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Week of Jun
6
Take a Pass on Yoga
How can I support a
practice that is targeting the young and the weak?
By Holly Vicente
Robaina / posted 06/07/2005 09:00 a.m.
This
is a response to Agnieszka Tennant’s “Yes to Yoga,” which
recently appeared on Christianity Today’s website. Agnieszka wrote her
article in response to my piece, “The Truth About Yoga,” which
appeared in Today’s Christian Woman’s March/April 2005 issue.
While
I recognize Agnieszka’s right to practice yoga, I’ve got to take a
pass—and I feel compelled to encourage other Christians to pass on yoga,
too.
I
was deeply involved in the New Age before I became a Christian. Trances,
channeling spirits, and past-life regression were normal practices for me back
then. So was yoga.
Like
Laurette Willis, whose story is featured in “The Truth About Yoga,”
I was raised in a Christian home. I accepted Jesus as a child, was baptized,
attended a Christian school, and participated in Bible quizzing. When I headed
off to college, I thought my faith was rock solid.
A
Ouija board game in college started my journey into the New Age. It seemed so
innocent at the time—a plastic pointer on top of a piece of cardboard
printed with the alphabet. It seemed like Monopoly or Scrabble. Though
I’d been warned about Ouija boards by church youth leaders, this
didn’t look like anything that could hurt me.
It
took many years and many prayers for me to let go of my New Age practices and
to be healed from the pain they caused me. Until last fall, when I met Laurette
Willis, I’d never met another Christian who’d come out of the New
Age. (To be fair, I’ve kept pretty quiet about my experience.) Laurette
told me she hadn’t met any before either. (And she’s been extremely
vocal about her experience.)
Both
Laurette and I have met quite a few New Agers who’d grown up in Christian
households, attended church, or even been professing believers.
Just
before I wrote “The Truth About Yoga,” I was looking for a
stretching routine that would offer an alternative to yoga. I’d practiced
yoga for years and loved the feel of stretching and relaxing from a day’s
stresses. But after I became a Christian, I sensed something spiritual about
yoga that made me uneasy. (I later discovered yoga’s Hindu origins and
understood why I’d felt uneasy—New Age beliefs and practices are
largely derived from Hinduism.)
So
when I heard about a new exercise program dubbed “Christian yoga,”
I thought I’d found my alternative. And I figured TCW readers would love
to learn about it, too.
I
interviewed two Christian yoga instructors along with Laurette and had
contacted others when I began putting the story together. As I was working on
it, I felt troubled by some of the statements made by Christian yoga
instructors and characteristics of their programs. At first, I ignored it,
thinking I was hypersensitive and being too nitpicky because of my own New Age
past. I became deeply concerned again when I discovered one of my
interviewees—a Christian yoga instructor who’d been featured prominently
in articles by several Christian publications—had links to a New Age
website on her Christian yoga site. I prayed about it, began deeply researching
more than a dozen Christian yoga programs, and prayed some more. Finally, I
contacted Today’s Christian Woman
editor Jane Johnson Struck. We agreed it was best to stick to a profile on
Laurette Willis.
Laurette
never contacted me about her PraiseMoves program, nor did she send promotional
material to TCW. I didn’t even know she was working on a book for Harvest
House. I found her website through a search engine, and it was my decision
(with support from the TCW editors) to focus on her story.
The big difference
I’ve
found that yoga practitioners—both Christian and those who are not
believers—are extremely defensive of yoga. I can understand why.
Stretching feels fabulous, and there’s a dearth of stretching programs
out there. That was yet another reason it seemed helpful to highlight
PraiseMoves, a stretching program created by a Christian, for Christians.
Agnieszka seems to
believe PraiseMoves is yoga with Christian terminology thrown in. I’d
correct that statement and say Laurette’s program is a Christian
stretching program that seeks to reflect the physical benefits of yoga while
replacing Hindu spiritualism with Christian worship.
Is
there really a difference? I’ve practiced yoga with many different
instructors (who all said they taught purely “physical exercise”
without any yogic spiritualism), and I’ve done the PraiseMoves program
myself. So I’d offer a resounding “Yes, there’s a big
difference,” along with an illustration.
I
have a Buddhist friend who practices ancestor worship—she goes to a
temple, lights a stick of incense, and leaves food for her deceased relatives.
There are Christians who light candles in remembrance of deceased relatives, or
set a place at their holiday table for someone who has passed. The actions are
similar, but the intent and settings are different. The Christians
aren’t worshiping their deceased relatives (intent), or performing a
symbolic gesture inside a Buddhist temple or in a uniquely Buddhist way
(setting).
I
believe Agnieszka’s personal intent in practicing yoga is good and pure.
She loves Jesus, sees yoga as exercise, and likely would never be seduced into
the deeper spiritualism that is inherent in all yoga. But yoga has a history, a
“setting” of postures and language that pays homage to Hindu
deities. While American instructors may water down that language, I think
If’s safe to say most are still using it. The word namaste is still used in many yoga classes, including
Agnieszka’s, and it’s a term Hindus use when paying respect to
their deities. Even when used between friends, the term still really means,
“I bow to the god within you.” (Agnieszka offers a different translation
in her article. While the word gets translated differently depending on the
source, I believe my translation, which comes from a number of Hindu websites,
is closer to its true intent. It is a Sanskrit/Hindu word, and Hindus believe
all living things are part of god, i.e. we are all gods. Some explain this
belief as “monotheistic polytheism.”) And most
instructors—including, it seems, Agnieszka’s—use traditional
Sanskrit terms that have been translated into English, such as downward facing
dog, corpse pose, and sun salutation. The last one, by the way, directly pays
homage to the Hindu sun god—it isn’t called a “salute to the
sun” for nothin’.
Minority report
Even
if a Christian can get past the Hindu origins of yoga, what about those who are
instructing the class? What’s their intent? On the Internet, you’ll
find a jillion yoga instructors who offer definitions similar to this one found
on yogabasics.com: “Yoga is…aimed at integrating mind, body and
spirit, and achieving a state of enlightenment or oneness with the universe.
What is normally thought of as ‘yoga’ in the West is really Hatha
Yoga, one of the many paths of yoga. These different paths of yoga are simply
different approaches and techniques that all lead to the same goal of unification
and enlightenment.” The definition was written by the website’s
founder, who has instructed yoga for 16 years.
As
for American-style yoga being just exercise, the site goes on to say:
“More than just stretching, asanas [yoga postures] open the energy channels,
chakras and psychic centers of the body. Asanas purify and strengthen the body
and control and focus the mind.”
These
are not fringe views shared only by hardcore Hindu yogis. Rather,
Agnieszka’s view—that the Hindu spiritualism within American yoga has
largely been extracted, making it purely exercise—seems to be in the
minority. Kaiser Permanente, a major healthcare provider, says this about yoga
on its website: “Yoga has been practiced for thousands of years in
Yoga
is everywhere. Classes are taught in churches and nursing homes, through city
recreation programs, and at elementary schools—both private and public.
Meanwhile, numerous studies show prayer and faith have a healing effect, and
that religion is good for your overall health. But you probably won’t see
your local city hall renting a room for prayer meetings at the senior center
any time soon.
Perhaps
it has become so common that it’s now easy to overlook yoga’s
origins—and its inherent Hindu spirituality—even when the Hindu and
yoga communities are loudly proclaiming, “Yes, all of yoga is Hinduism.
Everyone should be aware of this fact” (from an e-mail written to
Laurette Willis by a staff member of the Classical Yoga Hindu Academy in New
Jersey).
Agnieszka
references 1 Corinthians 8 in her article to illustrate how yoga might not
cause a strong Christian to stumble. But she doesn’t mention the last
part of the passage, where Paul goes on to say:
“Be
careful, however, that the exercise of your freedom does not become a stumbling
block to the weak. For if anyone with a weak conscience sees you who have this
knowledge eating in an idol’s temple, won’t he be emboldened to eat
what has been sacrificed to idols? So this weak brother, for whom Christ died,
is destroyed by your knowledge. When you sin against your brothers in this way
and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ” (verses 9-12).
And
I’ll admit it—I loved yoga. Perhaps I’m even a strong enough
Christian now to begin a yoga class again. But my decision to say no to yoga
isn’t just about me. Children are being exposed to yoga’s
spiritualism at school and in after-school programs. (I remember being taken
through a guided meditation as a teen at a youth recreation program, though I
had no idea what it was at the time.) And I’ve read many stories about
doctors who encourage the elderly, depressed patients, the mentally ill, and
terminal patients to practice yoga for its mental and spiritual
benefits—as if there is no better comfort available in the world than
yoga.
So
even if I’m strong enough, how can I support a practice that seems to be
targeting the young and the weak? I take 1 Corinthians 8:13 most seriously:
“Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother to fall into sin, I will
never eat meat again, so that I will not cause him to fall.”
For
me, giving up yoga is even easier than it would be to give up meat because
there are alternatives (There aren’t many alternatives to a good steak!)
I can still stretch. I can meditate on Scripture. I can slow down, take deep
breaths, relax, and thank God for the many gifts He’s given me. And I can
pray that more Christians like Laurette Willis will be moved to develop
alternatives to yoga.
Lastly,
I’d like to address the idea that some evangelicals are engaging in
fear-mongering about yoga. It’s easy to become afraid of things we
don’t understand, especially practices that use a different language and
come from a different culture. But fear also can be a God-given response that
keeps us out of danger. As someone who was deeply involved in the New Age and
metaphysical practices, I can tell you from experience: There is a spiritual
realm in this world. There are spiritual battles being fought. And there are
frightening things from which we need to run—even if, like that Ouija
board, they look benign on the surface.
Holly
Vicente Robaina, a regular
contributor to Today’s Christian Woman, lives in
Copyright ©
2005 Christianity Today.