Should Christians Practice Yoga?

Yoga classes meet in church halls, gyms, physiotherapy clinics and public schools. Many Christians who attend them think of yoga as stretching with good breathing. Others have heard from a pastor or a priest that the poses are acts of Hindu worship and that a Christian should stay away. Both claims are made with confidence, and they cannot both be simply true.

The honest answer starts with history. The word "yoga" names an ancient Indian discipline whose goal was spiritual liberation, and it also names a twentieth-century fitness practice whose origins scholars have only recently traced. A Christian deciding what to do needs to know which one is on offer, what Hindus themselves say about it, and how the Church has applied the apostle Paul's teaching about food offered to idols to questions like this one. This article tries to do that without either alarm or naivety.

In brief

Classical yoga, as codified in Patañjali's Yoga Sutras (composed around 400 AD by current scholarly reckoning), is a spiritual path whose aim is the stilling of the mind and the "isolation" of the self from matter. Of its 195 short sutras, only three deal with posture, and posture there means a "stable-and-easy" seat for meditation. The flowing sequences most Western classes teach developed largely in India in the 1920s and 1930s, mixing hatha yoga with Indian physical culture and European gymnastics, as the historian Mark Singleton has shown. Hindus disagree about what follows: some insist yoga cannot be separated from Hinduism, while others say anyone of any faith may practise it. Christians disagree too, but the Orthodox answer is clear. The goals of yoga as a spiritual path, whether the isolation of the self, absorption in samādhi, the awakening of kundalini or the realisation that the self is not ultimately separate from Brahman, are false, and they are not the salvation Christ gives. The Holy Synod of the Church of Greece said in 2015 and 2020 that yoga "has no place in the lives of Christians." The body belongs to God and exercise is good, so a stretch is not an act of worship; but a Christian must not take up the meditation, mantras or spiritual aims of another religion, and the wise course is to keep one's exercise apart from yoga altogether.

Thesis: Physical stretching is not a sin, but yoga as a spiritual practice aims at goals that are false and incompatible with communion with the Holy Trinity in Christ, so Orthodox Christians should not practise it as a spiritual discipline and should keep their exercise clear of its chanting, mantras and meditation.

What "yoga" meant: Patañjali's Yoga Sutras

The classical text of yoga is the Yoga Sutras attributed to Patañjali. Scholars date it, with its oldest commentary, to around 400 AD; the Indologist Philipp Maas has argued that the sutras and the commentary were composed together as one work.¹ In James Haughton Woods's 1914 Harvard translation, the second sutra defines the whole project: "Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of mind-stuff." The third gives its purpose: "Then the Seer [that is, the Self] abides in himself."²

The path has eight "aids": abstentions, observances, postures, regulation of the breath, withdrawal of the senses, fixed attention, contemplation and concentration.³ Posture is the third of eight, and the text gives it a single line: "Stable-and-easy posture." Woods notes that the work contains 195 sutras in all.⁴ The goal of the final book is kaivalya, which Woods translates "Isolation": the self freed from entanglement with the material world.⁵ Our article on karma, reincarnation and moksha explains the wider Indian idea of liberation that this goal belongs to.

The Sutras also speak of the Lord, Īśvara. Concentration may be reached by "devotion" to him, and he is "a special kind of Self," untouched by karma. "The word-expressing Him is the Mystic-syllable" (pranava, the sacred syllable Om), and its "Repetition" with reflection on its meaning is recommended.⁶ For how Hindus understand the one and the many divine, see Is Hinduism polytheistic? The Īśvara of the Sutras is not the Holy Trinity, and he is not a God who creates the world from nothing and becomes incarnate to save it. It belongs to the Sāṅkhya-Yoga philosophy of ancient India. Our articles on Hinduism and on the Bhagavad Gita, where "yoga" also means a path of action, knowledge and devotion, give the wider setting.

How postural yoga was born

If the classical texts say so little about postures, where did today's sequences of standing poses, sun salutations and flowing transitions come from? The most influential answer comes from Mark Singleton, whose Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010) grew out of years of archival research. Writing for Yoga Journal, he summarised what he found. Reading the classical and medieval texts, "it was obvious to me that asana was rarely, if ever, the primary feature of the significant yoga traditions in India."⁷ Postures were auxiliary, "subordinate to other practices," and "did not have health and fitness as their chief aim."

Singleton describes several surprises. Swami Vivekananda, who headed the first wave of "export yogis" and arrived in America in 1893, "publicly rejected hatha yoga in general and asana in particular." In the 1920s, amid a wave of Indian physical culture tied to the independence movement, teachers such as Swami Kuvalayananda and Sri Yogendra "blended asanas and indigenous Indian physical culture systems with the latest European techniques of gymnastics and naturopathy." T. Krishnamacharya, teacher of B. K. S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois, developed in Mysore in the 1930s a dynamic practice that was "a marriage of hatha yoga, wrestling exercises, and modern Western gymnastic movement."⁸ Singleton even found many familiar poses in a manual of Danish "Primitive Gymnastics" from the early twentieth century.

He draws a careful conclusion. It is not that modern postures simply "derive from Western gymnastics," he writes, though sometimes they do, but that as they spread they were interpreted through Western traditions, including American "harmonial" movement, which used posture and breath "to access heightened states of awareness."⁹ {{strong: Most of the flowing posture sequences taught in Western classes took shape in the twentieth century rather than in ancient Hindu texts.}} That cuts two ways for a Christian. Many poses are not ancient Hindu rituals. But a modern class can still carry a spirituality, sometimes Hindu and sometimes a Western spirituality of the self.

What Hindus say

Hindus do not agree among themselves about secular yoga. In 2010 the Hindu American Foundation launched a campaign called "Take Back Yoga." As The New York Times reported, it did not ask practitioners to become Hindu but to recognise "yoga's debt to the faith's ancient traditions." The Foundation's opening essay complained that yoga had been decoupled "from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity," and its co-founder Aseem Shukla wrote of "overt intellectual property theft."¹⁰ The same report noted that Deepak Chopra dismissed the campaign, and that the Southern Baptist seminary president Albert Mohler agreed that yoga is Hindu and drew the opposite conclusion for Christians.

Other Hindus take the opposite view. When the Church of Greece spoke against yoga in 2020, Rajan Zed of the Universal Society of Hinduism replied that yoga, "although introduced and nourished by Hinduism," was "a world heritage," and that "One could still practice one's respective faith and do yoga."¹¹ A Christian should listen to both. The first group is right that yoga has Hindu roots and that its classical goals are religious. The second describes how many people actually practise it today.

What Christians say

A range of evangelical views

Evangelicals are divided. Albert Mohler warned in 2010 that "Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice" that threatens their faith.¹² In a 2015 Today's Christian Woman forum, Laurette Willis, a former yoga practitioner who founded a Christian fitness ministry, argued that "yoga is an effective missionary arm of the New Age movement." Brooke Boon of Holy Yoga replied that her classes centre on Scripture and prayer, and that ordinary studio classes are "for the most part, just secular fitness classes," though she would be "more careful" in a class quoting Hindu scripture. A third contributor, a yoga teacher, wrote that she "encountered the Lord on my mat."¹³

The Catholic Church

In 1989 the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, under Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, addressed Eastern methods of meditation, naming "Zen," "Transcendental Meditation" and "Yoga." It did not ban them outright. Such methods should not be "rejected out of hand simply because they are not Christian"; "one can take from them what is useful so long as the Christian conception of prayer, its logic and requirements are never obscured." But it warned that "Some physical exercises automatically produce a feeling of quiet and relaxation," and that to take such feelings "for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life."¹⁴

The Orthodox Church

The clearest Orthodox statements come from the Church of Greece. In June 2015, responding to the United Nations' new International Day of Yoga, its Holy Synod said that yoga "has no place in the lives of Christians," because it is a fundamental part of Hinduism and not simply a "form of exercise," while affirming respect for religious freedom and the duty to avoid a "climate of religious syncretism."¹⁵ In June 2020, after Greek media suggested yoga for pandemic stress, its Standing Holy Synod repeated that yoga "is completely incompatible with our Orthodox Faith and has no place in the lives of Christians." Metropolitan Stefanos of Philippi explained on television that the Church does not condemn exercise, but that this philosophy "refers to an impersonal God."¹⁶ {{very-strong: The Holy Synod of the Church of Greece declared in 2015 and again in 2020 that yoga has no place in the lives of Christians.}}

Formally these are statements of one autocephalous Church for its own faithful, and we have not found a comparable synodal decision from every Orthodox Church. But the reasoning is not a Greek peculiarity. It rests on what every Orthodox Church confesses with the Lord Himself: "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me" (John 14:6, NKJV). The question is not whether stretching is wicked, but whether a Christian may take up the spiritual practice of another religion, and to that the Church's answer is no.

The courts

Secular courts have looked at the question from the other side. In 2015 a California appeals court unanimously upheld a school district's yoga programme against parents who argued that it promoted Hinduism, finding that the classes as taught were not religious instruction.¹⁷ That ruling shows that yoga can be taught as exercise. It does not show that every yoga class is merely exercise.

Thinking it through as an Orthodox Christian

The body is not an enemy. "Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit," Paul writes, so "glorify God in your body" (1 Corinthians 6:19-20, NKJV), and Christians present their bodies "a living sacrifice" (Romans 12:1). Exercise is good, though Paul keeps it in proportion: "bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things" (1 Timothy 4:8). The research reviewed by the U.S. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health finds some benefits, though for low-back pain "the evidence suggests a slight benefit."¹⁸ Christians need not fear stretching any more than they fear running.

The apostle's guidance on food offered to idols is the closest biblical parallel. "An idol is nothing in the world," so meat from the market may be eaten "asking no questions for conscience' sake" (1 Corinthians 8:4; 10:25). Yet "the things which the Gentiles sacrifice they sacrifice to demons," and "you cannot partake of the Lord's table and of the table of demons" (1 Corinthians 10:20-21). A movement of the body is like the meat: it belongs to God's creation. Chanting to a deity, invoking Om as the name of another lord, or adopting a meditation whose goal is the dissolving of the self is like the sacrificial meal itself.

The Orthodox Church also has its own bodily prayer, and it has thought about the resemblance. The hesychast monks of Byzantium joined the Jesus Prayer to posture and breathing. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware admits that "Striking parallels exist between the physical techniques recommended by the Byzantine Hesychasts and those employed in Hindu Yoga and in Sufism." But he insists, "What matters is the picture, not the frame." The essential point of the Jesus Prayer "is not the act of repetition in itself, not how we sit or breathe, but to whom we speak," and it "is not simply a piece of 'Christian Yoga.'"¹⁹ That principle cuts both ways. Breathing and posture are frames. Patañjali's frame holds a picture of isolation from the world; the Church's holds the face of Christ. See also our guide to prayer, fasting and the Jesus Prayer.

The goals themselves must be named plainly, because they are what make yoga a religion and not a gym routine. Patañjali's goal is the self's "Isolation" from the world. In Tantric practice, kundalini is a power "envisaged as a coiled snake at the base of the central channel," and kundalini yoga "is a means of attaining samādhi and finally liberation."²⁰ In Advaita Vedānta, liberation is the realisation that the true self is not ultimately separate from Brahman, as our article on moksha explains. These goals are false. Man is not God by nature; the self is not meant to be dissolved into an impersonal absolute or isolated from the world God made "very good" (Genesis 1:31, NKJV); and no technique of breath or posture unlocks salvation. The Church's goal is theosis: union with the living, personal God by grace, in which the human person is healed and not erased. It is given in Christ and His Church alone, for "there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved" (Acts 4:12, NKJV).

In practice this suggests some plain questions. Does the class include chanting, invocations, or meditation aimed at emptying the mind? Does the teacher present the poses as spiritual practice or as exercise? Would going cause a weaker brother or sister to stumble (1 Corinthians 8:9)? The Orthodox answer follows. Yoga as a spiritual practice is not for Christians at all. And because the word carries the practice with it, the clear course, the one the Church of Greece urges, is to stretch and exercise under another name and in another setting. A spiritual father can help with particular cases, such as a physiotherapist's exercises borrowed from a yoga routine, but the principle does not change from one jurisdiction to another.

Objections and replies

"It's just stretching."

Sometimes it is, and a California court accepted that a school programme could be. Singleton's research supports the point that many poses are modern. But many classes keep spiritual elements, and Singleton himself notes that modern posture practice inherited Western spiritual traditions as well as Indian ones. A Christian should judge the actual class, not the label.

"Every pose is an offering to a Hindu god."

This claim circulates widely among Christian critics, but it overstates the case. The Yoga Sutras treat posture as a seat for meditation, not as a series of offerings to deities, and much of today's sequencing is twentieth-century. The stronger Christian argument is not that each pose is idolatry but that classical yoga's goal differs from the Gospel's, and that some classes still teach that goal.

"Christians who strip yoga of Hinduism are appropriating it."

The Hindu American Foundation makes a fair point that yoga has Hindu roots and should be acknowledged. A Christian who agrees will be honest about those roots and will not repackage Hindu meditation as Christian prayer. Choosing to stretch without the spiritual practice is not appropriation; it is declining to take part in another religion while treating its followers with respect.

"The Church of Greece speaks for all Orthodox."

Formally it speaks for its own faithful. Its reasoning reflects a common Orthodox caution, and English-language Orthodox websites based in Russia, such as OrthoChristian.com and Pravmir.com, reported it, OrthoChristian in its defence. How to handle borderline cases, such as a physiotherapist's exercises, is a matter for one's priest. The principle beneath the statement, that a Christian must not take up yoga as a spiritual path, follows from the confession that Christ alone is Saviour, and no Orthodox Church holds otherwise.

What we can say confidently

• Patañjali's Yoga Sutras, from around 400 AD, describe a spiritual path whose goal is the stilling of the mind and the isolation of the self; posture plays a small part.
• Most modern posture sequences developed in the twentieth century, drawing on hatha yoga, Indian physical culture and European gymnastics.
• Hindus disagree about whether yoga can be practised apart from Hinduism.
• The Holy Synod of the Church of Greece declared in 2015 and 2020 that yoga has no place in the lives of Christians.
• Scripture teaches both that the body should glorify God and that Christians must not share in the worship of other gods.
• The spiritual goals of yoga (the isolation of the self, samādhi, the awakening of kundalini, realising oneness with Brahman) belong to Hindu religion and are incompatible with the Christian faith.

What remains disputed

• How much of modern posture practice descends from medieval hatha yoga and how much from twentieth-century physical culture and gymnastics.
• The exact date of the Yoga Sutras and whether the sutras and their first commentary are by one author.
• How large the health benefits of yoga are compared with other exercise; the research is still modest.

Conclusion

The Orthodox Church has never despised the body. It fasts with the body, bows with it, crosses it, anoints it and buries it in hope of the resurrection. Christians are free to keep that body healthy, and no one needs to fear a hamstring stretch. What they are not free to do is take up another religion's path, however gentle and pleasant it feels, for its goal is not the living God, and Christ alone is the way to the Father. The path the Church offers is not the stilling of the self into isolation but the healing of the whole person in communion with Christ, who took a human body and raised it from the dead. The simplest test for any practice is the one Metropolitan Kallistos gave: not how we sit or breathe, but to whom we speak.

Notes

1. SOAS University of London, event page "The authorship of the Yoga Sutra and its oldest commentary" (lecture by Philipp A. Maas), https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/event/authorship-yoga-sutra-and-its-oldest-commentary.
2. Patañjali, Yoga Sutras 1.2-3, in James Haughton Woods, trans., The Yoga-System of Patañjali, Harvard Oriental Series 17 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), https://archive.org/details/yogasystemofpata00wooduoft.
3. Yoga Sutras 2.29, trans. Woods.
4. Yoga Sutras 2.46-48, trans. Woods; Woods, "Notice to the Reader."
5. Yoga Sutras 4.34, trans. Woods.
6. Yoga Sutras 1.23-28 and 2.32, trans. Woods (Woods transliterates the word as Içvara).
7. Mark Singleton, "The Roots of Yoga: Ancient + Modern," Yoga Journal, 4 February 2011, copy at https://www.babajiskriyayoga.net/english/pdfs/The-Roots-of-Yoga-by-Dr-Mark-Singleton-Yoga-Journal-Feb-4-2001.pdf; see his Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
8. Singleton, "The Roots of Yoga."
9. Singleton, "The Roots of Yoga."
10. Paul Vitello, "Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga's Soul," The New York Times, November 2010, as reprinted by Hindu Press International, 27 November 2010, https://www.hinduismtoday.com/hpi/?p=9802.
11. "Hindus upset by Church of Greece's condemnation of yoga," OrthoChristian.com, 10 June 2020, quoting Rajan Zed's statement, https://orthochristian.com/131770.html.
12. R. Albert Mohler Jr., "The Subtle Body: Should Christians Practice Yoga?" 20 September 2010, https://albertmohler.com/2010/09/20/the-subtle-body-should-christians-practice-yoga.
13. Laurette Willis, Brooke Boon and Jeannie Iseman, "Should Christians Do Yoga? 3 Views on the Fitness Trend," Today's Christian Woman (Christianity Today), 13 May 2015, https://todayschristianwoman.com/articles/2015/may-13/should-christians-do-yoga.html.
14. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation (15 October 1989), sections 16 and 28 and note 1, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19891015_meditazione-cristiana_en.html.
15. "Holy Synod claims yoga has 'no place in the lives of Christians,'" To Vima (English edition), 16 June 2015, https://www.tovima.gr/2015/06/16/international/holy-synod-claims-yoga-has-no-place-in-the-lives-of-christians/amp/. The synod's Greek text was not opened.
16. OrthoChristian.com, 10 June 2020 (as note 11); see also Pravmir.com, "Church of Greece: Yoga is Incompatible with Christian Faith," 5 June 2020, https://www.pravmir.com/church-of-greece-yoga-is-incompatible-with-christian-faith/. The Greek wording ("απολύτως ασυμβίβαστη με την Ορθόδοξη Χριστιανική Πίστη μας και δεν έχει καμία θέση στην ζωή των Χριστιανών") is quoted in "Ιερά Σύνοδος: Η γιόγκα δεν έχει καμία θέση στη ζωή των χριστιανών," iefimerida.gr, 3 June 2020, https://www.iefimerida.gr/ellada/ekklisia-tis-elladas-gia-giogka.
17. Sedlock v. Baird, California Court of Appeal, Fourth District, decided 3 April 2015, as reported in Education Week, 6 April 2015, https://www.edweek.org/education/california-state-appellate-court-upholds-public-school-yoga-program/2015/04. The opinion itself was not opened.
18. National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, "Yoga: Effectiveness and Safety" (last updated August 2023), https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/yoga-effectiveness-and-safety.
19. Kallistos Ware, The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality (Oxford: SLG Press), section on breathing exercises, as reproduced at https://www.orthodoxprayer.org/Articles_files/Ware-7%20Breathing%20Exercises.html.
20. John Bowker, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (Oxford University Press), entry "Kuṇḍalinī," as published at Encyclopedia.com, https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/eastern-religions/hinduism/kundalini.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.
• Woods, James Haughton, trans. The Yoga-System of Patañjali. Harvard Oriental Series 17. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914.
• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation. Vatican City, 1989.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• Holy Synod of the Church of Greece, statements of June 2015 and June 2020, as reported by To Vima, OrthoChristian.com and Pravmir.com.
• Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Singleton, Mark. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Singleton, Mark. "The Roots of Yoga: Ancient + Modern." Yoga Journal, 4 February 2011.
• Bowker, John, ed. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Entry "Kuṇḍalinī."
• Maas, Philipp A. Lecture, "The authorship of the Yoga Sutra and its oldest commentary." SOAS University of London.
• National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health. "Yoga: Effectiveness and Safety." 2023.
• Education Week. "California State Appellate Court Upholds Public School Yoga Program." April 2015.

Sources from the traditions being discussed (Hindu and Christian voices)

• Vitello, Paul. "Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga's Soul." The New York Times, November 2010 (on the Hindu American Foundation's "Take Back Yoga" campaign).
• Zed, Rajan (Universal Society of Hinduism). Statement on the Church of Greece, June 2020, as quoted by OrthoChristian.com.
• Mohler, R. Albert, Jr. "The Subtle Body: Should Christians Practice Yoga?" 2010.
• Willis, Laurette, Brooke Boon and Jeannie Iseman. "Should Christians Do Yoga?" Today's Christian Woman, 2015.