Yoga and Christianity

[dgolvach]

I will confess that I don't know much about Yoga. What little I know seems to have overtones from all that hippie non-sence from the 60s. I have heard that it is anti-Christian in its nature? I must admit that it sounds like you might be singing Hari Kristna if your not careful but I really don't know. All that aside, there seems to be some real evidence that a person can improve his health with this stuff. I have tried conventional physical therapy and exercise but they only seem to exacerbate my phsyical problems. I am now on a ridiculous cocktail of meds and I don't really know if that is any more Godly than Yoga. I have read many accounts of improved health from Yoga. (mind and body). I guess I would like to hear from anyone who has tried it. I am still in the investigation process. No Yoga yet but I was given a coupon for some free session. Pros? Cons? I will just listen.

Dan

[Trinity]

I don't think they mesh well at all, Its budism junk!

[Leonard]

Some yoga movements are certainly beneficial physical exercises, but to really 'learn yoga' involves a great deal of Oriental religion. I wouldn't hesitate to use the exercise techniques however....

[yomotalking]

That's right.

The "workouts" are fine, the Meditation is not right.

Anyone agree?

Yomo

[nebula]

Best I can tell - that's about it.

The stretches are good for the body.

It's the spirituality stuff added to the stretches that's the problem.

[Guest Zayit]

Take this into account, yesterday while watching a home decorating program there were two commercials that had yoga in them, one for interior paint and one for fancy feast cat food! I couldn't believe it, and they were promoting the eastern religion very subtily but it was there.

[Trinity]

Best I can tell - that's about it.

The stretches are good for the body.

It's the spirituality stuff added to the stretches that's the problem.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I agree

Joshua 24:23

"Now then," said Joshua, "throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel."

[dgolvach]

Well I might stretch but I no way am I gonna chant " Aaammmmm Aaammmmm".

Dan

[Trinity]

Well I might stretch but I no way am I gonna chant " Aaammmmm Aaammmmm".

Dan

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

hahahahaha

[angels4u]

What Does the Bible Say About Yoga?

I don't see anything wrong with some exercises either, but it becomes dangerous when you go in a higher level, anyway I found this article:

by Michael Sharif

Yoga is pervasive. Yoga is in the east and the west. Yoga classes are offered in Central Africa, in Russia, in Australia. Flyers for yoga are on university bulletin boards, in health food stores, in the elevators of high rise apartment buildings in downtown Los Angeles, and even as part of some YMCA physical education programs. Is yoga merely a physical exercise?

Regarding the yoga asanas or physical postures Swami Vivekananda writes in his book Raja Yoga : "A series of exercises, physical and mental, is to be gone through every day until certain higher states are reached. Nerve currents will have to be dispatched and given a new channel. New sorts of vibrations will begin: the whole constitution will be remodeled, as it were."

In Yoga: The Method of Re-Intergation Alain Danielou, a French scholar on yoga, writes that the real import of yoga is as "a process of control of the gross body which aims at freeing the subtle body." The subtle body is regarded as extremely complex and consisting of 72,000 invisible psychic channels called nadis corresponding to the physical or gross body. The subtle body and the physical body are connected at seven primary points or chakras ranging from the top of the head to the base of the spine.

The charkas are believed to control the consciousness of an individual. Manipulating the spine through various yoga postures is believed to increase the energy flow from the subtle body altering the consciousness of the individual. Kundalini yoga and hatha yoga directly manipulate the charkas through their various postures and breathing exercises.

In a mind over body relationship mantra yoga also seeks to alter consciousness of an individual by the repetition of mantras, which Guru Dev, the guru of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, considered the "favorite names of the gods". Mantras are repeated silently or audibly up to several hours and produce altered states of consciousness.

Yoga is bound up in Eastern religious metaphysics and is not an innocent form of relaxing the body and the mind. The goal of yoga is the same as that of Hinduism, which is realizing that one is Brahman, the underlying impersonal God of the Universe in Hinduism. According to Psychic Forces and Occult Shock (Wilson and Weldon): "The physical exercises of yoga are designed to prepare the body for the psychospiritual change vital to inculcating this idea (the realization that one is Brahman) into the consciousness and being of the person. Hence talk of separating yoga practice from theory is meaningless. From a Christian perspective, whether the two can safely be divided is doubtful. 'I do yoga, but Hinduism isn't involved,' is an incorrect statement."

A Spiritual Counterfeits Project (Berkeley, California) publication on "Yoga" states: "For while it may suit the secular fancy to espouse only that selected aspect (the physical) of yoga which fits the bourgeois notion of what yoga is supposed to do (i.e. make a beautiful body), the fact still remains that even physical yoga is inextricably bound up in the whole of Eastern religious metaphysics. In fact, it is quite accurate to say that physical yoga and Indian metaphysics are mutually interdependent; you really can't have one without the other."

In the Shankara tradition, which pervades most of contemporary Hinduism, the raindrop is pictured as the symbol of the individual self and the ocean is the symbol of the universal soul (J.Isamu Yamamoto, SCP Newsletter). "The absorption of the raindrop into the ocean is symbolic of the absorption of the person into the impersonal universe. After people attain enlightenment, they lose their identities and become one with the all. Absorption is the goal of the monist Hindu" (J.Isamu Yamamoto, SCP Newsletter , March-April 1983).

"The candle flame is a Buddhist image of the individual; it is the light of life that flickers in the darkness of sorrow. The quest of each ardent Buddhist is to extinguish their own flame. They seek not merely a physical death but a death that will deliver them from both the physical and spiritual life. Extinction is the goal of the traditional Buddhist" (J. Isamu Yamamoto, SCP Newsletter , op.cit.).

For this author more persuasive than any authority is the author's personal experience in mantra yoga, hatha yoga, and kundalini yoga. Definite altered states of consciousness are produced by yoga. However, these states of consciousness while initially anesthetic became with constant yoga practice progressively more oppressive resulting in a disassociation from the external world. Sensory input was accentuated and produced an overreaction to external stimuli resulting in anxiety. On intensive asana-meditation courses the author experienced several blackouts during mantra meditation sessions which lasted up to an hour and a half. No consciousness of elapsed time and no memory of what had transpired during the blackout existed after such an experience.

Coping with these altered states of consciousness produced in the author mounting tension making him easily upset by trifles (slamming of a door, the screeching of a jet fighter plane, traffic). In many ways the meditation/yoga experience is the classic experience of anxiety disorder so well documented by the Australian doctor Claire Weekes in her classic book Hope and Help For Your Nerves , which also offers the best non clinical approach for curing anxiety disorder of which panic attacks are common symptoms.

Meditation and yoga in many instances cause anxiety disorder. This author's experience is that the techniques result in feelings of unreality, feelings of personality disintegration, and depression. It is the author's belief that many of the so-called "advanced states of consciousness" are no more than the result of extreme sensitization, a state in which our nerves react in an exaggerated way to stress induced by the yoga/meditation techniques, producing an overshadowing sensory unreality similar to those induced by consciousness altering drugs.

Yoga is marketed in the guise of an innocent, healthful technique, but it is far from it. H.Rieker warns: "Yoga is not a trifling jest if we consider that any misunderstanding in the practice of yoga can mean death or insanity," and that if the breath is "prematurely exhausted, there is immediate danger of death for the yogi" (Rieker, The Yoga of Light (Los Angeles: Dawn House) 1974, p. 135). Blackouts, strange trance states, or insanity are listed from even "the slightest mistake