Rebecca Reed I&G World

There is nothing “Holy” about “Holy Yoga”

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This week, my SBC church tried to launch a Holy Yoga class and I almost lost it. Before last September, I had honestly never given much attention to Yoga’s roots. I just started doing it during high school as one form of exercise. The DVDs & mats were pretty inexpensive and it worked to tone my lower body (win-win, right). However, my husband and I were flabbergasted to discover in September just how nefarious yoga actually was. Apparently, yoga was not designed to be a total body toner, but rather a Vedic mind-transformer. Armed with this knowledge, I had to alert the church leadership and sound the heresy alarm.

Are you skeptical like I was? Do you think that I should do some deep breathing and stop with this “conspiracy-type” nonsense? Sorry, but I can’t.

The fundamental problem with Yoga is that it is a pagan form of worship. For this reason, it should have no place in a Christian’s life. 

Holy Yoga and other companies trying to put a “Christian spin” on it are just playing mind games with us. They are all selling the same wretched thing—heretical syncretism. Simply stripping out the explicitly pagan elements of yoga does not transform yoga into a viable option for Christian worship. Taking a quote for the creators of yoga, ’The poses alone are enough.’ (Check out the lectures below for more details)

Still not convinced that Yoga has to go? Think about how God did not permit the Israelites to simply repurpose/paint the Asherah poles in the Old Testament; instead, they were reminded time and time again that they needed to tear them all down and worship Yahweh alone, the one true God.

“Destroy completely all the places where the nations that you are driving out worship their gods — on the high mountains, on the hills, and under every green tree. Tear down their altars, smash their sacred pillars, burn up their Asherah poles, cut down the carved images of their gods, and wipe out their names from every place. Don’t worship the LORD your God this way. Instead, you must turn to the place Yahweh your God chooses from all your tribes to put His name for His dwelling and go there. ” (Deut. 12:2-5)

So while God never explicitly struck down Yoga in the Bible, we should take His cues from the Old Testament. We should not to import pagan worship practices in efforts to enhance our “felt connection with God” (or reshape our legs). We should not to get overly creative with our worship like Nadab and Abihu who were promptly executed for improperly worshipping God (Leviticus 10). We should only to worship God in spirit and in truth as outlined in His Word.

Not sure what to do without Yoga? Don’t worry! Check out my next post about God-honoring fitness for best practices that I have learned since quitting yoga in September. (If you subscribe to this blog, you will get an alert when it drops 😉 )

Once again, I highly recommend that you all check out the video lectures linked below. While they are about an hour each, they are very thorough, biblically-faithful presentations from the TruthXchange, a Christian ‘think tank’ of sorts headed by Dr. Peter Jones:

 

What are your thoughts/reactions? Share your feedback in the comments section below!