Thoughts on Yoga

I have been asked over the years what I thought about the practice of yoga. While I do not believe I have ever attempted yoga in any meaningful sense because I am about as physically flexible as a rock (and largely always have been, even as a youngster), I only know of yoga by what I have seen other people engaging in such practices. Usually that is what I see on TV because that's often either a trope on many TV sitcoms of some (usually female) character(s) going to yoga class, or the occasional trope of a man (usually a single and/or middle aged Dad) attempting a yoga class to some hilarious effect. On rare occasion, I also happen to occasionally walk by some yoga class in progress at the local YMCA. 

That is about the only experience I have with yoga personally. From those seemingly innocuous interactions of my personal experience, I, for many years, simply told people that I thought yoga was just some harmless form of exercise like Jazzercise or what have you. I never put a whole lot of thought or effort into exploring what exactly yoga was or where it came from.  I thought the hysteria from certain Christian corners against yoga was akin to the echo chamber of the "Halloween is a Pagan Holiday/Satan Worship" school of Pietistic moralism where we somehow show our salvation by what we don't do. We don't drink. We don't smoke. We don't do Halloween. We don't do _____, and that proves somehow we are pious Christians. Pietism can quickly become a sort of a weird, inverted works righteousness. 

In its most obnoxious form, Pietism can become "holier than thou" self-righteous snobbery. This reminds me of the old stock jokes from my youth in the Bible belt that goes something like, "How can you tell the difference between a Methodist and a Baptist?...A Methodist will actually talk to you in a liquor store" or (my personal favorite:) "Why should you always take at least two Baptists with you when you go fishing?...because if you only take one, he'll drink all your beer."

I am kind of picking on Baptists there, and perhaps that is unfair. You can insert any Pietist in those jokes. Ironically, Pietism actually started in European Lutheranism and over the centuries fused with the Great Awakening in the US and infiltrated a lot of what become the more "Evangelical" churches in the US. And I freely admit, even though I was never a Baptist or self-identified Evangelical, I did grow up in the Bible belt. The concept of having alcoholic beverages at official church social functions still raises my eyebrows to this day. I know it comes from that sort of Pietistic mentality that you even find in non-stock American Protestant churches in the Bible belt like Episcopalians and Catholics. 

To be fair, part of this is regional vices. In the South, drinking alcohol was historically frowned upon but tobacco use...everyone was lighting up cigarettes or cigars in the parking lot after church on Sundays and no one batted an eye. I have found living in the Midwest, that is precisely inverted. Most people around here have no problem drinking alcohol at Church functions, but pull a cigar out in the parking lot at church and watch the moralistic tongues start wagging, even at a Catholic church where the priest keeps a bottle of bourbon in the desk in his office. 

But, I digress slightly. My point in this article is not about the ethics of using beer or tobacco products but yoga. Out of personal curiosity I started researching yoga. This was not out of some desire to become a practitioner. I am virtually certain if I tried most of those yoga postures, I would snap in half. Flexible, I ain't. I have tried over the years to get my mind around Far Eastern (non-Abrahamic) religions. 

 I admit I have largely been unsuccessful in getting my head around many of those faiths. I mean, I can understand the principles, history, and some of the concepts/practices, but the actual mysteries (to use a Catholic term) that people must somehow get something out of often eludes me. Eastern religions are generally not systematic in any form of coherent theology. They have moral principles and coherent practices, but it is not a theology like in many Western religions. Western religion, particularly Christianity, have entire libraries on exegeting the Bible and how to understand and discuss concepts like the Trinity. Rabbinical theology in Judaism goes into great detail on how to keep kosher and all sorts of rules and ethics in interpreting Torah. Classical Islam has four schools of interpretion of the Quran and applications to daily life like whether or not playing chess is haram (forbidden).    

Eastern religions from South East Asia are closer akin to a philosophy than what Abrahamic faiths would recognize as a "religion." Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism often emphasize concepts such as karma, reincarnation, and the pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Buddhism in particular is actually non-theistic in the sense that the idea of a supreme being like God who calls people back from sin or such concepts central to Western religions is largely irrelevant in the pursuit of Buddhist Enlightenment. One can believe in a deity or not in Buddhism, but God is really quite beside the point in Buddhist philosophy. 

Buddhism emphasizes personal spiritual development and understanding the nature of suffering and existence. As I understand it, The goal of Buddhism is often described as achieving Nirvana, which involves the extinguishing of desires and attachments, leading to the cessation of suffering and the cycle of rebirth.This is where theistic Westerners really have trouble following Buddhist thought because God is the center of existence as the Creator. Buddhism seems to say that's all irrelevant and one can achieve Nirvana quite without a creator deity. Westerners will of course start asking questions like "How can we know what Nirvana and Enlightenment even is if not for a Creator or Supreme Being?" And for that matter, Buddhism cannot seem to agree on what exactly Nirvana is. Some would say it is ultimately the extinguishment of the self in the great cosmic consciousness. Others would say this process can be interpreted as a form of liberation from the grasping self, rather than the complete annihilation of the self. But at the end of the day, most Western Abrahamic faith adherents would see all this as simply philosophical navel gaving.

Enter into this long history of religio-philosophy that comes from religions like Hinduism and its offshoot, Buddhism. The Buddha was originally Hindu. Yoga originated in India over 5,000 years ago, initially as part of rituals and spiritual practices among Hindu priests. It evolved through various stages, including the codification of practices by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras around 200 BC.Yoga has since transformed into a popular form of exercise and wellness worldwide in its watered down form.

At the end of the day, the word "Yoga" means to "yoke" yourself to something. Speaking from a Christian perspective, I immediately was curious when I learned this because the question becomes "What am I attempting to yoke myself to in this practice?" When one looks at it from this perspective,  a problem quickly arises to the discerning Christian conscience. If Yoga is a spiritual practice from a pagan religion and involves many moves and postures that are in some way associated with worship of pagan deities, and the name of the practice of yoga literally means I am yoking myself to such practices, that's a big problem in Christian moral theology. We are not to be involved in the worship of pagan gods. The Bible is very clear on this over and over. In fact, it is one of the very major themes of the Old Testament and the Ancient Israelites. 

The possible exception to this might be in St. Paul's discussion of food sacrificed to idols. On one level, we are free to each such food because we know the idol is all poppycock that "hath no power here." So, one could argue that doing yoga is likewise just the eating of food sacrificed to false idols. But I think that would be problematic as what Paul was talking about was a negation of false religion in that we could eat such food offered to idols because it's an act of defiance to such idols. We say you are not real and so any offering made to you means nothing because you (the idol) are nothing. What Paul was talking about was not yoking ourself in any way to the idol, but an act of defiance to such an idol. 

Secondly, what Paul is talking about is that we should even then likely refrain from eating food offered to idols if it causes a brother or sister to fall from grace. By that, Paul was meaning that fellow Christians who do not have so strong a faith might see us eating food offered to idols and think it was okay to partake in the worship of that idol as well as the Christian God because that was normative Roman thinking in a polytheistic religion where the worship of the gods at the various temples was an ongoing act of "the more, the merrier!" Why not just burn a little incense to the Emperor? What's the harm? 

So, on one level, maybe one could make a Pauline argument and say we can do yoga because all those Hindu gods are false, but at the very least, we should be mindful not to create stumbling blocks for fellow Christians who might not be as strong in their faith as we are and might be susceptible to getting sucking into New Agey stuff. And the most, we should not engage in something that is literally about yoking our selves to a pagan worship. 

There are plenty of exercises and calisthenics that have no such spiritual or theological darkness that we can engage in without the need to even go near yoga. We should yoke ourselves to Christ and not to some foreign god or theology. That's not Pietism. That's simply basic moral believe in the 1st Commandment.