I first came into contact with yoga in middle school. My sister started bringing home yoga books from the library, she was interested in it and we (my brother and me) would watch her amused at all the weird breathing and stretching she was doing.
Fast forward several years later. I remember having a family friend mention casually that yoga wasn’t Godly. He was primarily concerned over the meditative aspects of it and having to clear your mind. I strongly disagreed with him, but little did he know, he planted a seed.
In spite of his warnings, I still would practice yoga occasionally. I would do a video here and there and for a short season did it regularly when a new studio opened in town. I really enjoyed the flexibility I was gaining, however, the more steeped in my faith I became, the wearier I was about saying ‘om’ or namaste. I would simply pray or say ‘Jesus’ instead. Then I watched something that completely changed everything, a 2008 documentary on YouTube called, “Yoga Uncoiled” (unfortunately the full video is no longer available on YouTube).
The premise of the documentary is that yoga is intrinsically a spiritual practice and one can NOT divorce the spiritual aspect of it from its physicality.
To call it enlightening is an understatement! Basically, every pose in yoga, for example, downward dog, has a connection with the Hindu spiritual world.
Having grown up a bit in Kenya, where there is a sizeable Indian population, I have a little familiarity with some of the Hindu gods from the movies I was exposed to on TV. I say that because there are numerous gods in the Hindu religion and the realization that yoga poses are connected to specific gods was mind blowing.
What I came to understand was that as you ‘practice’ you are conjuring/worshiping Hindu deities as you lay in corpse pose or serpent pose.
Matter of fact yoga comes from the word ‘yuj’ in Sanskrit which means to join or to yoke, in other words, to become one with. Sounds spiritual right? So it’s probable that as you are doing those different poses you are becoming one with corpses and serpents etc.
At the end of the day, “yoga is Hinduism,” as mentioned by Subhas Tiwari (a professor of Yoga) and we can not extricate the moves from the spiritual belief. We cannot have one without the other.
This, is the problem with yoga.
So if you are a Christian, yoga is not for you. And I know it may be difficult to let it go, it was for me, and it was for my sister who was a Bikram yoga enthusiast during the years she lived in LA. But. If we want to remove the shackles that hold us back from God’s best, we’re going to have to find some alternatives such as barre classes or basic stretching.
Please search for the documentary “Yoga Uncoiled – Christ Centered Yoga False Christianity” by Caryl Matrisciana
For more information: carlytv.com
