With the summer yawning empty and largely jobless, I have been working out a good deal. Running in my funky toed vibrams, a monthly pass to a rock climbing gym, and yoga with an app on my phone. It is about this last I have long been nursing a small itch to write.
Yoga, while an excellent way to build strength and flexibility, draws on deep roots in Eastern spirituality. Even my Android app enjoined me, at the end of my practice, to "let your body assimilate the deep transformation". If one were to take a yoga class at Hosanna, one would find this element to be largely (and intentionally) ignored. Surely, we think, we can start at the trunk of this tree. Cut it off from its terrible pagan roots and just get a good workout.
As you may have guessed, I do not entirely hold with this viewpoint. Otherwise, I wouldn't be talking about it now. While I agree that we have to be careful to keep our focus on Jesus and not on our chakras or karma or whatever, I firmly believe that we are meant to live in our bodies. The Christian story has a lot to say about our physicality. Like the rest of us, our muscles and blood and skin are wondrously woven, though subsequently corrupted, and someday we will be restored to perfect health in new bodies. I have, from my Eastern Orthodox days, an image of Mary holding the baby Jesus. Though I don't pray to Mary, I love the image because it is a picture of the Incarnation and a reminder that we don't become spirit or transcend our flesh in order to be nearer to God. It is the other way around; He takes on a body to get closer to us.
I like yoga because it reminds me to inhabit my body well without denying that I am more than a body. My 'self' is more than synapses firing in a wad of brain trying to make sense of the tide of electrical impulses it receives. I am both body and spirit, and, as in dance, each informs the other.
Naturally, I have to make some modifications to the usual curriculum of a yoga class. While Eastern thought has a great understanding of some things, it still needs to be redeemed. So I play a game: translating yogaese into Theology. While I am supposed to be pondering "the balance of light and dark within myself", I contemplate the tension between the "old man" and the "new creation" within myself. When told to "allow my body to assimilate the deep transformation" at the end of class, I pray for God to help me live up to what I have already attained. With my deep breaths through my nose, I pray after the Orthodox fashion,
"Lord Jesus Christ,
Son of the living God
have mercy on me,
a sinner"
