JAKARTA – AN EIGHT-DAY international yoga festival opened on Tuesday on the Indonesian holiday island of Bali despite a fatwa against the exercise from the country’s top Muslim body.
Organisers said seminars and workshops would help introduce yoga to a wider audience and rejected the clerics’ concerns that some forms of the popular exercise were a threat to Islam.
‘The festival has a universal value. It doesn’t belong to any religious teachings,’ International Bali-India Yoga Festival spokeswoman Susi Andrini told AFP.
I’m glad that the organizers to the event had the balls courage to go ahead with DOING THE RIGHT THING, and creating awareness on the benefits of Yoga as an exercise – despite of the baseless claims from certain parties.
Read the full story HERE.
Bali boleh!
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Noel Chelliah, ACE-CPT, ACE-LWMC, has been recognized as one of the Top Transformation Experts in Malaysia. No stranger to being overweight himself, Noel has gone through a life-changing transformation himself, from fat, to fit. In 2010, Noel founded the DailyMuscle Body Transformation Camp, which today helps hundreds of individuals exercise and practice healthier habits. In his spare time, Noel serves the community with various programs that promote a healthier lifestyle, and enjoys playing with his dogs.
My name is Noel Chelliah, and I’m a Transformation Specialist and founder of the 
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Look at the carefully crafted response line
‘The festival has a universal value. It doesn’t belong to any religious teachings,’
She stopped short of saying yoga isnt religious, instead focusing on the “festival”. That’s good PR for you.
Cheers,
RoK
Indeed – that takes such skill, which unfortunately, I am hopeless at! I even turned down a phone interview from BBC during the whole Yoga Fatwa Incident thingy – didn’t want to be misquoted and end up in prison under the ISA.