Yoga & Spirituality

This is a conversion story, of sorts. Or, more accurately, it is part of a conversion story. Sorry about that. Consider yourself warned.

Yoga taught me about prayer. Not about New Age spirituality, but about real, honest, Christian prayer. You see, I didn't really know much about prayer, really. Or spiritual prayer, anyway. I was taught "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" as a child, but I was always a little uncomfortable about the whole dying-in-my-sleep-as-a-child connotation. And I knew the Lord's Prayer/Our Father. My sister says she remembers our grandmother teaching her to pray the Rosary. I had no such experience, but I was less taken with shiny things. When I was older, I was always uncomfortable with the praying-in-a-group thing, with one person speaking for everyone. While it removed the responsibility from the individual, it nevertheless puts the individual on the spot in an odd sort of way--perhaps the pressure of conformity, since you couldn't really walk away from those situations. I knew that prayer was personal, individual; I just didn't really know how to do it.

I was plagued with fears as a young child--fourth grade or so. I was too aware of stories of weird deaths, crime, etc., and these fears found their way into nightmares. My most heartfelt prayers as a child--the only kind that went beyond the "bless so-and-so" variety, involved an end to these nightmares. These prayers persisted through many of my younger years--and they worked. I later rationalized away their success. During these same years, when I was attending a Baptist church sporadically, I also would lie on my back sometimes in broad daylight imagining that deceased relatives whom I had never known looked down on me from heaven, and I imagined myself talking to them, expressing my own love and thankfulness for their watchfulness. In my naiveté, I was reaching towards the idea of the Communion of Saints and the practice of meditation. These were not things that came to me from any of the churches I attended--Lutheran, Baptist, First Assembly of God (who did, however, use the Sign of the Cross!). So what does all of this near-prayer-experience have to do with yoga?

As an amateur and occasional yoga practitioner, I like guided practices. The yoga DVD is not my preferred means of acquiring such guidance, but with a toddler, it will do, since I have found some that are not too offensive--you know, not MTV yoga. So as I was entering into final relaxation (Savasana or Corpse Pose), when the yoga instructor tells the viewer/practitioner that this is a time to focus the mind inwards. We spend most of our time focusing our minds outwards, and, seemingly, this is the time to correct that, to restore the balance. However, what struck me is that this is not my experience of yoga, or of the world. Rather, it is my experience that many of us spend time focused rather intensely inwards--on our own hopes, fears, desires, etc. This was clearly one of my obstacles with prayer (the "bless the people I know & take care of me" prayers), and still, admittedly, is. Perhaps this is not the inwards-focusing she meant, but it is internal. When we direct our energies outwards, isn't it to satisfy some inner selfishness--some goal that we have, some desire, something we need to accomplish because of a drive deep within (even a shallow one)? Anyway, in the final relaxation stage, during which the body--exhausted from the effort of the workout--is still and heavy, the person is guided to relax further, both physically and mentally, by consciously relaxing muscles, being conscious of breath, envisioning relaxing spaces.

It must be that with yoga, the mind is caught off-guard, and feels no need to rationalize and reject the spiritual experience. When practicing yoga, I can say, "It's only exercise; I'm only exercising; I'm relaxing; there's nothing spiritual here; I'm not vulnerable to anything outside of myself." At least, that's the only way I can account for my submission to it--that, and it feels really good. (See my earlier post on exercise.) Rereading even my own description here, it sounds very New Age spirituality, but recently I was quite perplexed at finding Catholic sources representing yoga very negatively, albeit the context was in reference to an ex-nun who became an ex-nun to pursue this very New Age spirituality, and in fact teaches yoga.

My experience with "live" yoga was not very spiritual. It was a modestly priced class-by-class fitness option at the rec center of a public university. No one was seeking enlightenment. Most were seeking tighter abs and a Spring Break bikini body, and soon found that they were in the wrong class. Because there is a Christian tinge to this large state school, the yoga instructor sometimes reassured the class that this was not a religious thing. But it could have been, and in those moments of relaxation at the end of the hour, I felt it. It could perhaps have been a bad thing to experience something spiritual in such a secular setting, and I may have been drawn into eastern mysticism or religion-of-self. At the time, however, I was moving hard & fast in the direction of Catholicism. As I lay on the yoga mat, I reached outwards. In an RCIA (the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) class session, we were asked to visualize a place where we felt absolutely comfortable and at home. I felt uncomfortable, self-conscious, silly even. My mind was closed. However, when told by the yoga instructor to visualize a place where I felt absolutely at peace, comfortable, relaxed, I tended to have alternate images--neither a real place: the first was what I knew to be a mountain or tall hill with tall, soft, sun-kissed grasses waving against me as I lay looking at the blue sky, hemmed in by taller mountains or hills; the second was an hexagonal-shaped room of a wood-framed house with three wall-sized windows overlooking a pine forest at night in a downpour of rain. Floors were wood, furniture was sparse. It feels odd putting these images into print. I didn't connect--or contrast--the two experiences at the time.

What I noticed more than anything, however, was that after the relaxation, when the instructor would say "Namaste," what I wanted more than anything else was to make the Sign of the Cross--as if a prayer had ended for me. I must have felt that yoga was not an end in itself; looking back, I recognize it as a beginning.

Shopping at a Christian bookstore for a rosary at about this time, I was surprised to have the woman who unlocked the case for me describe Catholicism as intensely spiritual--it caught me offguard and perhaps frightened me a little. . . I was looking for the rational, not the irrational in religion. But gradually, I have come to accept that the two can coexist. And I don't even have to be sweaty to see it.