Can yoga be Christian?

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1:20You're reminding yourself right now that there is absolutely no rush anymore. you're not running late for anything there is nowhere else that you need to be if you do yoga regularly this might be a familiar image the gentle ambient music in the background the positions and cues so big breath in for three long slow exhale for six you might know that the movements originate from ancient India and that the practice of yoga has its roots in the Hindu faith. But not this class. As Christians, we know and believe that our breath is more than air and oxygen. From the top of her terracotta yoga mat, Annette Langebree is taking her class through an hour of Christian yoga.

2:15What special mountain, what holy place, what church, what sanctuary? If God is not right here where you are, where else can you be? The positions are the same, so is the breathing. But what's different is that this class leans on Christian references. This is the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Megan Lawton. And on this episode of Heart and Soul, which explores approaches to spirituality from around the world, I'm asking, can yoga ever be Christian? I'm not the only one that says that yoga is more than just exercise. It's a question that will take me from here, inside a yoga studio in Nottingham in the UK, to the United States.

3:05Now there are six parts to a Praise Moves workout, and you're going to be experiencing all of them. We always start with prayer. That's a good thing. Today, we're going to meet two people, both Christian in their faith, but with very different beliefs about yoga. When I became a Christian, I recognised that the foundations of yoga did not align with Christian beliefs. There is such a holy weight to what it means to be a human in a body when you ground your yoga practice and just your existence as a Christian in that kind of theological thinking. To find out, can yoga ever be Christian?

3:48It's a slightly overcast spring morning in Nottingham in the UK's East Midlands. And I'm here for a special event, as the leaflet says, recharging and connecting with God through Christian yoga. The class is run by Annette Lanchbury. She's in her 30s and was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She greets me with a beaming smile and shows me into a small but bright church hall where today's event is going to be held.

4:19So what is the difference between a Christian yoga class and any other yoga class? I think if you would call yourself a Christian and your faith matters to you, then I think that would be the biggest difference. I think there'll be rather than vague, a-spiritual references to the universe or comforting platitudes that are great, but I think they carry a lot more weight and have a bit more gravitas That's one backed by scripture and the truth of the gospel that we believe in as Christians. So I guess the semantics will be different from another yoga class. We'll hear it in the words you say. What about the physicality of it?

4:56Will that be kind of typical of any other yoga session? Yeah, that's a great question. It actually would be really typical of a yoga session. It would be the same movements. I learnt sort of vinyasa yoga style training with my Christian yoga teacher training. I did a little bit of yin yoga as well. So I think that if you are well-versed with the yoga world, you would understand the movements. I think often people ask, why don't you just call it mindful movement? But I think that would do a disservice to people who ended up coming because they're like, oh, I'm essentially doing yoga. I can see the room filling up behind us.

5:30I think one woman has arrived with a very young baby. I know, it's so cute. It looks so, so cute. Bless God in the sanctuary. Bless God in the fields of plenty. Before the yoga class begins, there's 20 minutes of worship through song. Bless your name. Bless God, my hands are empty. Bless God in the world. After the singing ends, the class begins. So I often start all my yoga classes the same, just fine. We often think of yoga as exercise, but that's not how it started. Its roots lie thousands of miles from here in ancient India, where it grew out of spiritual traditions, including Hinduism as well as Buddhism and Jainism.

6:19It involved meditation, controlled breathing, chanting and sometimes physical poses called asanas. Ancient Hindu texts like the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali describe its goal as spiritual, calming the mind and seeking union with the ultimate reality known as Brahman. Long, slow exhale for six. After the class, Annette and I find a space in the church to talk. How was that for you? You've literally just come up the stairs after an hour and a bit. It's true. I'm worried I'm going to be just sounding so breathless for everyone listening. Some nice ASMR for us all. No, it was amazing. It's genuinely such a privilege.

7:05I think people are trusting you with their time, their attention, and just that you will be a spiritually safe space. And it's always genuinely a joy to share what I love to do. Annette's now in her 30s and explains that yoga came into her life during what she calls her tumultuous 20s. I think in my early 20s, I'd finished my law degree. I didn't know if I wanted to be a lawyer. I was kind of fumbling around. They were like the best of times and the worst of times all rolled into one decade. And I would be doing these sort of 10 hour, 12 hour shifts. And I was like, I'm too young to have such an achy body.

7:41And then yoga came into it. I was just like, I can't believe my body feels so good, but my mind feels so calm. And there has to be something in this where I can connect my faith to what's happening in these moments because God created the mind and the body and the whole thing. And so any good idea comes from God. Today, Annette runs a Christian yoga business, but her journey begins in Zimbabwe, where she says she was raised in a strict religious household. For context, I didn't grow up reading Harry Potter. I think one time I went to a friend's house and I tried black nail polish and my mum was like, take that off immediately.

8:20Like, are you a witch? Witches wear black hair polish in air. And I was like, whoa. Like, when you come from an African background, witchcraft is really part and parcel of spirituality. And so there's a real understanding of not dabbling in something dark, but also knowing that God is greater. It's very rogue that I got into yoga. Some Christians are wary of what they call new age practices, because they believe these ideas come from spiritual traditions outside Christianity. The term New Age is used to describe a mix of alternative spiritual practices, from astrology to crystals, tarot, yoga and sometimes forms of witchcraft.

9:05For these Christians, the concern is theological. They believe spiritual guidance should come from God alone. When it comes to natural medicines, she's a pharmacist, which is so ironic, but she's like, if you can, drink water, sleep, let the body heal itself. God has given us all we need to recover. Annette tells me about the day she called her mum to tell her she was regularly practising yoga. and I assumed that I would tell my mom on the phone that hey I'm like really like I'm really intrigued by yoga I'm like I love all these things about it and she would be like no but she as much as she was like a strict African mom who loved God uh she's also just so so quirky and like open to the wonder and the bigness of God and she has such a reverence and a respect for cultures and the wisdom that culture holds and I think she was just like of course it makes sense that you would love yoga because we're called to worship God with our whole heart body mind soul and you know the God that you believe in and that's the most important thing.

10:14So you mentioned there about finding yoga almost because you were just hurting after long days in hospitality and you and you were stretching when do you remember a moment on the mat where you thought okay my faith actually lends itself to what I'm doing now because I'm guessing the videos you're watching on YouTube weren't necessarily Christian yoga at that point yeah it's true they weren't I couldn't I hadn't couldn't find any and um gosh two things stand out to me like because I come from a different culture and I speak a different language I'm I love languages and I did French in school and Italian on the side and so yoga is largely has all of these like Sanskrit posture names you've got stuff like mountain pose, eagle pose, tree pose, child's pose, all of these postures that have this English transliteration and that would inspire me to think of scripture because I would do these poses and I would think where is God in this and what from my Christian upbringing or the Bible verse I read this morning lends itself to what I'm doing in this moment and when you do a yoga class even if it's not Christian, there's such a high emphasis on noticing your breath and trying to move and connect to your breath.

11:30It just really made a lot of sense to me. And it means God's place. So maybe the next time you inhale and lift your hands high up to the sky, we've got the fingers getting a nice stretch into the shoulders. And as you exhale, just cross those arms, give yourself a huge hug. We're bringing the elbows in towards the belly so you stretch into the back body. And as for that moment of realisation on the mat... I remember, like, I'd just started my yoga business. I'd had a really hard day. I was trying to work in hospitality still, but, like, also start something. And I was just alone in the living room on my yoga mat, and I was so, so sad.

12:11I was so disheartened. And I remember crying out, like, God, I wish you were just here. I wish you were here with me in this moment. and if you do yoga a lot you kind of have all these different props, yoga blocks, yoga bolsters so I got into child's pose and I put the bolster on top of the blocks and in such a way that in child's pose I can kind of wrap my arms around the bolster and it honestly was the closest I've ever gotten to feeling like I'm having a hug from God right now, it was just yeah life-changing. for annette yoga became a space where she could easily connect with her faith but growing up getting to church regularly wasn't always as easy as an angsty teen i was always really frustrated by the inconsistency of my church experience my mum when we moved to england was a single parent and getting to church on a sunday morning often felt really hard to get three kids out the door and to church on time so I constantly felt like the new person at church and always had that sort of outsider feeling with it.

13:17You said yourself that yoga is something that came very much from Asia and Buddhist and Hindu religions do you within your practice feel a kind of need to to honour that and the origins how do you balance I guess taking this new concept of yoga which works for you Christian yoga but also honouring that it was developed by other faiths? I mentioned at the start a lot of christians will say well why do you call it yoga just call it mindfulness or why do you do yoga just do pilates what someone will do in a class is yoga they will come and they will do a downward facing dog they will do like a vinyasa or a warrior three and so it feels like a bit of a hoodwink for them to come expecting stretching but then i'm like asking them to do these specific poses and yeah like i said i come from a different culture i speak a different language as my mother tongue and so I love to use the Sanskrit terminology and to find a way to honour where yoga comes from through that.

14:17You rang your mum and told her you were into yoga, she seems quite accommodating of that whereas I know even from somebody who was in your class today growing up in a Christian household, yoga doesn't equate to being Christian. What kind of opinions have you heard about why yoga and Christianity aren't compatible? A lot of people will be like well the yoga poses themselves are like postures to worship other gods in Hinduism and I definitely understand that and see where they're coming from but I would say for me what you are bringing to something is far more important than what the thing is itself.

14:56Have you ever had doubts about yoga and whether it was a phrase that I hear from the people who think that Christianity and yoga aren't compatible is that yoga is not of Christ have you ever kind of had thoughts about that and had to kind of think about your faith and what that means I think a lot about the responsibility of talking so openly about Christian yoga and not wanting to lead anybody else astray and that makes me have reservations and take pause and think oh lord I really want to to do this because of how much it's blessed me and how much I see so much of you in it but equally I want to do it carefully and have open conversations with people and just get them to pray for themselves and to think for themselves is this something that I feel draws me closer to God or draws me away from I think that's a great baseline place to start from

16:05From the BBC World Service, you're listening to the documentary.

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18:46It's a question that's dividing opinion. For some believers, yoga's roots in Hindu, Buddhist and other spiritual traditions make it incompatible with their beliefs. But others say the physical postures and breathing can be separated from those origins. And in my research, I also came across what's branded a Christian alternative to yoga. It's called Praise Moves. Okay, we're moving into our next step. We're going to exercise and warm up our shoulders. Five, four, three. In this class, led by instructor Chandra Tyson, viewers are guided through a series of aerobic moves and postures. They've developed over 150 of them, each assigned to a Bible scripture.

19:31Exhale, raise your hands, your palms are facing one another. Inhale, exhale and say this scripture. Oh, give thanks to the Lord. It's now a global business founded by Dr. Lorette Willis with instructors, or as they refer to them, fitness ministers, located around the world. So, just like with one of her online classes, I opened my laptop for a call with Lorette. Well, let's get into it. Whereabouts am I speaking to you from today? My husband and I live in northeastern Oklahoma. I'm originally from New York City. We're at in the middle of a 40 acre hay field surrounded by woods deer and bunny rabbits, which is my dream.

20:18I always wanted... From this quiet corner of Oklahoma, Lorette now leads a worldwide community. Well, Praise Moves, it's the Christian alternative to yoga. Every posture in Praise Moves is assigned a scripture that we meditate upon and speak aloud while doing a stretching, strengthening posture. Shoulders down, relaxed. These are the words of Jesus. Please repeat after me. I am the vine. You are the branches. And the exercise is what I like to call the witty invention to get you more into the word of God. and more of the word of God into you. That's kind of how it works. And this truly changes people's prayer lives, because the expression is that faith begins where the will of God is known.

21:06And when you know God's will, which we believe is in God's word, the Bible, you know what to pray for, you know, it gives you confidence. Before she founded the Christian alternative to yoga, for years, Lorette practiced and even taught traditional yoga? Well, it really comes, Megan, from my own experience of having been in yoga for 22 years, from the ages of seven till I was 29. My mother got involved with yoga. Both of us did. You know, I did everything mommy did. Both my parents were attorneys. My father was also a judge, had his own practice. You know, everything seemed lovely, you know, on the outside, but inside, There was turmoil.

21:52There was trauma. Unfortunately, my mother was diagnosed schizophrenic, had three nervous breakdowns when I was growing up. She was also a high-functioning alcoholic. And my father was an emotional eater, also would fly into rages. So there was a great need for peace and serenity in our home. And for my mother and myself, yoga seemed to provide that. Although yoga sometimes brought a sense of calm, Lorette says there were moments when something didn't sit right. Still, she and her mother became increasingly involved in the world of yoga. She became a Hatha yoga instructor and we invited college students and high school students to come to the home for free classes.

22:42And I was the little demonstration model. So for me, you know, it's like, I just love that being the center of attention, being able to do the different poses. And we thought it was just exercise, but it wasn't. It led us in an entirely different way. In yoga, the exercise is not the foundation. It's the hook, if you will, to get you into the belief structure because it is a spiritual practice. It's not just exercise. It was this realization that sets Lorette on the path to praise moves. You know, when people ask me, well, can I just do the exercise? You really cannot separate the two in yoga.

23:28And having taught it for a number of years before I came to Christ, it's even in the cues that we use. There are things, practices such as visualization, which some believe one is actually leaving one's body or opening oneself up to other spiritual forces or influences. It was age 29 and during a formative period of her life that Lorette says she found her relationship with Jesus. It was February 25th, 2001 at 1035 in the morning. I'll never forget. I was praying. I was actually moving at the same time too. I was doing some exercise and just kind of talking with the Lord. All of a sudden, this idea just dropped into my spirit, you could say, just like a crystal drop of water in a still pool, you know, and the ripples just go out and the praise moves.

24:22And I was like, oh, no, no, Christian alternative to you. I didn't want to have anything to do with yoga. and especially something that would be so controversial. I'd spent most of my life avoiding controversy. Now, there are six parts to a Praise Moves workout, and you're going to be experiencing all of them. We always start with prayer. That's a good thing, isn't it? So when I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ, I came out of that world with a very clear understanding and experience of what yoga truly is and a desire to give Christians something different. When I became a Christian, I recognized that the foundations of yoga did not align with Christian beliefs.

25:07So rather than attempting to adapt yoga, I chose to create something distinct, you know, different, word-based. And Praise Moves was then developed from the ground up based on scripture. I'm careful to let people know that it's not so-called Christian yoga, but a Christian alternative. You made the point that you are keen to stress you are a Christian alternative to yoga. I guess that will be the concern of some people. Have you not just taken the practice of yoga and made it Christian without including yoga in the name? Well, that is really an important distinction too. And I totally get where people are coming from when they're saying this.

25:48However, if we realize that the body can only move in a finite number of ways, not an infinite number of ways. It's not like, Megan, all of a sudden you're going to move your body in such a way and I go, whoa, I've never seen that before. It's like, wow, I didn't know a body could even do that. No, not. And there are estimates of anywhere from 2 ,900 to over 7 ,000 yoga poses and variations. So for us not to have something that's similar to that would be nigh impossible. Now we do have over 150 praise moves postures. Some look like yoga, some look absolutely nothing like yoga. And ones that do resemble yoga, we consider, if I may be so bold as to say, redeemed postures.

26:42In the videos I've been watching ahead of talking to Lorette, The instructors often guide the class through positions that look almost identical to yoga movements, like warrior, child's pose, or cobra. We'll be doing about 15 different praise moves postures, and these are postures... Why not take a healthful posture that is great for the spine, great for the triceps, great for the whole body, and then redeem it, bring it out of darkness, give it a new foundation on the Word of God, and you're moving to it, that's really the answer.

27:23Talking with you today, you sound very clear in your mind about what yoga is to you. When I was at a Christian yoga class the other day, I spoke with a few people there and for a lot of them, it was their first time at Christian yoga class and many of them said that they grew up in households where yoga wasn't seen as being compatible with Christianity. but they also said that by the end of the class they felt closer to God and I'm wondering what you think of that is it only ever a good thing that someone might feel closer to their God after doing yoga I would like to speak with them and ask them some questions and I tell you I am around a lot of those people because many of them have come to Christ now there's a scripture that says God's not the author of confusion, but of peace.

28:13And so I'd wonder, that sounds confusing there. So that's why I call Christian yoga an oxymoron or contradiction in terms like a Christian Hindu or Christian Buddhist. There's no such thing. It's an opinion that contrasts directly with Annette, the Christian yoga teacher we heard from earlier. I think one thing that I found really helpful from my yoga, Christian yoga teacher training is just the simple truth that yoga isn't a religion and so many people don't know that and it's understandable because it comes from that part of the world in Asia where Hinduism and Buddhism are predominant religions and so you assume that it's immediately going to be a religion but it's not just for the simple fact that Hinduism and Buddhism are two different faiths but you'll have a Hindu and a Buddhist who both practice yoga in the same way that you can have a Christian and a Muslim who both pray but obviously you would have a different conversation with them and they would say they were praying to God and one would say they're praying to Allah so just because something is common amongst lots of religions doesn't mean it's a religion.

29:20There's no doubt after speaking with Annette and Lorette both deeply committed Christians that they see yoga very differently. They share the same faith, yet reach opposite conclusions about whether the ancient practice is compatible with it. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service with me, Megan Lawton. The producer was Sam Gruet. The series producer was Rajiv Gupta. Thanks for listening.

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