Yoga is the practice of bringing together. In Sanskrit, yoga means binding or bringing together (it is the root from which we get our work yoke). It brings together the body’s movements with breath, the yogi’s attention to the present moment, and the yogi’s spirit with the yogi’s body. It is intended to even bring the yogi’s spirit in touch with a greater spiritual reality. Yoga as an Eastern practice is viewed with suspicion in the Christian West, but the discipline and insight yoga has to offer should not be so easily dismissed.
The bringing together soul and body by being aware of ones breath is nothing foreign to Christianity. Breath in Greek and Hebrew, which author the Christian canon, is rendered pneuma and rûakh. These words represent wind, breath, and spirit, and this poetic language show that the Western mind and yoga have common ground.
Attentiveness to breathing is often the starting point for Christian meditation as well. The Hesychastes begin with awareness of breath, so that they can understand the rhythm that their body is giving them. With this in mind they can orient themselves toward hesychasis or contemplative silence and stillness.
Christians need reorientation, because to do otherwise is to sin. The Greek and Hebrew words for sin are h’amartia and khattah represent deviating, missing the mark, or moving without proper orientation. This moral failure results from ignoring the order given by God to his creatures. Christians are constantly trying to bind themselves back to this moral order. This is most perfectly done by conforming ones will to the divine will. Christian anthropology teaches that humans are created imago Dei, and thusly they are the image, the reflection of the divine. A mirror that does not perfectly reflect is a bad mirror, so deviation and distortion violate a person’s humanity.
Yoga can teach Christians how to be aware of their alignment. Yoga is analogous to the spiritual life, and so if one can be bind ones body and soul in harmony, they will have a model to do the same in their spiritual life. Yoga is a penetrating process were one begins to practice even off the mat. Awareness of breath and body continue and a person is constantly realigning or deepening in everyday life.
The reason yoga is often viewed with suspicion in the Christian West is due to its relation to Hindu and Buddhist culture. Christians are often afraid that mantras and other practices within yoga will lead to Buddhism or Hinduism, which is not necessarily the case. One element of Hindu philosophy that must be understood cautiously is the word yoga, and what does it mean by bringing together? When one discovers that Atman and Brahman is the same thing, a fusion takes place where the selfless person is absorbed into the divine. This is a different understanding that the Christian idea of communion. Communion is brought about by the fact that there are many persons co-existing, for persons can love each other. This is the reason why the Christian God is a Trinity of three persons in one nature. Communion respects the dignity of individual persons while recognizing the common nature that unifies them.
In yoga, one could say communion is an applicable concept, because ones breath and ones movements may be brought together, but that does not mean that the lungs or the muscles cease to have their individual dignity. It is the fact that different things come together in synergy that makes yoga so beautiful.
One Christian motto (of the Benedictine monks) is ora et labora (pray and work). Yoga is a discipline that can help teach one how to unify together how one prays with how one works. This closes the gaps and binds together a person’s moments of prayer into a constant prayer. Prayer cease to be some activity one does now and again, but becomes something that one is. Yoga has the potential to teach Christians the idea of “practice.” It can teach them that the spiritual life is an on going process of awareness and re-alignment constantly in a world that is so often deviating and distorting.
