A few weeks ago, a Baptist minister in Texas started a rumble, or at least a small brouhaha, when he declared that yoga is not suitable for Christians. His point was that using the body for spiritual practice contradicts basic Christian principles.
But his basic complaint seemed to have more to do with the fact that yoga comes out of a country whose main religious culture is Hindu. (Though, of course, Indian Christians are found all over the sub-continent and throughout the west as well.)
Then, last week, a group of Hindus took up the issue from a different point of view. They criticized the Western practice of divorcing yoga from its Hindu roots. Yoga comes from Hinduism, they said, and it should be taught in the context of the Hindu tradition.
So, what is yoga? Is it a system of physical culture? Is it part of a Hindu religious tradition? Is it a practice, like meditation, that is doctrinally neutral and therefore adaptable to any religious culture?
We've been considering these questions ever since yoga first made its way to the West.
In fact, the minister's attack was oddly similar to the fervid denunciations that some mainstream Christian leaders leveled at yoga when it came to the United States in the early 20th century. The first Parliament of World Religions in Chicago had introduced Vedanta and meditative yoga to America, and in the years following this landmark event, Indian teachers like Swami Vivekananda and Swami Ram Tirtha were joined by western teachers to teach different forms of yoga philosophy and meditation to the cultural creatives of the time. Most of their students were well-educated, upper-middle-class men and women, including society leaders and even some otherwise staid industrialists. The press treated the Indian teachers as exotics, the western teachers as charlatans, and mocked the western students who followed them. But in the years that followed, a growing movement towards the physical culture of hatha yoga began to gain ground in this country, side by side with the growing interest in alternative medicine, vegetarianism and "health food" (as it was known for many years). By the 1970s, yoga studios had sprung up in major cities. Today, of course, yoga is taught in gyms and health clubs, in schools and colleges and even in kindergarten. Well-dressed people tote yoga mats through the streets of our cities, and no one looks twice.
Hatha Yoga, as practiced by most people in mainstream western culture, is as much about physical health and well being as it is about spirituality. The standard series' of physical postures, breathing practices, sometimes mixed with meditative concentration, fits in well with healthy-conscious lifestyle, without requiring anyone to adopt a belief system or creed. This type of yoga is objective, non-religious and easily adaptable either to a totally secular approach (as in the fitness club) or to being incorporated by mainstream Christian and Jewish centers, churches and synagogues
On the other hand, yoga has gifts to offer that go far beyond the physical. In its original, classical form, hatha yoga is part of a comprehensive system of spiritual philosophy and self-culture that comes out of the Indian tradition. So classically -- and in many contemporary yoga schools -- the physical postures are taught in a context that includes moral and ethical precepts, meditation, and teachings about the nature of reality, aimed at aligning the individual with his or her divine core. Usually, the teachings come from the tradition of Vedanta, from other non-dual traditions like tantra or from the Hindu devotional paths. All these systems have in common an understanding that the soul of a human being is inherently divine. And many of them teach that the divine appears as the world, that there are many paths to the same truth, and that the individual and God are one. This type of philosophically-based yoga practice would probably not be acceptable within conservative or evangelical Christian traditions, or in orthodox or conservative Jewish traditions, that believe that the divine is only beyond or apart from the human body and the world.
It's definitely true that the deep gifts of yoga are not just physical. Yoga is more than physical posture. It is a profound system for yoking the individual and the divine.
But as pure physical culture, hatha yoga is adaptable to nearly every tradition, and can be of enormous value for its effect on health, strength and well-being. And in our increasingly global society, it remains one of the great gifts of the east to the West.
An acknowledged master teacher of meditation and former swami in one of the Saraswati orders of India, Sally Kempton's new book Meditation for the Love of It releases January, 2011 (Sounds True). A teachers' teacher whose students now include leading teachers of yoga and meditation around the world, Sally writes the popular "Wisdom" column for Yoga Journal.
Nicholas Rosen: Going to the Mat: Confessions of a Yoga Guinea Pig
Southern Baptist leader on yoga: Not Christianity - Yahoo! News
Yoga and Christianity: Are They Compatible? - Probe Ministries
Christian leader: Avoid yoga! - Boing Boing
Learning From Other Traditions While Staying Within Your Own ...
Health - Should Christians Do Yoga?
Josh Schrei: The Crucible Gone Cold: Modern Yoga, Christianity ...
Yes to Yoga | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical ...
I'm a strong person, but I'm not comfortable with what appears to be a push to "combine" faith traditions and call it "spirituality". I think many people are afraid to be called intolerant, so they say nothing.
Christian leaders condemning yoga takes us back to the middle ages when only priests were supposed to 'know' God and us mere mortals were to get from them what God wanted.
"In the spring of 1893, an Indian swami named Vivekananda traveled to the U.S. hoping to participate in the World Parliament of Religions, which was being convened as a part of Chicago’s World Fair... According to the Boston Evening Transcript, “Four thousand fanning people in the Hall of Columbus would sit smiling and expectant, waiting for an hour or two of other men’s speeches to listen to Vivekananda for fifteen minutes.”
Perhaps one key to Vivekananda’s popularity was that he at once fulfilled and debunked Indian stereotypes, enabling Americans to romanticize him and his country without abandoning too many of their own values...
In his talks, Vivekananda never used the word yoga, a curious fact in light of some current scholarship which proposes that modern, transnational yoga began with him.
Moreover, Vivekananda did not contort himself into the bow pose or any other asana. In India a yoga revival connected with Indian nationalism was in full swing, and Vivekananda was an advocate of the movement. But he avoided the word “yoga” because he thought Westerners would find it too foreign and frightening, and he avoided hatha yoga altogether because—along with the majority of his compatriots—he found it distasteful and wholly unsuitable for the yoga revival...."
http://shambhalasun.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3605&Itemid=0
Or Maybe, Judaism White...lol.
Not the same thing.
Who cares. Art is Art....eh..... right?
But since you are like lukewarm water, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth!
The Christian religion calls for an all or nothing approach. Either get on the bandwagon or find another one!
I for one decided to walk.
I'm sure you agreed with me until you read the last sentence. How dare I feel offended by such liberal intellegence.
PraiseMoves (http://praisemoves.com) is a Christian "alternative" to their interpretation of classical yoga. In fact its virtually the same thing wrapped in a lot of Evangelical talk.
I embrace the mind/body aspect of Hatha Yoga. I don't/can't get into all the esoteric theology. I'm secure enough in my faith not to let yoga be any sort of threat to what I believe. I think God is more pissed at our arguing with each other rather than if a Christian should do yoga.
Truly, people need to stop assigning human emotions to "God"
PraiseMoves (http://praisemoves.com) is a popular "Christian alternative" to their interpretation of classical Yoga. In truth its precisely the same thing with a lot of Evangelical talk.
I embrace the mind/body aspect of yoga. I don't/can't get into all the esoteric theology. I'm secure enough in my faith that yoga poses (pardon the pun) no real threat to what I believe. I think God is more pissed over our arguing about it than whether or not a Christian should do yoga.