Developing Your Personal Yoga Practice
In this time of personal seclusion during the corona pandemic, you likely have the personal time, and need, to devote to the development of a personalized prayer practice. And with the churches closed and communal services unavailable, there’s all the more reason for you to choose a song or two that directs your heart to God, and begin to move to the music with a yoga posture flow in a truly holistic form of prayer. What follows is a brief introduction to how my own personal yoga practice came into being. My hope is that you’ll develop your own — and the postures you engage in provide you with a “vocabulary” to use in giving whole-person expression to God in prayer through your body, mind, heart, and spirit.
The history of yoga makes it clear to us that yoga was originally designed to help people meditate better. It evolved as a way of preparing the body to sit still and comfortably with focused mind in meditation, with the goal being an experience of communion with the Divine.
Yoga does this by developing a strong back to sit upright, flexible legs and hips to sit grounded and balanced in a cross-legged position for a prolonged time. It helps you sit comfortably in your body by virtue of releasing tension and stress from the body through contraction and relaxation of the muscles and deep breathing—in other words: hatha yoga.
“If an experience of communion with God, I reasoned, is the goal of the exercise, why wait till the end? Why not bring the end forward by working with the postures in an explicitly God-oriented way?”
Over time, however, yoga became for me not just a preparation for prayer/meditation, but prayer itself. If an experience of communion with God, I reasoned, is the goal of the exercise, why wait till the end? Why not bring the end forward by working with the postures in an explicitly God-oriented way?
So I began engaging with classic prayers like the Our Father, using bodily postures that expressed what the words of the prayer were saying, and linking those postures together into a harmonious flow. And once I started doing that, it wasn’t long before the thought occurred: Why not harmonize this posture flow to the rhythm of a musical version of this prayer? Movement to music is a deeply human instinct and inclination—do you know anyone who doesn’t like to move to music?
This has become so natural for me now in my own practice that I only infrequently engage in posture-flows outside of the context of song-prayer. I recognize that is not the general experience of practitioners, but it has become so for me. Over time I have developed about 35 vinyassa posture flows to song-prayers that “catch my heart”, that carry a message I want to present to God with my whole being. Examples of this are available in the DVD Yoga Prayer which contains seven of them.
The Contribution Music Makes
I would say that the music is a support in at least two ways. First, it engages our affectivity, the heart, which is key in prayer. In the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, at the end of every prayer period the key question one asks oneself is not “What good thoughts did I have during that period of prayer?” Rather, it is “How was my heart moved?” The ideal in prayer is always to bring the head down into the heart and integrate the two. Prayer becomes more potent as the body is actively engaged as the medium of expression for what is in the mind and heart.
Second, the music provides a pattern, a structure, a current that carries one along. To roll out of bed early in the morning with no light yet coming in through the windows, and to get down on the floor and get a series of postures going by sheer dint of will is very difficult to do. But when I light a soft lamp, unroll my mat on the floor, and begin playing a song or two to the rhythm and flow of which I’ve developed some warm-up exercises, it’s like I’m jumping into a steadily flowing river and being carried along by the current. In the music, the energy of inspiration is given. When inspiring words are combined with a pleasing voice and instrumentation, a fire is lit in the heart that starts the body moving.
And following the warm-up exercises, I enter into several yoga posture flows, each flow choreographed to express what the words of the song-prayer are saying. It’s truly a marvelous way to “wake up”! And at the end of 30-40 minutes of such embodied prayer, I am really ready to meditate, i.e., to just sit in the conscious embrace of God’s love, to literally “rest in God.” That is to say, the prayer, already begun through the yoga posture flows, now enters into a contemplative expression, namely, resting in God; love responding to Love with focused awareness in the stillness.
In fact, all three forms of prayer—oral, mental, contemplative—are contained in the process. Oral in the songs. Mental in one’s reflection on the words of the songs and conscious embodiment of their meaning through postures which express that attitude of heart. And contemplative in the quiet sitting in which one takes up a mantra or prayer word/phrase and simply comes to be in loving attention before the One Who Is.
Whole Person Prayer to the Trinity
The whole process is also consciously Trinitarian in its orientation. Embodiment through the postures celebrates the Word becoming flesh and making our enspirited flesh the place that God chose to call “home”. The attention to breath throughout celebrates the Breath of God, the Holy Spirit, who is our Enlivener and Sustainer. And in meditation, the mantra I use encompasses all three persons of the Trinity: (in-breath: Jesus. Out-breath: Abba. In-breath: Holy outbreath: Spirit.) The first in-breath expresses the flow of love from the Father to the Son; the first out-breath expresses the flow of love from the Son back to the Father; the second in-breath and out-breath expresses the Holy Spirit as the flow of love between the Father and the Son). Jesus. Abba. Holy Spirit.
In short, there are ways of making hatha yoga itself prayer, so that it is not just cast as a preparation for raja yoga (prayer/meditation), but realizes that end itself. As you develop yoga prayers like this, you make them your own through a) a choice of music that moves you; b) a choice of postures that exemplify the words of the song and the particular attitude of the heart you want to express. In this sense, the postures you engage in are providing you with a “vocabulary” to use in giving whole-person expression to God in prayer through your body, mind, heart, and spirit.
What’s not to like about that?
