Yoga and Fasting: Forms of Holistic Prayer
Not long ago, the geography of spirituality was the interior or inner life, the “life of the soul”. It meant having to do with our “spiritual” life or life of private prayer with God. The basic premise was that we grow holier by our personal prayer. Spiritual books often dealt with realities outside the realm of ordinary human experience.
Today, however, Christian spirituality is better understood as Christian life in the Spirit. It relates to our whole existence before God and amid the created world: prayer, work, play, time with family and friends. It is the human spirit being grasped, sustained, and transformed by the Holy Spirit through all the circumstances of our lives.
In other words, contemporary spirituality is more holistic. Its main focus is not the interior journey or the life of the soul narrowly understood. In this new territory we do not make rivals of soul and body, spirit and flesh, church and world, sacred and profane. Christian spirituality is being conformed to the person of Christ and being united in communion with God and others through the full range of human experience.
Why? Well, think about it: God became one of us, a living being of flesh and blood, experiencing life in this world just as we experience it—eating and drinking, working and resting, touching and being touched, suffering and dying. In other words, God gave us a model of holistic spirituality.
And there’s much more! At Easter, Christians celebrate Jesus’ bodily resurrection from the dead. And forty days later, on the feast of Jesus’ Ascension into heaven, Christians find a foreshadowing of the entry of their own embodied nature into the intimate embrace of God’s trinitarian life. Then ten days after the Ascension comes Pentecost: the Holy Spirit, God’s own life, given to is us in this mortal flesh!
In short, there is every indication that salvation does not mean getting out of this skin, but being transfigured and glorified in it. A spiritual body, yes, but a body. No wonder, then, that the apostle Paul wrote, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? So glorify God in your bodies!” (1 Cor 6:20)
2 Holistic Forms of Prayer
One of the ways we can glorify God in holistic prayer is through yoga. It has long been an integral part of my prayer life. I’ve developed posture flows to the rhythm and music of song prayers, expressing through my bodily postures what the song prayer is saying—arms upraised in mountain pose to express praise; standing forward bend in adoration; half-moon posture to give God glory for the beauty of sun, moon, and stars; warrior pose to express readiness to step into the day’s tasks awaiting me, etc. A fuller expression of this form of prayer can be found in my book Prayer of Heart and Body: Meditation and Yoga as Christian Spiritual Practice.
Westerners have been conditioned to think that prayer is mostly a mental activity, largely located in the brain. But prayer is not a bodiless experience done only in the head, nor only in the heart. It is an experience of the whole person. One of the Lenten practices—fasting—offers yet another expression of “whole person prayer”.
Yes, food is important. Yes, I need it. But all the needs of my life, if traced down to the deepest core, are rooted in my single greatest need: fulfillment from the hand of my Creator. Fasting is a concrete, decisive act that says, “You, Lord, are the still point in my turning world, and please don’t ever let me forget it. For you I will upset my routine of three meals today because you are the God I worship, not my routine. For you I will live with these hunger pangs today and let them speak to me of my deepest hunger: Our hearts are restless, Lord, until they rest in you.”
Precisely because eating symbolizes that which is most important to us (life and growth), when we set food and drink aside to seek God, we’re declaring that God is more important and essential a source of life and growth for us than anything else. It is essentially God’s love that creates, sustains, and restores us at the core of our being. But if you’re not in a position to fast from food for one or two meals on, say, Fridays during Lent, know that there are other forms of fasting as well.
A few examples: Fast with your feet. Resist the impulse to be always on the go, and offer yourself a daily quiet half hour of reading that nourishes your spirit. Fast from anger, resentment, bitterness. Get to the bottom of why you’re upset, and do the hard work of talking it through with the other, of expressing clearly what it is that you are asking for. Fast from judging others. Unhook from conversations in which others are being disparaged, or contribute something positive to balance the negative things that are being said. Fast from the media a day each week, leaving the radio and TV off and your Iphone on the dresser, and listen more to your own inner spirit.
Lent is usually the season in which the subject of fasting surfaces, but it’s really not just for Lent. It’s for Christian living. If you’d find more on this subject helpful, you can find it in my book The Sacred Art of Fasting: Preparing to Practice (SkyLight Paths).
