An American art museum offers yoga classes

Now one can enjoy yoga surrounded by beautiful art.The Noyes Museum of Art, the only fine arts museum in southern New Jersey (USA), is offering “No Sweat Yoga” classes. “Relax & reduce your stress level”, yoga class announcement says. Naida Burgess is the instructor.

Welcoming the well known museum’s move to offer yoga classes, Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada (USA) today, said that although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, yoga was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. Zed urged other museums around the world to also offer yoga classes so that one could explore the two powerful mediums at the same moment.

Rajan Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, further said that yoga, referred as “a living fossil” whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, was a mental and physical discipline handed down from one guru to next, for everybody to share and benefit from. 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.

Noyes Museum in Oceanville, opened in 1983, “is filled with treasures of American art, especially folk art and crafts” and provides serene lakeside setting adjacent to a National Wildlife Refuge. Charles A. Bryant Junior and Michael Hyett are President and Vice President respectively of its Board of Directors while Michael Cagno is the Executive Director.

According to USA’s National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. According to an estimate, about 16 million Americans, including many celebrities, now practice yoga.