Why Catholics Should Never Do Yoga
Our Social Networks Facebook Youtube Telegram Twitter Centercode Telegram-plane Comment MOTHER & REFUGE OF THE END TIMES IN THE END MY IMMACULATE HEART WILL TRIUMPH! HOME ABOUT M&R MYSTICS ON M & R Privacy Policy ARTICLES BOOKS DONATE FREE DOWNLOADS CONTACT US PRAYER REQUESTS LIVE PRAYERS HOME ABOUT M&R MYSTICS ON M & R Privacy Policy ARTICLES BOOKS DONATE FREE DOWNLOADS CONTACT US PRAYER REQUESTS LIVE PRAYERS WATCH ONLINE Why Catholics Should Never Do Yoga Once upon a time back around 1995 or 1996, before I started working at a Catholic bookstore (I have a lot of great books in my private library from that wonderful little place), I was hearing a lot about meditation, and several people told me that I should try it. I had no idea how to meditate, so I went down to the Diocesan library. They had fewer materials than I thought a Diocesan library should have, but I managed to find a set of tapes (the title completely escapes me) by a Catholic priest and checked it out. Having been born into the Post-Concillar Church, my parents spent a small fortune on Catholic grade-school with a faith formation program consisting of little more than the infamous “Hi God!” programs. My mother did save her old Maryknoll Crusades magazines from her childhood, and I read those back in grade school, but proper faith formation requires much more than a couple dozen issues of an old Bible study magazine from the 1950s meant to supplement what should be thorough Catechetical training. I was utterly unprepared for what I now know is New Age, progressive thinking. I was also stupid, so I popped the tape in my stereo and went through the meditations. I had a hard time with this priest’s meditations because he kept saying to empty the mind, focus on the sound of his voice, place the self into the scene he was describing. He spent a lot of time talking about breathing and did a few breathing exercises. I really couldn’t get into the tapes. I couldn’t empty my mind. My thoughts kept churning in circles. I credit working at that bookstore with helping me to understand what meditation really is. It’s not the emptying of the mind, but the focusing of our thoughts on The Lord, on Christ, on the mysteries of our faith, on scripture, on the teachings of the Church. I gave up on the tapes, but there was this insert with the tapes that talked about the similarities between the world’s religions; how God knows our hearts and our intentions; how being open-minded to new and different ideas helps us to understand God; how Eastern philosophies use meditation techniques from which Catholics could benefit. I now recognize that this blending of philosophies with Catholicism is an error called “syncretism.” The ideas from that insert planted some serious errors in my mind and opened the door to a near decade long affair with the practice of yoga. It was around 1997 when I caught this fitness bug and was introduced to yoga through workout programs on cable fitness stations. I started with the programs that mixed yoga with dance, and thanks to my High School and College dance training, I picked it all up very quickly. There were full yoga programs as well, with the instructors talking about balance and muscle control. Every so often they’d throw in key phrases like, “find your center”, “focus your breath”, “clear the mind”, “feel your inner warmth”. Today I would clearly recognize these phrases as being in the danger zone; but to me “the center” was a dance term, and the rest, well, I knew what I believed, and in my mind this was all just exercise. I deftly rationalized that the terminology wasn’t important, and I developed my own syncretistic practice. What I was failing to grasp, as I believe do many people, is that ultimately yoga isn’t at all about health and fitness, but more on that later. For nine years I was an on again-off again yoga student. I wasn’t faithful to it for a long time by any means, but I always came back to it, because the physical results were unmatched. I could maintain my figure with a no-impact workout program that also relieved my stress, which was a real bonus when I took a new, demanding job in 2006. I decided then that it was time to get more serious about my yoga practice. I found Yoga Journal online which contained some very compelling articles about the physical benefits of yoga, along with tutorials on the poses. I felt great about my decision and bought myself two books at the beginning of 2007: Light on Yoga by B.K.S. Iyengar and Richard Hittleman’s Yoga: A 28-Day Exercise Plan. I also started looking for an instructor, but (luckily) they all overcharge. What can I say, I’m cheap. I flipped through Hittleman’s book, which was for beginners, and decided that I should save the easy book to loan out to someone that might be interested, and just dive right into Iyengar’s more challenging Asana sequences instead. I casually read the Introduction titled, “What Is Yoga?”, perused the photographs of the poses and found the section containing the sequences. It took quite a bit of study, and within 5 months I was advancing quite quickly. I couldn’t get my foot behind my head, but I was able to complete a solid 40-minute “workout”, was getting stronger and more flexible, and was even starting to pick up the Sanskrit terminology. As I progressed, though, I was still having trouble with the whole “empty your mind” thing. I tried to pray my traditional Catholic prayers, but they interfered with my ability to hold a pose. Then there was the breathing. Getting the breathing down is very important. There is this term, “pranayama,” which in its simplest definition means breath. To practice pranayama, as I understood it, you lie on the floor on your…
