting an all-round personality development in students of generation next,” Nagendra informed reporters. It is being said that the university is the brain child of Nagendra.
The university is all set to start its post-graduation course in the United States later this year. According to university officials, the admission for the course will commence in April and the programs will start from August 2020.
VAYU is meant to expedite collective research, credit transfers and combined programmes with numerous leading universities across the globe.
The objective of VAYU is to offer man-making and nation-building education by encouraging an all-round personality development in students of generation next. Nagendra, a former scientist from NASA, is said to be the brainchild behind VAYU. He has been working on transforming Yoga into a socially significant science for the last four decades. He commenced India’s first Yoga University in the year 2002.
The university aims at helping thousands of Yoga teachers in the US whose Yoga education was limited to 200 or 500 hours of certificate programmes to progress further into university-based higher education, said Prem Bhandari, a member of the VAYU board of directors.
