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Posts Tagged ‘tweets’

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My final research topic for teacher training was a paper on one of ~15 topics.  Being close to my heart I chose “Yoga & Christianity”.  Seems like an interesting topic, right?   I mean I’ve been doing yoga for 7 years and have never once felt like I needed to pray to a Hindu god, or felt like it was contrary to a Christian based faith system, yet have this constant query by Christian friends about “isn’t yoga anti-Christian?”  What I found as I dug deeper really interested me, enough that I thought I’d share some of it.

As I dug into it I found that while the Hindu philosophy of religion is about communing with the Lord, it is very open to the different God figures and believes that all paths lead to the same God.  Christianity seems to be much more threatened by this, is driven by the unified belief that there is ONE God and that all other religions and their followings will go to hell because they do not believe exactly what the Christian church believes.  This seems a little drastic I must say.

This is where I stray from my Christian upbringing, let’s take a Buddhist monk for example, they live their lives in selfless devotion to others and spending spiritual time with God.   Am I to believe that this person is evil and going to hell because they do not believe in Jesus Christ as the son of God?  I cannot, this is where I stray, and at the same time where I find piece in the yogic school of though about spirituality.   The practice of physical asana is designed to prepare the mind and body for meditation (read spiritual time).  How I choose to spend that time, the god that I pray to or commune with is a choice of my heart and not something that is (or should be) taught in a modern yoga class in the U.S.

The Key Topics or findings that bring me to my conclusion are:

• Hinduism is about becoming closer to God
• Christianity is about becoming closer to God (thru Jesus)
• The practice of yoga is meant (in all forms) to bring the practitioner  closer to God (with no specification on who’s God this refers to).

The Arguments:

• One main argument by the Christian church is that yoga teaches that each person is God, indeed we greet each other with the term “Namaste” which roughly translates to “the light in me solutes the light in you” and the belief that we all carry a piece of God within us.   This is a problem for Christianity, but why?  Christianity believes that the “Holy Spirit” lives within us, is this not the same thing?
• The Catholic church is threatened by the idea of people being able to commune with God without their help, and has stated that practices such as meditation and yoga can lead to the devil entering the mind.  Yet this same church encourages its followers to pray on a daily basis and in these same declarations states that tools from other religions can be beneficial to the Christian practice of fellowship if used in those terms.
• B.K.S. Iyengar’s “Light on Yoga” has been proclaimed as “The Bible of Modern Yoga”…   In this text Iyengar Describes Yoga as the “union or communion.  It is the true union of our will with the will of God”…

My Conclusion:

That while yoga originated deep in Indian culture and has ties to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, what is practiced today is a physical practice in line with the Hatha yoga tradition.  The ultimate goal of practice is to prepare the yogi for spiritual time and bring them closer to God.   As a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, etc… the definition of God is left to the practitioner.  The original idea being based in the Hindu belief that all God’s are the same God, just with different names and different paths to the same place.

“Yoga is the science of God-realization and Peace, it accepts that “truth is One, Paths are Many.”

I hope this helps somebody on their spiritual journey, researching it and writing it has certainly helped me on mine!

~ Namaste