F
friardchips
Guest
Hi! Thank you for your sharing your thoughts generously. I see what you mean and going by many of the posts that often appear on this site alone one might think this is the case - that Yoga is innocent if just doing it for the simple exercises, especially when people who don’t have a troublesome past, spiritually, do it for mere stretching reasons. I’m not judging them but putting what I believe up here and just don’t trust the exercises even though we can’t see the damage. I suppose I mean the spiritual stratosphere of life where the dots seem to connect to an uncomfortable realisation. And I suppose, what I would say in response to your honest and considered post, is: if Christians think Yoga is nothing more than simple exercise then why do Yoga? Why not do simple exercises? I used to work out quite a bit, and the exercises I did before were fine, there was something for everything, and I never needed to go anywhere near Yoga! So, if it is so innocent then why the need for people to defend it as if personally offended - if there is no spiritual pull - because one’s identity as a Christian should be Jesus Christ, and only Jesus Christ, not Jesus Christ and Yoga. A Christian could well be offended if people attack Jesus, or Our Lady, but I never became offended if people said they didn’t bother doing exercise or thought it was pointless!In fairness, I think many (if not most) yoga classes really ARE only stretching and breathing exercises, completely disconnected from any pagan spirituality aside from carrying the name “yoga”. However, I used to take kundalini yoga, many years ago, and it’s almost more spiritual than physical. Highly meditative, highly chant oriented, highly spiritual. After I moved away from West L.A, and the kundalini center, I took multiple other types of yoga classes and they were nothing more than stretching and breathing. There was no spiritual component to any of those classes.
That being said, I no longer take any yoga classes, at all, since coming back to the Church. But, for me, it’s because I have a long back-history of both spirituality in yoga and an even longer history of practicing paganism. Anything remotely connected to those things, even only in name, I avoid. I would imagine most people don’t have that sort of troublesome history, so, for them, taking a class that has nothing but stretching and breathing wouldn’t be spiritual, in the least.