Hindu community has commended Memorial University Medical Center (MUMC) in Savannah (Georgia, USA) offering free yoga classes for cancer patients and survivors.
“The classes help with flexibility and balance while also providing relaxation”, an announcement says.
US-based Hindu religious leader Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, termed it as a step in the positive direction to make multi-benefit yoga available free of cost for cancer patients and survivors. Zed urged Memorial Health Board Chairman J. Harry Haslam Jr. and CEO Margaret Gill to offer free yoga classes to all of their patients.
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 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. According to a “2016 Yoga in America Study”, about 37 million Americans (which included many celebrities) now practice yoga; and yoga is strongly correlated with having a positive self image. Yoga was the repository of something basic in the human soul and psyche, Zed added.
Award-winning MUMC, opened in 1955, serves 35 counties across southeast Georgia and southern South Carolina and claims to be “most advanced healthcare provider in the region”. Its mission is “With compassion, we heal, teach, and discover”.