What does yoga really do?
Like what is probably true for many people, I did a lot of a yoga for a short period in my life, maybe a year. I got really into the feeling, the culture, the people, the weird stuff it drives you to eat, and buying yoga mats and towels. At one point I was cooking with fresh kale and drinking cold pressed juice. I thought I was pinnacle of human physiological efficiency.
In any case, like many habits I try to form it got hard to make classes (5:30am!) and it felt expensive and I guess I got bored. As a card carrying millennial, I also have a short attention span.
Is Yoga a religion? I have no idea.
In the early 2000’s I dated a girl with parents who were pretty religious. This was when the groundswell of membership to “new Christian” churches was starting. In the South it had been happening for some time — with folks like Joel Osteen and other Televangelists. Where I live, in Cincinnati, we were slow on the uptake. Everyone I knew and was related to was, for the most part, Catholic.
This family had some interesting beliefs as compared to where I had come from, not the least of which was the “laying on of hands” to heal people. I twisted my knee at one point, and it swelled up a little bit, collecting some fluid. It was a little painful to walk on, and I like to complain a lot about stuff like that.
I worked a retail job at that point, so it never really got any rest and never got any better. The father decided that they needed to pray for it. What that meant was one evening at their house, I sat in a chair in the middle of the living room while he put his hands on my knees and people stood around with their hands on my back and his back and held up in the air to signal, I’m assuming, Jesus, to look down on us. We then closed our eyes and the dad of the girl I was dating prayed and asked Jesus to fix my knee and restore full function to my swollen joint.
The knee got noticeably worse for about another two months. Then I started to really get serious about icing it and elevating it and resting it and it eventually got better. Thank you, Lord.
A common belief system, at least with these people, was that anything that was not Christian was inherently anti-Christian. Or, if not explicit in it’s anti-Christ-ness, it was deeply suspect. Yoga, for example. There was talk in these great stadium churches that Yoga was rooted in ancient, eastern religions, and as such was a gateway to ancient, eastern gods. Apparently, if you did any sort of organized stretching, you were inviting Satan into your life. This floored me at the time — but I can tell you that no one I knew in that circle ever considered doing yoga.
In retrospect, they really loved Indian food — in fact introduced me to it — so I wonder how they justified that. Maybe Lucifer couldn’t come into the mortal plane through the kitchen.
Ignorance is bliss, though
Maybe a few years ago when I did yoga for about 9 months I invited a bunch of old gods from India into the world. Is that bad? What do they have to do with Satan, anyway? Do practitioners of Yoga even have the concept of Satan? I could google these things but actually I don’t care.
What I got out of Yoga was great. It helped me really feel my body — every muscle, ligament, tendon, stretch of skin and bone. And more importantly, it gave me 90 minutes of completely uninterrupted thinking time. I was able to retreat into my own brain, never saying a single word in the hot room. Before and after the practice we would lay perfectly still in dead body pose (ammunition for the religious) with our eyes closed. I finally understood what people meant when they said things like “Zen” and “being centered”.
How often do you ever have 90 minutes with no screens, no spoken words, no expectations of human interaction or output? It was just me and my own corpse. Someone is gently telling you what positions to get into, so you don’t even have to come up with them yourself. It’s mindless and beautiful.
At the end of class, as the instructor would leave, we would all say Namaste together. Maybe that means “come on in, Dark Lord!”, who knows.
