War? Schism? Genocide? Fraud, pestilence, global conspiracies? These are all child’s play. Back in my day, Catholics used to spend our days on the internet arguing about really important things, like yoga.
Oh yes. It’s finally summer, the streams are flowing, and I’d dearly like to start a fight about the spiritual dangers of banana pose.
I’ve been doing yoga, off and on, for four years now, and it has changed my life. It’s been great for my joints and my digestion, it builds muscle and helps me sleep, it’s brought my blood pressure back to normal, and I really enjoy showing fealty to false deities and demons. All while wearing revealing pants!
I kid, I kid. What is true is that I love yoga and it has changed my life, but whenever I talk about it in Catholic circles, someone freaks out and says I’m gonna catch a demon.
Believe it or not, I take that warning seriously. I think the world is full of things we can’t see, and it’s entirely possible to slide into a state that welcomes in malignant spirits, and we shouldn’t mess around with spiritual practices that are not our own.
I also believe the body has meaning. When I make the sign of the cross, I believe that it has an inherent meaning. It means something when an actor in a movie does it without any understanding of what it signifies. It meant something even when my mother, far gone in dementia, made the sign of the cross on herself out of sheer habit. When I have sex, THAT has inherent meaning, even if my thoughts at the time are not necessarily fully engaged with passages from Theology of the Body. What we do with our bodies matters.
So even if I don’t MEAN to honor Shiva when I manage to pull off a wobbly natarajasana, isn’t there something wrong with a Catholic doing the thing that was designed in ancient times to honor Shiva?
These questions bothered me. So I did what any good Catholic would do: I looked it up.
It turns out the thing that springs to mind when we say “yoga” — yes, even the kind with gongs and incense and statues of elephants — is about 60 years old. There is an ancient practice that was once called “yoga” but it was mainly concerned with interior, spiritual concepts and practices, and barely even mentions the body. Yoga as we know it, and as most modern people practice it, is physical exercise that happens to have originated in India; and some people — some eastern, some western — have done their best to grandfather in some spiritual practices.
But historically, the only common denominator between ancient yoga and modern yoga is India. The spiritual elements of modern yoga are about as rooted in ancient pagan spirituality as Totino’s Orange Chicken Pizza Rolls (WHICH ARE A REAL THING) are rooted in old Napoli. There is a connection, sort of? But not a meaningfully historical one.
However! In this essay, I will not claim that, because of this lack of seamless historicity, there is therefore no possible spiritual danger that can come from getting into yoga.
Read the rest of my latest column for The Pillar (subscriber content).
Photo by Mohamed Hassan form PxHere
