Competitive yoga
The International Federation of Sports Yoga has organised annual championships since 1989, and is led by Fernando Estevez-Griego (Swami Maitreyananda).[7] The documentary film Posture by Nathan Bender and Daniel Nelson portrays competitors and detractors of the USA Yoga Federation National Championship.[8] The journalist Neal Pollack said that the goal of all types of yoga is samadhi, "enlightened bliss where the ego separates from the self and the practitioner realizes that he's powerless to control the vagaries of an endlessly shifting universe"."[9] He noted that in the early history of yoga as exercise in the first part of the 20th century, the rival Indian pioneers Kuvalayananda and Yogendra both saw the practice as a way of uniting "body and mind in the service of independent India."[9] Competitive yoga could, as both pioneers saw, be incorporated into the existing structure of athletics in Indian schools, simultaneously encouraging children's personal growth and building physical fitness.