Posted on 09/24/2010 6:46:07 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Some questions we ask today would simply baffle our ancestors. When Christians ask whether believers should practice yoga, they are asking a question that betrays the strangeness of our current cultural moment - a time in which yoga seems almost mainstream in America.
It was not always so. No one tells the story of yoga in America better than Stefanie Syman, whose recent book, The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America, is a masterpiece of cultural history. Syman, an engaging author who is also a fifteen-year devotee of yoga, tells this story well.
Her book actually opens with a scene from this year’s annual White House Easter Egg Roll. President Barack Obama made a few comments and then introduced First Lady Michelle Obama, who said: “Our goal today is just to have fun. We want to focus on activity, healthy eating. We’ve got yoga, we’ve got dancing, we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got Easter-egg decorating.”
Syman describes the yoga on the White House lawn as “sanitized, sanctioned, and family-friendly,” and she noted the rather amazing fact that a practice once seen as so exotic and even dangerous was now included as an activity sufficiently safe and mainstream for children.
In her words:
There certainly was no better proof that Americans had assimilated this spiritual discipline. We had turned a technique for God realization that had, at various points in time, enjoined its adherents to reduce their diet to rice, milk, and a few vegetables, fix their minds on a set of, to us, incomprehensible syllables, and self-administer daily enemas (without the benefit of equipment), to name just a few of its prerequisites, into an activity suitable for children. Though yoga has no coherent tradition in India, being preserved instead by thousands of gurus and hundreds of lineages, each of which makes a unique claim to authenticity, we had managed to turn it into a singular thing: a way to stay healthy and relaxed.
In her book, Syman tells the fascinating story of how yoga was transformed in the American mind from a foreign and “even heathen” practice into a cultural reality that is widely admired and practiced.
In telling this story, Syman documents the ties between yoga and groups or movements such as the Transcendentalists and New Thought - movements that sought to provide a spirituality that would be a clear alternative to biblical Christianity. She traces the influence of leading figures such as Swami Vivekananda and Swami Prabhavananda, along with Pierre Bernard and the now lesser-known Margaret Woodrow Wilson. Each of these figures played a role in the growing acceptance of yoga in America, but most were controversial at the time - some extremely so.
Syman describes yoga as a varied practice, but she makes clear that yoga cannot be fully extricated from its spiritual roots in Hinduism and Buddhism. She is also straightforward in explaining the role of sexual energy in virtually all forms of yoga and of ritualized sex in some yoga traditions. She also explains that yoga “is one of the first and most successful products of globalization, and it has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot country.”
Reading The Subtle Body is an eye-opening and truly interesting experience. To a remarkable degree, the growing acceptance of yoga points to the retreat of biblical Christianity in the culture. Yoga begins and ends with an understanding of the body that is, to say the very least, at odds with the Christian understanding. Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine. Believers are called to meditate upon the Word of God - an external Word that comes to us by divine revelation - not to meditate by means of incomprehensible syllables.
Nevertheless, a significant number of American Christians either experiment with yoga or become adherents of some yoga discipline. Most seem unaware that yoga cannot be neatly separated into physical and spiritual dimensions. The physical is the spiritual in yoga, and the exercises and disciplines of yoga are meant to connect with the divine.
Douglas R. Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and a respected specialist on the New Age Movement, warns Christians that yoga is not merely about physical exercise or health. “All forms of yoga involve occult assumptions,” he warns, “even hatha yoga, which is often presented as a merely physical discipline.” While most adherents of yoga avoid the more exotic forms of ritualized sex that are associated with tantric yoga, virtually all forms of yoga involve an emphasis on channeling sexual energy throughout the body as a means of spiritual enlightenment.
Stefanie Syman documents how yoga was transformed in American culture from an exotic and heathen practice into a central component of our national cult of health. Of course, her story would end differently if Americans still had cultural access to the notion of “heathen.”
The nation of India is almost manically syncretistic, blending worldviews over and over again. But, in more recent times, America has developed its own obsession with syncretism, mixing elements of worldviews with little or no attention to what each mix means. Americans have turned yoga into an exercise ritual, a means of focusing attention, and an avenue to longer life and greater health. Many Americans attempt to deny or minimize the spiritual aspects of yoga - to the great consternation of many in India.
When Christians practice yoga, they must either deny the reality of what yoga represents or fail to see the contradictions between their Christian commitments and their embrace of yoga. The contradictions are not few, nor are they peripheral. The bare fact is that yoga is a spiritual discipline by which the adherent is trained to use the body as a vehicle for achieving consciousness of the divine. Christians are called to look to Christ for all that we need and to obey Christ through obeying his Word. We are not called to escape the consciousness of this world by achieving an elevated state of consciousness, but to follow Christ in the way of faithfulness.
There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the main issue. But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose. Consider this - if you have to meditate intensely in order to achieve or to maintain a physical posture, it is no longer merely a physical posture.
The embrace of yoga is a symptom of our postmodern spiritual confusion, and, to our shame, this confusion reaches into the church. Stefanie Syman is telling us something important when she writes that yoga “has augured a truly post-Christian, spiritually polyglot country.” Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a “post-Christian, spiritually polyglot” reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?
Ummmmmm.......you can bend and stretch and pray to Jesus instead?
What about Zumba?
No.
That's where all the hot chicks were.
And nothing established your 'bona fides' as a sensitive, new age male like going to yoga class.
I thought the instructor was pretty hot too. She was maybe 50+ years old and named Lillian.
She'd be in her 90's now.
Now they have naked yoga.
We're from New Hampshire.
RE: I used to go to yoga classes when I was in college in the mid to late 70’s.
That’s where all the hot chicks were.
Were you a Christian then? Are you one now? If so, what do you think of practicing Yoga as a Christian?
Precisely.
He still does the burnt offering so the great day Isaiah prophesied has not yet arrived ~ there's still plenty of time for the faithful to perform the duties laid out for the Great Commission.
The big difference in his understanding of theological principles is that he thinks the Messiah has come to Mankind many times ~ mostly in India.
Here's what Yoga is ~ a discipline, an exercise routine, a test ~ can I do now what I did 10 years ago, or when I was 20? You can do it without equipment, and you can conceivably learn it from books of drawings, thus dispensing with organized religion (a guru who always has his hand out for your money).
I am aware that some Christians believe Yoga is just another access port for Satan. They'd probably be better off staying away from it ~ that'd reduce the amount of time they'd be focusing on Satan and increase the amount available for the Lord.
That could be really frightening.
I’m working on growing old gracefully and calling it good.
We just call it “exercise”.
Does acupuncture work on Christians? Can a Christian get relief from pain that way, or only through prayer?
Some Christians even reject scientific medicine, which far too often results in agonizing death for their children. Some Christians reject the study of Oriental martial arts for self defense, as well, for fear that it is somehow “tainted”, by some variants once having a religious association.
You see the problem, here.
As people, we live in the world. And most of the people in the world have different ways of doing things than we do. This does not mean that they are wrong.
Christians can eat Kosher hot dogs. It is not contaminated with Jewishness, or is it?, yet if you eat it, its nutritional content will become part of your body.
The authors argument is that finding one’s spiritual center will somehow lead to a non-Christian outcome? Couldn’t a Christian instead used their heightened spirituality, by whatever means, to achieve a deeper connection with Jesus? If not, then why do you even have it in you?
Me, I like acupuncture and martial arts. Not so much yoga, as I get too many ouchy places. But any spiritual improvement I get in any direction, I’m pretty confident won’t interfere with what I am in a bad way. If it showed signs of doing so, I wouldn’t have much interest in it.
It hurts my muscles and joints just as much as if I weren't a Christian............I take that back. I don't know what it's like to yoga as a non-Christian.
This article is a crock............
I’m with you.
At the gym that my insurance pays for this is one of the classes that they recommended for me.....Zoomba......what is that all about?
Anyone?
I steal picnic baskets in Jellystone park and screw with Ranger Smith. My soul is damned to cartoon hell.
You don’t want to know about me and snuffleupagus then.
You’re a TOON!!!
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