During the mid-2000s, there was a brief publishing trend for feel-good novels with folksy titles: Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. They’d pop up as recommendations on Richard and Judy’s Book Club and turn the authors into overnight best-sellers.
I’m late to the party, but I do think my own Yoga for Catholics would have sparked a bidding war. A young woman is judged and castigated for her apparently incompatible life choices, before a heart-warming resolution brokered by a sexy priest (years ahead of Fleabag) played by Matthew McConaughey in the film adaptation.
As a latecomer to the faith, I have been unrolling my yoga mat for far longer than I’ve been kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament. Perhaps I am guilty of male levels of compartmentalisation, but I’ve only recently come to realise that, for many Catholics, the word “yoga” is accompanied by a dark crash of organ music…
There were rumblings at our old parish in south London when the new assistant priest, super-keen and fresh out of seminary, took issue with the yoga classes in the church hall. We were bemused that a group of women stretching and breathing could attract suspicion. Most of us (including the teacher) were mothers at the primary school next door, and would be back in that same room for the children’s liturgy on Sunday morning.
But last year I was brought up short by a contemporary who told me straight, when I mentioned my weekly classes: “The Church bans it – so you shouldn’t do it.”
Now this is problematic. Like a Dukes martini, yoga – for me – reaches the parts that other forms of exercise cannot. My Monday morning class is non-negotiable: it unkinks my twisted spine, teases out tense muscles and instils a sense of deep calm.
Over the years, I have unrolled my mat on grotty student-union carpets, in swish white London studios with stained-glass windows the colours of the chakras – purple, orange, green and yellow, on the lawn of a sub-tropical garden in Cornwall whilst heavily pregnant, on my bedroom floor when lockdown pushed classes online, and, latterly, in draughty village halls.
I have encountered teachers good, bad and indifferent. Nell, my brilliant and empathic current teacher, is a former journalist. She, like me, has a child with additional needs and helps me reset with her emphasis on kindness, forgiveness and re-evaluating what success means.
At no point in the past 25 years have I encountered anything inimical to having a relationship with God. Yet type “Catholics” and “yoga” into Google and you’ll find pages and pages of hand-wringing – and a multitude of blogs, Substack articles and opinion pieces, most of them hostile.
Yoga is satanic and “leads to evil”, warned the Vatican’s chief exorcist, Fr Gabriele Amorth in 2011 (he also saw the devil in Harry Potter). More recently, the Bishop of Waterford & Lismore, the Rt Revd Alphonsus Cullinan, wrote to headteachers in his diocese saying that yoga was not suitable for schools because it “was not of Christian origin”.
And therein lies the rub, it seems. Is yoga forbidden lest, in the throes of a Downward Dog or Warrior pose, the more feeble-minded among us become overwhelmed with the need to venerate morally-dubious Hindu gods?
“The Church doesn’t forbid it,” says my exasperated Oratorian friend, often my first port of call for guidance, for whom this subject comes up “a lot”. So “if anyone says it’s banned, it’s not. As long as it’s seen as a mechanical exercise, not a spiritual one, then it isn’t a problem.”
But, he adds, “there are people who would love the Church to forbid it and priests I respect who say it shouldn’t be done”.
For added ammunition to lob at the yogaphobics, he directs me to the chairman of the Latin Mass Society, Joseph Shaw, who has done a deep dive into the subject and even – before, as he puts it, his “full assimilation into traddie-land” – did a bit of yoga himself. Dr Shaw has debunked the link between ancient Hindu spirituality and “modern, postural yoga” (largely a 20th-century Western invention). That link, he says, was made by Hindu nationalists in the 1930s – which then re-entered the West during the 1960s craze for Eastern wisdom. And while the Vatican warned Catholics against mixing Christian meditation with Eastern spirituality in a directory of 2003, it didn’t mention yoga.
Granted, Pope Francis has said, in a homily of 2015, that “practices like yoga are not capable of opening our hearts up to God”. But neither is going to the gym or running or a bracing mid-winter dip in the North Sea. That’s not why we do it. Priests need to park any notions of yoga as being “spiritual”. I practise yoga because it makes me stronger, more supple and quietens the chattering monkeys in my head.
And if the Holy Father still isn’t convinced, may I invite him to pull on a pair of Lululemon leggings and unfurl a purple mat beside me next Monday morning? Namaste.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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