Full Contact Christianity

Once upon a time, I was part of starting and hosting a Christian yoga practice group. Naturally this raised questions, which I answered thus: 

Let’s talk about what our yoga practice looks like, why we do it, and why we call it Christian yoga. We recognize that some Christians are nervous about yoga, so at the bottom of the page, we’ll also devote some attention to those concerns. We also commend to you our essay on the real history of modern yoga, which is a bit different than people think.

What do we do?
The word “yoga” tends to conjure up images of bendy young women in impossible poses. What we do is a little different from that. First of all, a number of us are men. We’ve done a lot of fun things that were bad for our bodies over the years, and this kind of exercise helps us recover. Second, while the young are certainly welcome, most of us are over 40. Third, most of us don’t do impossible poses. Some of us can’t even reach our toes. Other than that, it’s a lot like you might think: slow movements that focus on control, mobility, strength, balance, and coordinating movement and breath. Because we’re Christians, we practice like it, with a focus on Christ and what He is doing in us.

Why do we do it?
Because there are significant health benefits to this kind of exercise, and we can all feel the difference. Because we believe that the gym belongs to Jesus as surely as every other area of life, and we prefer to exercise in an attitude of prayer rather than in the attitude of self-worship that’s so common in places where they hang mirrors on all the walls.

Why do we call it “Christian Yoga?”
We are aware, of course, that “yoga” is a Sanskrit word that means “yoking” or “union,” and that among people who use yoga posture practice as a Hindu spiritual discipline, it is intended to connote union with “the divine,” which we would understand as union with demonic spirits. (Sorry, guys, but it’s true.) Obviously, we don’t do that.

We are also aware that “yoga” has gone the way of kleenex, band-aid, and velcro. It may have been a narrowly construed religious brand back in the 60s and 70s, but in branding terms, that was a long time ago. The term “yoga” has long since entered the popular lexicon as the generic label for a particular kind of exercise: a complex, relaxing, posture practice, challenging to the point of being gymnastic at times, focused on flexibility, balance, and control.

Of course, when legally constrained to do so, people can avoid brand names and use circumlocutions like “facial tissue,” “adhesive bandage,” and “hook and loop fastener.” Some Christians have done exactly that with yoga (see the note on PraiseMoves, below). They are acting in the way most agreeable with their consciences. As Paul calls us to do in Romans 14, we bless their efforts. After all, who are we to judge God’s servants?

At the same time, we aren’t called to take that route ourselves. Everybody knows that when you say “hook and loop fastener,” you really mean velcro. Likewise, we could call what we do “Christian restorative gymnastics” or “stretching for Jesus” or something, but let’s face it: five minutes into the class, everyone will know it’s Christian yoga, so why not just say so to start with?

Today, the generic term “yoga” has a lot of latitude, and people attach different modifiers to connote different focuses of practice, hence “power yoga,” “restorative yoga,” “flow yoga,” and “prenatal yoga.” So, for example, prenatal yoga is a yoga exercise practice specifically designed for the needs and concerns of expectant mothers. It leaves out those things that would hurt mother or baby, and in their place it teaches things that will help them to grow healthily. Likewise, Christian yoga is a yoga exercise practice specifically designed for the needs and concerns of Christians. It leaves out those things that we as Christians find damaging or dehumanizing, and in their place it teaches things that will strengthen and deepen our relationship with Jesus.

Retaking the Territory
A lot of Christians are afraid of yoga, and depending on what we mean by “yoga,” the fears can be well-founded. But they can also be poppycock, and in any case, God has not given us a spirit of fear.

If you go into a studio and there’s a little brass Kali in the corner with a bowl of fruit in front of her, yeah — a Christian should be concerned that demonic entanglement is a real possibility in that yoga class. A Christian seeking exercise should walk right out of there and never go back.

On the other hand, it’s profoundly silly to suppose that a healthy exercise — any healthy exercise — can somehow become the exclusive property of a demon. Why would we ever believe that?

Suppose the U.S. Marine Corps were to claim rights to the pushup. Suppose they were to claim that the pushup was a Marine exercise, and unless you intend to be a Marine, you have no right to be doing pushups. Should anyone believe them? Of course not.

“There is not one square inch of the whole creation over which Christ does not call out, ‘Mine!’” Our bodies belong to Christ. Our health belongs to Christ. Every healthy exercise rightly belongs to Christ. The yogini who thinks her body and its movements belong to Shiva is sorely mistaken. The secularist in a step aerobics class at Bally’s who thinks there is no religious significance to her body and its movements is equally mistaken. (And you can see her true religion for yourself when she glances over her shoulder to admire her toned backside in the mirrors that liberally adorn the walls.) Over both of them, Christ calls out, “Mine!”

We all worship something; we can’t help it. As Christians, we believe that every movement we make, every day, all day, should glorify Christ. As we seek to enjoy the bodies God has given us, and to steward them well, we are in His service, and we should not be afraid to employ whatever belongs to Him.

Now there are exercises over which one lying demon or another has shouted “Mine!” and there are foolish people who have believed them — notable yogis and Dave Hunt among them. A good Christian should respond to that foolishness in the same way we would respond if the Marines were to try to claim the pushup: point and laugh. A claim has been made, to be sure, but that hardly makes it true. As the hands and feet of Christ in the world, it is our privilege to reclaim that territory for our King. Where healthy movement is being foolishly and unlawfully prostituted to the service of demons, it is our pleasure to return it to its right use in service of the King, and to demonstrate His supremacy over it.

This is not simply a matter of appropriating useful movement wherever we happen to find it. The spiritual battle is real. If the Marines were to claim exclusive rights to the pushup, we could expect them to press their claim vigorously and try to punish those who didn’t respect it. Likewise, where demons have claimed the territory, they will try to hold it. We cannot expect to retake the territory without a fight. But retake it we will, because we are the church of Jesus Christ, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against us.

Christian Yoga Resources
In our pursuit of yoga-style exercise, we have found a number of resources helpful for the physical exercise — most of them not authored by Christians. But there are some yoga resources created by and for Christians. We don’t vouch for everything they say about the theory and theology of Christian yoga, but when it comes to what’s on the mat, we have found them helpful, and we think you might, too.

• Susan Bordenkircher has a book/DVD combination that is a pretty good place to start your Christian yoga practice. She also has a few other DVDS on her website. We began our group practice with nothing but her three DVDs.
• Brooke Boone’s Holy Yoga has a number of DVDs, a couple books, downloadable resources, a subscription service, and teacher training.
• Yahweh Yoga has DVDs, CDs, a book, online resources, and teacher training.
• PraiseMoves has built their brand around being not-yoga, but rather a Christian alternative to it. They have a number of DVDs.

As we engage the subject of Christian physicality, we will unavoidably run into the question of mind-body practices, and what Christians may and may not participate in. In my experience, yoga is one of the first practices people ask about. Pro-yoga marketers, various Hindu sects, and yoga’s Christian despisers all aggressively promote the idea that yoga is an ancient Hindu practice. In fact, this is not true at all, as I will explain below. For further information, read Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism, and N. E. Sjoman, The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, or take a look at a recent BBC article. 

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What you get in a yoga class at your local fitness club is not an ancient Hindu practice at all. That is a myth, created in the early 20th century by Indian nationalists and anti-colonialists. In order to understand how the myth grew so popular, we have to grasp a little of what it’s like to live in a colonized nation. When the British colonized India, they brought vastly superior technology — railroads, steam engines, telegraph, better ships, firearms, and so on. India developed a desperate desire to “catch up” with the Western powers, to modernize. Indians began to dress and talk like Westerners, go to college, learn engineering and other technical disciplines, and so on. All that was Western became synonymous with progress, and all that was Indian became synonymous with backwardness. Now that’ll give you a serious inferiority complex, and people can’t live like that for an extended period of time. Eventually the undiscriminating worship of all things Western provoked a backlash, and there was a great desire to point out the ways in which Indian culture was superior and had something to offer to the West.

Part of what the West had brought to India was the physical culture movement, very popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Observers from both cultures noticed that in general, Indians were physically weak by comparison with their Western counterparts. Indian reformers set out to change that through physical exercise. They were aided in the effort by the YMCA, which had branches throughout India and taught a variety of physical disciplines like Pilates, Swedish Vital Gymnastics and other physical culture regimens popular at that time in the West.

At that time, “yoga” was understood to be one of the six orthodox paths to enlightenment in Hinduism, and usually had little if anything to do with physical posture. “Yoga” literally means “yoking” and referred to yoking one’s own consciousness to the divine. There were numerous yoga practices — the yoga of good deeds (karma yoga), the yoga of devotion (bhakti yoga), the yoga of knowledge (jnana yoga), etc. Some of the meditation traditions included instructions to take a certain posture for meditation to achieve certain ends — one text, the Geranda Samhita, has 30 or so postures which are alleged to help attain certain benefits. On the other hand, other forms of yoga taught nothing to do with postures. Popular yogi and lecturer Vivekananda, for example, denounced teachers of postures as hucksters and carnival performers.

In short, modern postural yoga — what happens in a fitness center yoga class, where you might move through dozens of postures over the course of an hour-long session — does not seem to have much documentable precedent as a religious exercise in classical Hinduism. It was created, and recently — mostly by Krishnamacharya in Mysore. While he never traveled to the U.S. and few people have heard of him, his students K. Pattabhi Jois (Ashtanga Vinyasa), B. K. S. Iyengar (Iyengar Yoga), Indra Devi and T. K. V. Desikachar (Viniyoga) are almost entirely responsible for the popularity of what we now call “yoga” in the West. Even the relatively few yoga lineages that do not begin with Krishnamacharya are certainly influenced by his legacy.

While modern postural yoga has little precedent in classical Hinduism, it does have some precursors in indigenous Indian practices. To find the precursors, we have to leave Hindu meditation behind and look to India’s wrestling tradition. India has a long tradition of producing superb wrestlers, and in texts that describe their training we see some indigenous exercises along that line, including the danda exercises — sophisticated pushup variations — that Krishnamacharya brought into his yoga program as the now-ubiquitous “sun salutation.” Similar exercises are preserved in Kalaripayyat, the indigenous martial art of Kerala in southern India. Swedish Vital Gymnastics and the other regimens of the western physical culture movement are also ancestors of modern postural yoga.

Of course, this sort of exercise is actually pretty common through world culture. From the wresting conditioning of the Persian Zurkaneh to the whip and saber exercises of the Cossacks to the neigong exercises of the Chinese to the djurus, lankas and kembaggan of the Indonesian Pentjak-Silat players, exercise sequences that work the whole body evenly and promote coordination, whole-body looseness and balance are found around the world. The routines look somewhat different from culture to culture, but they’re all designed to do the same thing: cultivate a relaxed, supple body that moves gracefully, freely and strongly through its whole range of motion. (As a Christian, that’s a goal I can get behind. I believe God made the body to do exactly that.)

But back to yoga. What happened to produce the yoga class down at your local gym? In early 20th-century India, the anticolonial backlash was well under way. Reformers were seeking ways to bring India up to par with the Western nations, and at the same time proclaim the benefits of things that were uniquely Indian. Working as just such a reformer, Krishnamacharya gathered up various exercises from European physical culture movements, combined them with British army exercises, classical Indian wrestling exercises and meditation postures from old texts, and dubbed the result “yoga.” A few others did the same.

By calling their practices “yoga” and linking them to a liberal helping of Hindu religion and philosophy, they were seeking to market their physical culture programs as uniquely Indian and suitably ancient. Because they could point at a few old texts that teach some sort of posture practice — the Geranda Samhita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, and so on — they had enough historical cover to give their efforts a patina of respectability, and they were working in an environment where everybody wanted to believe that it was true. The result of this melange of European exercises, physical culture ethos, meditation postures and Hindu philosophy is what contemporary academics call Modern Postural Yoga. It was spread through the YMCAs and other channels, and became fairly popular in India.

Meanwhile in the West, the physical culture movement all but died. (Classical Pilates — originally known as Controlology — is virtually the only modern-day survivor of the Western physical culture movement.) What remained of the physical culture movement transformed into the fitness industry, and great emphasis was placed on simplicity and isolated movements. Exercises requiring careful attention and complex coordination fell by the wayside in favor of simple exercises like bicep curls, leg extensions and lat pulls.

Yoga (especially in its philosophical, non-physical forms) had been slowly trickling into the West, but the physical exercise that we mean when we say “yoga” today didn’t really begin to be popular here until the 1960s. (Indra Devi was promoting yoga here long before that, and taught such luminaries as Greta Garbo and Marylin Monroe, but teachers were rare in those days, and yoga was still virtually unknown.) By the 60s, modern yoga had been incubating in India for decades, and we had long since forgotten our own roots in the physical culture movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In keeping with the way modern postural yoga had been marketed in India, the yoga gurus of the 60s and 70s marketed yoga here as an ancient Hindu practice of health and spirituality, and Americans bought it.

Over time, Americans who had no interest in Hinduism saw the physical benefits of this kind of gymnastic exercise, requiring careful attention and complex coordination. It improved balance, mental focus, coordination and concentration, helped people relax, improved posture, and much more. These folks recognized that there was a market for this kind of exercise, quite apart from the Hinduism, and began to promote it simply as good exercise. Which it is. This is where the yoga class at your local fitness club comes from.

Now a Christian comes along, looks at that class at the gym, and says, “We had Christian aerobics back in the 80s. Why can’t we have Christian yoga now?” Good question.

In Daniel 10, we read a fascinating account of spiritual ministry. Daniel has mourned for His people and prayed for three weeks. At the end of the three weeks, an angelic being confronts him in a vision (the other men with him were terrified, but saw nothing).

As the angel began to speak, Daniel lost all strength and fell on his face to the ground. The angel touched him the first time, which made him tremble. The angel explained his presence there, and why he had been delayed for three weeks. All this while, Daniel is on his face, trembling, unable to speak.

Then an angel touched his lips, and he was able to speak. He told the angel that the vision he’s seen has so overwhelmed him that he’s unable to function. “Then again one having the likeness of a man touched me and strengthened me.” (Daniel 10:18)

Daniel tells the angel he’s been strengthened, and the angel begins to tell Daniel more about the future, which is found in Daniel 11.

For me, the point of interest here is how the angel (a “ministering spirit sent to minister to those who will inherit salvation,” as Hebrews puts it) ministered to Daniel. He touched him. This particular ministering spirit may or may not have even had a physical body (recall that those who were with Daniel couldn’t see the angel he saw). But this spirit being made contact with Daniel, and had a physical effect each time.

The first touch made Daniel tremble; the second touch on his mouth made him able to speak; the third strengthened him. I have seen touch have these effects, and I have directly administered two of the three.

So it was fun to see affirmation of what God has done through me in the Scriptures. Not that I had doubts — I take a “if you can’t believe the words, believe the works” approach to the surprising things God does — but it’s fun to see it in a verse. And useful, for the skeptics among us.