Yoga, a sinful practice?

When my whole body is tense and I feel anxious, it is helpful to exercise.  I go on walks, runs, and swims.  I take classes at my gym and sometimes I do yoga.  These all relax my mind and body.

I know that yoga is connected to Eastern religions as a form of meditation.  However, I argue to myself that it doesn't mean anything to me because I just view it as exercise.  It's just stretching.  Also, God knows my heart...so it is fine.

However, I couldn't have been more wrong. 

After some research, I found that yoga is turning the mind on itself and this is anti-Christian and New Age.  It is a union with false gods.  (See below.)

If yoga is New Age, and thus, Anti-Christian, why dabble in it? Why take risks or set bad examples for others?  By doing yoga, I signal: "I am okay with this.  I don't think there is anything wrong here." 

I may be only one person, but I have decided to not make New Age practices a part of my cultural norm despite my good intentions or "but this doesn't affect me" thinking. 

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According to the Bhagavad Gita, from which Iyengar quotes and calls “the most important authority on Yoga philosophy”, the whole purpose of yoga is to “escape pain and sorrow” (p. 19). There are eight “limbs” to yoga. Pranayama, the breath, is actually the fourth limb. The goal is to reach the eighth called Samadhi, which is when the yogi relinquishes the body for a state of transcendental perfection in union with the universe, or essentially an altered mental state. One of the beliefs behind the practice is that each person is granted a fixed number of breaths, and yoga will lengthen each breath for the purpose of extending the amount of time a soul can exist in the altered state before the body dies, thus the higher state when it reenters this world upon reincarnation.

What we think is exercise is actually Asana, the third limb of yoga that is supposed to purify the body to be a proper vessel for the soul, to help the yogi gain mastery over the body for the sake of deep, sustained inhales and exhales, which we now know are prayers to the self as God. Here in the West, because we think Asana is exercise we skip over the first two limbs, which promote indifference toward the world and others. Indifference would certainly help quiet the mind loaded with worries and cares, but it should set off serious alarms in any properly formed Catholic. Isn't Christ's great commandment to love one another? Also, the deep breathing of Asana poses allows the yogi to achieve such a deeply relaxed physical state. Recall that the purpose of yoga is to escape pain and sorrow. I believe that the intense relaxation is the primary reason why so many people find themselves seeking out a more disciplined yoga practice, as I did. The racing mind disturbs relaxation, and if determined, the yogi will break his or her mind,  move on through the remaining limbs, deepen the rift between the body and soul, and turn the mind in on itself. From: Why Catholics Should Never Do Yoga

Yoga is incompatible with Catholicism because the best known practice of Hindu spirituality is Yoga. “Inner” Hinduism professes pantheism, which denies that there is only one infinite Being who created the world out of nothing. This pantheistic Hinduism says to the multitude of uncultured believers who follow the ways of the gods that they will receive the reward of the gods. They will have brief tastes of heaven between successive rebirths on earth. But they will never be delivered from the “wheel of existence” with its illusory lives and deaths until they realize that only “God” exists and all else is illusion (Maya). To achieve this liberation the principal way is by means of concentration and self control (yoga).

Indian spirituality is perhaps best known by the practice of yoga, derived from the root yuj to unite or yoke, which in context means union with the Absolute. Numerous stages are distinguished in the upward progress toward the supreme end of identification: by means of knowledge with the deity; the practice of moral virtues and observance of ethical rules; bodily postures; control of internal and external senses; concentration of memory and meditation–finally terminating in total absorption (samadhi), “when the seer stands in his own nature.” From: Why is Yoga incompatible with Catholicism? FATHER JOHN HARDON, S.J.

"27. Eastern Christian meditation 32 has valued "psychophysical symbolism," often absent in western forms of prayer. It can range from a specific bodily posture to the basic life functions, such as breathing or the beating of the heart. The exercise of the "Jesus Prayer," for example, which adapts itself to the natural rhythm of breathing can, at least for a certain time, be of real help to many people. 33 On the other hand, the eastern masters themselves have also noted that not everyone is equally suited to making use of this symbolism, since not everybody is able to pass from the material sign to the spiritual reality that is being sought. Understood in an inadequate and incorrect way, the symbolism can even become an idol and thus an obstacle to the raising up of the spirit to God. To live out in one's prayer the full awareness of one's body as a symbol is even more difficult: it can degenerate into a cult of the body and can lead surreptitiously to considering all bodily sensations as spiritual experiences.


28. Some physical exercises automatically produce a feeling of quiet and relaxation, pleasing sensations, perhaps even phenomena of light and of warmth, which resemble spiritual well-being. To take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life. Giving them a symbolic significance typical of the mystical experience, when the moral condition of the person concerned does not correspond to such an experience, would represent a kind of mental schizophrenia which could also lead to psychic disturbance and, at times, to moral deviations." From: LETTER TO THE BISHOPS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH ON SOME ASPECTS OF CHRISTIAN MEDITATION Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith