Environmental Conservation Through Yoga Practice and Its Relevance to Contemporary Society– A Study

Abstract

In the 21st century, environmental conservation is being discussed in various platform considering the endanger of environmental pollution and hazards to the human community and other beings. Environmental impact is increasing by natural disaster as well as human activities in the contemporary society. Every religion in the society has very much environmental concerns and ecofriendly philosophy in their doctrine through describing cosmology, creation theories, interconnectedness of the gods and the nature, creatures and human. Moreover, yoga has eight ethical principles to stimulate human activities and safeguard the environment. By this means religions and yoga preserve the natural environment. Humankind is spiritual, their negligence, failure of following the religious faith rightly and busy with their day to day activities also triggers them to exploit and pollute the natural environment. The yoga is one of the ancient religious wisdom. now practicing yoga has been becoming viable means to console human mind, physical fitness and happy life in the busy society. Protecting environment, in the sense of yoga, has not been communicated to the present world by the researchers even many research carried out regarding the environmental conservation in various dimensions. Therefore, this research aims at identifying the yoga practice and demonstrating the yogic perspective of the environmental conservation and recommending the basic principle of yoga to stimulate and to simply observe the yoga in their life. Thus yoga practices will lead the individual for the attitude and behavioral change and control the adverse effect of human activities on environment. This research hypothetically analyzed data related to the literature on yoga sutra, textbooks, journals, research articles on environmental issues, and reached the conclusion that practicing yoga comparatively would be a useful mean to minimize the environmental hazards due to the human activities and optimizing the environmental conservation through changing the individual mind set.