Posted on 07/01/2014 4:20:15 PM PDT by NYer
Yelling “fire” in a crowded theater can get you into trouble. So can saying “yoga” in a group of Catholics.
I just do it for the stretches, I don’t do anything religious.
It’s evil…the work of the devil.
Oh please! The next thing you’ll be telling me is the number 13 brings bad luck.
Practicing yoga breaks the First Commandment; it’s pagan worship.
And so it goes. And goes. And goes.
Three years ago, I did an article titled “To Yoga or Not to Yoga.” Initially, I wrote it then put it aside for around a year. I was not sure I was up for putting my head into a hornet’s nest. When the time seemed right, I posted it. The hornets came. So did a number of radio interviews in which the listener lines lit up the whole time. “Can you stay on for another half hour,” I was asked by host Drew Mariani at Relevant Radio. “This happens every time we talk about yoga.”
There are a lot of issues that come with controversy—contraception, supposed same-sex marriage, and abortion, being among them. The difference is that the Church has spoken definitely on those issues. People can agree or disagree with the Catholic Church but they cannot pretend the Church is in favor of any of those issues. With yoga, interpretations abound. Debates can get heated, with both sides convince that yoga for exercise is either harmless or evil.
In a definition from About.com, yoga is described as, “ . . . a disciplined path for purification of our attachments to the temporal world of form (bodies and objects) and the ever changing world of energy and mind, to experience the bliss and unity of consciousness as the unchanging, ever permanent, immortal and infinite Being.” Wow. Cool. Wait, what’s that about the immortal and infinite Being? Is that God? Or the devil? Or is it nothing if I just show up with a mat and stretch pants ready to limber up?
Yoga is considered a whole body experience originating in Hinduism as a means to reach enlightenment through exercises and meditations that unite the body, mind, and spirit. For Catholics, worshiping or becoming one with a yoga deity breaks the First Commandment. No one argues that point. The question is, can we claim to just be there in pursuit of physical fitness alone?
Hatha yoga, the one used in exercise classes, prepares the body for enlightenment through physical postures. Some people say they don’t participate in the meditations or postures that could be religious. After all, if an atheist folds his hands, he’s not praying. So if a yoga posture used for worship means nothing but a balance exercise to you, then is that all it is?
Putting your body into a particular posture does not automatically turn it into a form of worship. But what if that is the purpose of the pose as many of the yoga postures are? Can you remain neutral even if the instructor is not? Isn’t the intent of the person what matters most?
The controversy with yoga goes beyond a person’s intent. No one is accusing Catholics of going to yoga class specifically to worship a Hindu God. The problem is that yoga holds that all existence is one; there is no distinction between God and the universe. Through enlightenment a person becomes one with all of existence.
Having taken a yoga class myself many years ago, I know that the stretches, relaxation meditations and poses, all mesh together. It would be hard to discern the instructor’s meaning behind everything. For instance, a classic yoga mantra: “So’ham” means, ‘I am the universal Self,’” which is often used repetitively, timed with your breathing.
A friend who took a yoga class told me everyone was supposed to fold their hands and bow before they began. She said she did not do that but upon considering that yoga exercise is one part of a bigger pagan spiritual practice, she decided to quit. “Why take a chance?” she said. “If parts of it are wrong, then I’m not going to participate in any of it.”
In part 1 of the 3 part series, “What is Yoga? A Catholic Perspective,” Fr. Ezra Sullivan O.P., a Dominican Friar of the Province of St. Joseph pointed out that one indication of yoga’s spiritual nature even in exercise classes is the way it affects practitioners over time. “The International Journal of Yoga published the results of a national survey in Australia. Physical postures (asana) comprised about 60% of the yoga they practiced; 40% was relaxation (savasana), breathing techniques (pranayama), meditation, and instruction. The survey showed very significant results: although most respondents commonly began yoga for reasons of physical health, they usually continued it for reasons of spirituality.
“In addition, the more people practiced yoga, the more likely they were to decrease their adherence to Christianity and the more likely they were to adhere to non-religious spirituality and Buddhism. In other words, whatever their intentions may have been, many people experience yoga as a gateway to a spirituality disconnected from Christ.”
Regardless of the warnings or information, there are always Catholics who say they will not give up their yoga because it makes them feel good and they personally don’t use it for religion. But there is a further consideration with yoga. By participating in yoga, or when a school or church sponsors classes, it gives the message of blanket approval. If yoga is okay with the Church or with Sally Stretchy, then it’s obviously okay, is the impression. So, if just part of it is wrong, is it still okay to practice some of it? What do you think?
(To read all three parts of the yoga article or for daily spiritual direction go to: http://spiritualdirection.com.)
I haven’t heard of any burning at the stake or Inquisitions lately, have you? Some of our priests engaged in horrific rapes of children. This has gone on for centuries but we no longer tolerate it, do we? We used to preach that all the Jews and protestants and other non-Catholics go straight to hell. We don’t preach that anymore, do we?
We are a work in progress but yes we have achieved significant areas of enlightenment as a perfect faith run on this earth by humans. I am not endorsing or condemning the Pope on his numerous opinions. But I think it is vitally important as a faith to ask ourselves - what is motivating him?
1 John 4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
I haven’t heard of any burning at the stake or Inquisitions lately, have you? Some of our priests engaged in horrific rapes of children. This has gone on for centuries but we no longer tolerate it, do we? We used to preach that all the Jews and protestants and other non-Catholics go straight to hell. We don’t preach that anymore, do we?
We are a work in progress but yes we have achieved significant areas of enlightenment as a perfect faith run on this earth by humans. I am not endorsing or condemning the Pope on his numerous opinions. But I think it is vitally important as a faith to ask ourselves - what is motivating him?
1 John 4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
I'd love to hear how this is different from praying to Mary or venerating relics, etc.
**New Age practices are particularly dangerous.**
I read a couple of books (I believe) by Perretti. Scary!
The non-Christian oracles can tell us some truths, but they will tell us some lies as well. And there’s no way of knowing which is which.
It doesn’t work that way, Tal. God can cause things other than God to be.
If you try to philosophize through it, you will go crazy. The essential issue is that God can do more than you can and so you can’t figure it all out and this is EXPECTED.
If you BELIEVE then you find out yes it is good and yes it makes sense.
These were novels intended to dramatize how the God of the bible (with His host) and evil spirits energizing the New Age phenomena “might” interact, based on things that have been documented. Take it with a grain of salt. The drama is “sanctified imagination” and might not be accurate.
Yes, I realized that, but they were still scary.
It’s certainly possible to deliberately invoke demons, thinking them to be something else (though still not God).
So believing that everything is part of the infinite God, is somehow limiting to the concept of the infinite God?
Infinite is infinite. In addition, why would anyone cognize a need that something exist outside of God at all? Why "require" such a thing for a philosophy? If you have God be infinite, isn't that enough, since it encompases everything?
The way I see it, requiring something to be "outside" of the infinite God is to not really believe in the infinite God. Is to find the infinitude of God somehow "lacking," and therefore requiring something else. So for me, the faith part of this is precisely that nothing is outside of God - in other words, that God truly is infinite.
In addition, once you start throwing out logic, where do you stop? It's not that faith isn't necessary, but only where terms or ideas fail. And the term and idea of infinity doesn't fail! Infinity is without limit, and so perfectly represents the limitlessness of the power of God. I simply see no need for even trying to get beyond that, since it is both conceiveable and inconceivable at the same time, and so, for me, fully satisfies the "scale" of the concept of "God."
Interesting take on all this.
Even when the mass is done in English, it is still giving God GLORY. Latin is in truth a very beautiful language. I have a number of Gregorian chants on my iPad, along with Dylan and U2.
I do not live near a Catholic Church that has the Latin chanting or TLM, but if a hymm is done in English and is beautiful, it can do.
Much better to do the “ Jesus Prayer” instead.
If people still think there is such a thing called “ the enemy”.
Most of the people getting the vapors over yoga are too fat and lazy to last 5 minutes doing the exercise so it’s really not an issue.
Yoga is an invention of a Brit in the 1950s, applying Hindu prayer to calisthenics. Leave out the Hindu prayer, and it’s simply calisthenics. But then call it calisthenics.
We preached what?
Who is we?
I never heard anyone in the Catholic Church preach the things you are talking about.
I don’t know who ‘we’ is/are
Burning at the stake wha?
I know that the church didn’t rape anyone. Misguided evil people calling themselves catholic do. Same as misguided people calling themselves catholic claim that there is no more evil and yoga is fine
I don’t play philosophical games with God. He outwits me every single solitary time I try.
All I can say is that the bible assertions are not nonsense. They are self consistent. They require an “implementation domain” that transcends our mortal coil, but cannot be shown wrong by any kind of reductio ad absurdam.
And the main question is not even “what?” but “who?” The “what” is there because of the “who.” Existence doesn’t just exist for the sake of existing. It’s got a purpose.
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