Hindus welcome yoga sessions at Santiago Airport

Hindus have applauded launching of yoga sessions at Santiago International Airport (SCL), Chile’s busiest airport; calling it a step in the positive direction.

SCL is offering complimentary yoga sessions three days a week during peak time passenger traffic at International Departures Gate 15. Currently, these sessions are 90 minutes each in the evenings on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Nuevo Pudahuel, which manages SCL, claims to believe “that the airport is much more than a place of transit and processes”.

Welcoming this SCL gesture, distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, urged Nuevo Pudahuel CEO Nicolas Claude to create a permanent yoga space available during all airport hours 365 days a year to all passengers, employees, visitors and vendors if SCL was serious to be a world-class airport, enhance the passenger experience and help reduce their stress levels.

Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, also urged all South American commercial airports to provide yoga facilities as many USA and world airports now did offer yoga spaces.

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, Rajan Zed noted.

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 recently released “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, Rajan Zed added.

Opened in 1967, SCL, also known as Aeropuerto Internacional Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez, serviced over 17.2 million passengers in 2015.

Source : From Our Correspondent