You’ve probably heard celebrities raving about it. Maybe you have a friend who attends a yoga class. Or perhaps your YMCA, school or church offers it as an exercise option. Maybe you’ve tried it. But do you know what it’s all about?

Yoga originated about 500 years ago in India. Its history is linked to Hinduism, the national religion of India. Yoga reached the United States nearly 100 years ago, but the boom in popularity didn’t start until the 1960s and ‘70s. Now it’s estimated that there are currently 18 million people practicing yoga in this country, up 50 percent within the last decade.

Fascination with yoga has grown much faster than most people’s knowledge of it.

Yoga means “union” or “to yoke.” This yoking occurs when a person disciplines her body and mind with postures, breathing and meditation. Through yoga, people seek to harmonize the body, mind and spirit so they can reach a meditative state, which leads to enlightenment or union with Brahman (the infinite or universal spirit that Hindus refer to as their highest god).

While there are many branches of yoga, the type that’s most popular in the United States is hatha yoga, which emphasizes physical discipline. Many Westerners practice it to develop flexibility, resilience and strength, or to relax. They usually don’t consider it a mystical exercise.

Think About This
Yoga originated as a spiritual practice, but not as a religion. Its supporters and instructors say that people of all faiths can practice yoga without compromising religious beliefs.

Model Christy Turlington is one of the most outspoken yoga devotees. She’s said you don’t have to be Hindu or Buddhist to practice yoga, but she added, “I think that some things are so powerful that even when they’re filtered, they’re still powerful. You’d lose so many people if you had to do something this way or that way.”

Sounds like a pantheistic, relativist worldview to me. Pantheism basically teaches that everything is a god. Relativism proclaims there’s no absolute truth. Turlington may not call herself a pantheist or relativist, but the ideas she proclaims certainly portray these underlying messages. These messages compete with Christian beliefs of absolute truth.

Have you seen advertisements for “Christian yoga”? Don’t be fooled. Just because the word is linked to something doesn’t make it OK. It may be a disguise for a twisted version of the truth.

Here’s an example. A man named Ted Self started the First International Church of Christian Yoga, which exists only on the Internet. He says he’s not a guru or a spiritual teacher, but he offers prayers and chants for his readers — as well as an online superstore. One of his prayers says, “Heavenly Spirit, we are traveling by many roads to Thine abode of light. Guide us unto the highway of Self knowledge, to which all paths of true religious beliefs eventually lead.”

As this prayer illustrates, New Agers proclaim that all spirituality is good and that no form is better than another, but that goes against God’s Word. Jesus said, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Eastern religions can be very tricky. They can enter subtly like an odorless, poisonous gas, seeping under a door and through an open window, so that people become engulfed without ever realizing there was danger.

And what about meditation? Some say it’s biblical and that yoga should fit perfectly into a Christian’s spiritual practice. But there’s a crucial difference between the meditation practiced in yoga and Christian meditation. Eastern meditation seeks to empty the mind. Christians meditate to fill the mind. The apostle Paul says, “I will pray with my spirit, but I will also pray with my mind” (1 Corinthians 14:15).

The Bottom Line
Is it wrong to participate in yoga? The Bible doesn’t specifically mention yoga, but it instructs us to pray and seek God in times of uncertainty. As Christians we’re to pray continually, test everything and hold on to the good (1 Thessalonians 5:17-21).

“Yoga is an alternative therapy that is difficult to wholeheartedly accept or reject,” say Donal O’Mathuna, Ph.D., and Walt Larimore, M.D., in their book Alternative Medicine. “As a set of physical and breathing exercises, it can improve general well-being. As a deeply religious practice with the goal of union with the divine, it is antithetical to biblical Christianity.”

Talk with your parents and church leaders to learn about their views on yoga.