Recently opened “Yoga on the Fly” at Denver International Airport (DEN) was on a trial basis and temporary, Hindu statesman Rajan Zed was informed on November 15.
Stacey Stegman, Senior Vice President of DEN, responding in an email to Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, wrote: We will take what we learn from this and make a decision as to whether we want to offer something different – such as a free room, as you noted, in the future.
An official DEN news-release called it “Holiday Stress Relief”, terming it as “90 day residency during the holiday season”, which is located in the center of Concourse A and charges $15 to $60 fee for yoga and meditation practice.
Critical of fee-based yoga offering, Rajan Zed pointed out that DEN, like many other US and world airports, should provide yoga space for the passengers without any charge if it was serious to help reduce their stress levels and be a “world-class” airport and follow its own “Core Objective” of “Winning the hearts of our customers”.
Zed noted that although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, yoga was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all and charging fee for it at a public facility like DEN did not seem right. It would be step in the positive direction if DEN rethinks about the issue and provide a yoga-room to be used by all passengers, employees, vendors and visitors for free.
Rajan Zed further said that yoga, referred as “a living fossil” whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, was a mental and physical discipline for everybody to share and benefit from. 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, Zed added.
Over 58 million passengers travel through DEN each year, making it the 18th-busiest airport in the world and generating over $26 billion for the region annually, reports suggest. Kim Day is Chief Executive Officer.
