How Yoga & My Faith Collided
Hello dear ones - I have a little caveat about this story….
As I was finishing up this new website my sister, being the best coach - logistics thinker and knower of my stories that she is, suggested I include this blog post on my yoga page because it talks about how yoga and my Christian faith connect.
But as I went back to read it, I found that my faith has grown and changed a lot over the past four years. It has widened and deepened.
Part of the widening has been to understand yoga as a spiritual practice of embodiment. A practice that has been around for centuries, and for Christians, invites us to connect with God holistically: heart, mind, soul and strength and come home to ourselves in Christ, on our mat. This practice has helped me experience God more deeply and showed me how I spent many years engaging with my faith primarily in my head (which I think is commonly taught in the western church). I thought what I believed in my mind, sang about in church and talked about with others was the most important way to engage with my faith.
However - yoga as a practice of embodiment - has helped me to connect all the parts of me: heart, soul, mind and strength and then, from a connected and integrated place, live the love Jesus talks about (rather than just think about it). I wonder if this may be part of your journey too?
Either way, I hope my story can offer a perspective that perhaps resonates, or is new. What still feels true about this post is how this event - and particularly the practice of yoga, opened me towards God in a way I had not accessed before. I’ve re-written parts to capture the ways I’ve come to see and understand differently.
If you are wondering how your Christian faith and Yoga can intersect, I want to offer my story and the invitation to try.
Here’s the Original Post with my tweeks :)
Towards the end of my 20s I experienced a season of loss and heartbreak that left me feeling like everything was falling apart. We lost my father-in-law quickly and unexpectedly to cancer, I gave birth to my second child and decided to become a stay-at-home mom. In the pain of loss, I felt abandoned by God and without my career I didn’t know who I was. It was chaos. Truthfully, I had let go of hope and picked up anger. My body and soul were exhausted.
I didn’t feel like I could trust much. Church felt hard to attend. My Bible felt hard to open. But I could make it to my mat. And so I practiced yoga. It became a safe space where I could breathe, I could cry, I could let the emotions bubble up and then move it out. I didn’t have to have the answers, and I could offer my questions, like prayers.
One weekend I saw a flyer at my yoga studio for a Yoga Retreat. When I read it more closely I noticed that it carried undertones of faith and spirituality. Honestly, the idea of getting away to the mountains and doing yoga felt more alluring than getting away to be with God. We weren’t really on great speaking terms (at least on my end). But the mountains and yoga felt like a way towards peace, so I decided to go.
That’s how I first grew to love yoga because it always brought me a sense of peace.
I began practicing yoga 15 years ago when I took my first yoga class as a requirement for my high school dance team. Our coach saw the value in the combination of strength and stretching but more-so, she knew high school girls could use the practice of calming and centering our minds. (It’s a battleground in adolescent brains!) And that’s what hooked me. The rhythmic breathing and moving centered my mind in a way I had never experienced.
Here’s a peek at my dance team days. I mean...no words. The scrunchy, the gloves, the choker, the intensity ;)
Over the next 15 years yoga became a necessary staple in my life. It was a friend I took with me through every life stage. I would attend weekly yoga classes through college and during my first job in the nonprofit world. I even took early morning classes in my first years of teaching Spanish in the classroom and continued taking classes into motherhood. Yes, 5:30 am is early, but no one else is up yet which guarantees I do at least one thing for myself before my monkeys, I mean children, get out of bed. Talk about #momwin
Coming back to the story, I found myself driving up I-70 towards the mountains I remember calling my husband saying, “as long as there is a lot of yoga and a little bit of God, I’ll be ok.” As I arrived, I discovered it was a faith-based yoga retreat (offered by SoulFittness Colorado) and to my own surprise, I caught myself praying, well actually pleading, “God, please let this be mostly yoga and just a little bit spiritual. I’m pretty tapped out. Can’t you see that?” And with that I made my way to the back of the room, where I could roll out my mat near an exit.
As the class began, the teacher opened with prayer and a pause for silence. After a brief reading of Scripture, she started guiding a flow as music played in the background.
The words of Scripture felt comforting - stripped of any tones of fixing or preaching- and I found myself relaxing into the practice.
Soon I discovered, this was a much more involved internal experience than my regular yoga classes. With each posture, my body was reflecting externally what it was doing internally.
For example, prayer.
As we prayed, I found myself resting in child’s pose, bowed forward, my forehead pressed to the mat and palms open wide. My body was in a posture of surrender, and I felt my heart opening to do the same. Here in this posture I felt open to God in a way I hadn’t in a long time.
And then the teacher asked,
“What do you need to surrender to Jesus?”
Now I had been asked this question before, but never in a moment where the posture of my body mirrored the invitation for my soul.
As she asked the question, my integrated self heard these lyrics float above my head....
“ I need you, Oh I need you. Every hour I need you. My one defense my righteousness, Oh God How I need you.”
This hymn from my childhood echoed forward, like a gentle invitation offering to hold the little child in me that felt so abandoned. So afraid. So lost in the chaos.
The tears began to stream down my face. I had just lost my father-in-law to cancer and I feared my family would fall apart and I’d lose my husband to sorrow. I needed God in a big way because there was nothing I could do in my own power to fix any of it. I was tired of trying so hard. I desperately needed to surrender. I needed help.
And I heard myself whisper, "I need to trust you, Jesus"
As the words escaped with my breath, I felt a deep sense of peace wash over me. It was as if my tears were an outpour of my surrender and I was met with a deep-knowing that I was loved and held.
The cadence of moving and breathing had allowed me to open up. To become present to the moment, where God was waiting for me.
And there, with my shoulders silently shuddering and my snot and tears pooling into a puddle on my mat, I realized God had never moved.
I might have run away in my hurt and pain, but God was there - as solid as the ground beneath me. Supporting my body. Holding my heart. An unmovable love.
And so I reached out through my fingertips, and with a big exhale….let go of all I was trying to control.
…and inhaled peace.
I was overcome with a sense that I didn’t have to glue all the broken pieces back together in my own power. Instead, I could hand them over with a deep knowing that they would find a home in God’s hands.
I was left open-handed. Trusting. Surrendering. And feeling a tangible sense of God being with me.
Where moments before I had felt closed off and stuck in my grief, it was the sense of God’s Presence that carried me through.
Up until now, I had believed that the hard shell that I had built around my heart, one brick at a time, would protect me from more hurt. But, in reality, this self-forged fortress was was suffocating the life force right out of me.
Today's culture drives home the importance of independence and the power to to fix our own problems.
And while there is truth in our God-given agency, it is also true we aren’t meant to do it alone. The practice of yoga is about becoming and integrating instead of achieving and separating. The combination of embodied movement, the sacred words of Scripture and prayerful meditation opened my heart to experience God in a way that I could receive in love, what I couldn’t do on my own.
I now approach yoga like other spiritual practices.
It’s one that brings me into the present moment where I find God’s presence - alive, moving and deeply loving.
This retreat was the seed that led to my growth and training as a yoga teacher. I believe the art of teaching is something caught more than taught and I’m grateful for my teachers SoulFitness Colorado and LivingSoul Institute.
Today you’ll find me practicing or leading from my mat on a weekly basis. I
’d love for you to come and join or connect with me about ways to try from home!
If you’d like a variety or different times to practice, try joining Ari yoga, SoulFitness or LivingSoul Institute.
May God meet you and continue to transform you from the inside out, one breath at a time.