Yoga as Embodied Prayer
We’re heading into the home-stretch of our 2023 Lenten journey. Lent and Easter are two of the most important periods in the liturgical year of the Church. But because of all the commercial focus we give to Christmas, some people lose sight of the fact that Easter Sunday is the most important day in the Christian calendar.
As St. Paul reminds us: “If there is no resurrection from the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain, and your faith been in vain” (1 Cor 15:13,14)
Bodily resurrection from the dead? Yes, that’s what it was! And what’s the message in that for giving our bodies a significant role in our spiritual lives? Could yoga help open us to this marvelous mystery of the resurrection?
Yes, it can. It quiets the body as the environment of the mind, and then empties the mind, bringing one to a state of focused, intuitive awareness of the Presence at the center our being, freeing the mind from anxieties and problems and rendering it available to the Holy Spirit. Given God's embrace of our body-mind-spirit unity in the incarnation of Jesus, one's spiritual life will be enriched by exercises in which body and soul are in possession of each other and work together.
In short, yoga and prayer can be inextricably linked. When we perform the various asanas/postures, we’re praying with our body. As my friend Pat O’Rourke once shared, “These physical exercises help me to achieve a sense of stillness and peace in which prayer becomes easier and the nagging worries of the day seem less urgent. Yoga has helped me to feel centered and grounded, not only when I do the exercises, but, increasingly, in all of my life. It helps to quiet my over-active mind and has led me to be more receptive to other people and to God.”
One of the ways in which yoga gradually assumed a prayerful expression in my own practice was through the creation of what I came to call “yoga prayers”. It simply began by taking one of the prayers that I would regularly pray—like the Our Father—and giving expression to the words of the prayer through a flow of yoga postures. It truly felt like holistic prayer, involving body, mind and spirit. And when I began to engage in these posture flows to the prayers in their musical version, it literally became all the more delightfully engaging! I eventually produced the DVD Yoga Prayer as a way of sharing these embodied posture flows to music with others.
The surprise for many is the discovery that something as ordinary as a set of exercises has such an amazing ability to alleviate stress and dispel our scatteredness. All the masters of prayer dwell much on the importance of preventing the mind from moving away from God once it has been focused there, preventing it from engaging with the distractions which present themselves. The basic postures of yoga and simple breath-control exercises offer themselves as a method of so doing—not the only one, of course, but one that many Christian yoga practitioners do find find very helpful.
And given that the core event of Christian faith is the “incarnation”---the embodiment of God in the human flesh and spirit of Jesus Christ—the integration of yoga as embodied prayer into one’s spiritual practice makes great sense!
Two central feast days in the Christian calendar are Christmas and Easter: God becoming flesh in a little child, and rising from the tomb in a resurrected body. Should not, then, an embodied spiritual practice such as yoga make great sense in the lives of Christians?
Much more on this theme can be found in my book Prayer of Heart and Body: Meditation and Yoga as Christian Spiritual Practice (Paulist Press) and DVD: Yoga Prayer: An Embodied Christian Spiritual Practice (Paulist Productions).
Featured photo by Father Tom Ryan. Artist unknown.
