SCHOLARSHIP MEETS PRACTICE
An emergent vision for cross-cultural learning and understanding By Kendall Higgins
unfolded in many ways with the ac ademic and contemplative atmosphere at Naropa providing a rich source for its growth. Ten years ago, the university launched the first yoga studies undergraduate degree program in the United States. The bachelor’s degree focuses on practices central to different iterations of yoga, including classical yoga, Tantra, hatha yoga, and modern postural yoga, while culminating in a 1000-hour teacher training certificate. Both the undergraduate and graduate degrees explore the development and history of yoga, but the new master’s program dives deeper into the history and evolution of yoga through an academic lens. Naropa’s graduate program does not offer a teacher training certificate or involve postural yoga practice. Instead, it is an academic training where students immerse themselves in theory and study the Sanskrit language, giving them the ability to more comprehensively access source texts in which the practice of yoga emerged.
The graduate degree is low-residency, which means students can work while completing the program and take Photo by Sofia Drobinskaya classes online from anywhere in the world. The cohort and faculty members come together for two nine-day inn the Fall of 2020, Naropa launched a person retreats at mountain centers in Colorado groundbreaking master’s degree program in before the first and third year to build a sense of the field of yoga studies. community and start their classes for the semester. Students take courses like History of Yoga, Hindu Today, yoga is a billion-dollar industry. Studios, Tantra, Power, Privilege, and Diversity, and Yoga and classes, retreat offerings, and yoga pants can be Globalization. This gives them a full roadmap from found all over the world—from South America to the source of yogic traditions to the many streams Europe throughout Asia and across Instagram—so we see today. how did a master’s degree in the subject make it to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at a university Ben Williams, PhD, Program Lead of the MA Yoga Studies degree and Assistant Professor of Yoga located in Boulder, Colorado? Studies and Hinduism, explains: Yoga has been studied at Naropa since the university’s inception in 1974 when spiritual teacher "What I think differentiates our program in many Ram Dass taught a course on the yogas of the ways, is that we take this panoramic view of the Bhagavad Gita. Since then, the study of yoga has history, philosophies, and theories of yoga. We do
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