Dave Hunt - Yoga and the Body of Christ: What Position Should Christians Hold?

That non-Christians are engaging in yoga is not surprising. After all, it is being promoted in the West as purely physical stretching and breathing exercises beneficial for ones healtheven as a cure for cancer, with testimonials that supposedly back up that claim. That Christians, however, who say they follow Christ and His Word, would also jump on the bandwagon of Eastern mysticism is staggering.

Yoga was developed to escape this unreal world of time and sense and to reach moksha , the Hindu heavenor to return to the void of the Buddhist. With its breathing exercises and limbering-up positions, yoga is promoted in the West for enhancing health and better living but in the far East, where it originated, it is understood to be a way of dying . Yogis claim to possess the ability to survive on almost no oxygen and to remain motionless for hours, free of the illusion of this life. The physical aspects of yoga, however, which attract many Westerners, were, in fact, originally developed and practiced for spiritual goals.

In spite of the widely published fact that yoga comes from occult practices in such places as China, India, and Tibet, and was not designed to enhance health but to achieve godhood, it is still popularly believed that one can engage in it strictly for health reasons and without any religious or spiritual involvement. John Patrick Sullivan, former NFL player and current yoga instructor in Santa Barbara, California, declares, Yoga has no religion. Its not about Hinuism [or] Buddhism.... Such opinions, however, are contradicted by original practitioners of yoga and by all of the experts who know it best.

Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, who was heavily involved in the occult and not a Christian by any means, was one of the pioneers in bringing yoga to the West 85 years ago and remained devoted to it all of his life. He declared authoritatively and emphatically that the spiritual cannot be cut out of yoga:

The numerous purely physical procedures of yoga [unite] the parts of the body...with the whole of the mind and spirit, as...in the pranayama exercises, where prana is both the breath and the universal dynamics of the cosmos...the elation of the body becomes one with the elation of the spirit.... Yoga practice is unthinkable, and would also be ineffectual, without the ideas on which it is based. It works the physical and the spiritual into one another in an extraordinarily complete way.