christian yoga

There are some really good reasons that yoga has never quite caught on in the United States, or anywhere else in western cultures, for that matter. For one thing, people in the west tend to be more of the "run until you drop" variety than anything approaching meditation. But primarily, the biggest reason that everyone doesn't do some form of yoga in places like the United States, as opposed to their Indian counterparts, is that the whole system of yoga is rather at odds with Christian belief at a fundamental level. So it's pretty interesting to see headlines for such a thing as "christian yoga" when the two terms are just about as mutually exclusive as they can get.

I would be the last one to get on anyones' case about some exercise. The bible is pretty clear that gluttony is a sin and you don't have to go searching very far to find evidence of over-indulgence. Our entire society is rife with over-indulgences. Will eating too much get you a one way ticket to hell? Probably not, but you're far better off following God's guidelines than you are doing it your way, and that's really the point of Christianity - setting aside self and your own desires and allowing God to replace those desires, which tend toward sinfulness, with His will, which is always perfect. No, it can't be done, only Christ himself was perfect, but the whole story of the Bible is about the fact that we need to be saved from our sins, which are many, and only God could provide a way for our sins to be forgiven. He did that by becoming a man and taking the punishment for our sins upon himself. There is nothing we can do, nor anything we should try to do to earn that salvation either. It's all about God, and God alone.

Yoga takes a very different approach. There is certainly nothing wrong with taking good care of your body, which the scriptures call the "temple of god," since God lives in us when we ask Him to. But you also have to be a little careful (or a lot, some people are quite narcissistic) that you do not begin to worship your body instead of the Lord himself. This, in effect is the main crux of the debate between yoga and christianity. Yoga is a kind of spiritual system, while not a complete religion, that also says that a complete religious system isn't necessary. Yoga teaches that all you need - is you. Yogis spend years training their bodies and minds to reach a sort of inner peace and enlightenment and become one with  . . . themselves.

In a sense, yoga is about worshiping you; your body, mind and spirit. While it is interesting that the system fully identifies the triune nature of humans (why people have trouble with the doctrine of the trinity is beyond me), it also opens the door to something approaching original sin. In case you don't know, the original sin is pride - satan committed this first sin before the dawn of time - pride being an overgrown sense of who and what you are. Lucifer decided he was bigger than the britches he had been given, and it was all downhill from there. Yoga, at it's very root, teaches self reliance; that you don't need anything but proper breathing and meditation to achieve complete unity with yourself, and that's all that you need in the universe.