I've recently committed myself to a regular yoga home practice, after years of owning books and DVD's but never really making an effort to make yoga a routine part of my life. The results have been extremely rewarding. I won't be tying myself into pretzel-shapes any time soon, but after several months of near-daily practice, I feel more flexible, relaxed, and centered.
Yoga practice has reminded me of the importance of my body and being firmly rooted in this physical experience. Sadly, much of Western religion has contributed to a disconnect between spirit and body. From the (heretical) tendency to view the body as a source of sin and weakness to an excessive emphasis on discursive, mental prayer, Christian spirituality has neglected the sacredness of our physical nature and the intimate linkage between mind, body, and spirit.
Yoga has reawakened this connection for me, and I've spent a lot more time lately practicing awareness of my physical experience, seeking to pray through my body and consciously surrender myself more completely to God on all levels.
A great resource for my yoga practice has been the magazine and website, Yoga Journal, a wealth of practical advice and guidance on yoga as exercise, philosophy, and way of life. I receive daily emails on a variety of yoga topics to enrich my knowledge and application of yoga. Today's Daily Insight was titled, Grounded in Gratitude. The meditation was filled with meaningful wisdom, but as a Christian yogi, I was left feeling a need to add something. Here's how the message starts:
On the surface, gratitude appears to arise from a sense that you're indebted to another person for taking care of you in some way. But looking deeper, you'll see that the feeling is actually a heightened awareness of your connection to everything else. Gratitude flows when you break out of the small, self-centered point of view and appreciate that through the labors and intentions and even the simple existence of an inconceivably large number of people, weather patterns, chemical reactions, and the like, you have been given the miracle of your life, with all the goodness in it.
This is all true, of course. Mindfulness deepens our awareness of the myriad interconnections of reality, and the resulting feeling is one of deep awe, reverence, and gratitude.
But for the Christian, there is another level of insight available, one that the author of this little meditation misses. The vast interconnectedness of our lives arises from God, the ground of all being. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity reminds that the essence of the Ultimate Reality is interconnection and relationship. That creation reflects this multiplicity and interdependence is no coincidence to the thoughtful Christian.
Gratitude does not arise, as the author supposes from a sense of indebtedness, but from the sense of vast, spacious, immense and inconceivable love, a love which pours out upon us in waves when we still our hearts to see what is here, both in our physical bodies, in our social connections, and in the created world at large. Indebtedness is too clumsy a word, too transactional, to reflect the transformative insight of resting in the enormous mystery of God.
In the light of Redemption, all things are lived out in adoration and intimacy with this mystery, including our minds, our bodies, and the practices (like yoga) we use to experience union of our total Selves with the Divine.
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