On International Yoga Day 2024, which is celebrated this June 21, the Dominican priest Fray Nelson Medina, Doctor in Fundamental Theology known for his vast apostolate on the Internet, warns of four dangers in this practice that emerged in Indian Hinduism.
What is the yoga?
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Yoga is a set of postures and physical exercises that in theory seek inner peace. Emerging from the spiritual tradition of Hinduism in India, yoga seeks to bring the soul to “samadhi”, that is, to the state in which man and God would become one, without any difference.
The word yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj which means “union.” The goal of yoga is to unite the transitory (temporary) self or jivawith the infinite (eternal self) or Brahmanthe Hindu concept of God, who is not a person, but something impersonal that is “one with nature and the cosmos” that “permeates, envelops and underlies everything.”
Yoga and the Catholic faith
At the beginning of his reflection, Friar Nelson proposes not starting from these two questions: “can a Catholic practice yoga?” and “is it wrong to practice yoga?”, since “they focus on the simple prohibition (and then emphasize that the Church does not “it lets us be ‘free’) and it turns out that the issue is deeper and more serious than a simple refusal.”
In his opinion, “I think the best questions a Catholic can ask himself regarding yoga are these: ‘1. What do I hope to find in those practices?’; ‘2. What I want to look for there, have I looked for it or found out in my Catholic Church?’; ‘Am I aware of the risks involved in practices that, according to all indications, mix good and bad things?’”
The Doctor in Fundamental Theology highlights that if Catholics asked themselves “honestly, the first question would come to answers such as peace, relaxation, relaxation, improving concentration, and physical well-being.”
“From there it is easy to see the answer to our question 2: literally all of this is in the theology of the body, a healthy spiritual direction that helps organize schedules and forces, and above all: time to pray. Prayer, on the other hand, is what yoga will never give,” he continues.
In that sense, Friar Nelson warns about 4 dangers in the practice of yoga:
1. The source of yoga is Hinduism
“On Wikipedia, accessible to everyone, there is this information: ‘Yoga is one of the six orthodox darshanas (doctrines) of Hinduism. It emphasizes meditation and liberation, its main text being the Yoga sutra (400 AD).’”
In this way, he adds, “this word is associated with meditation practices in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. “If they told you it was just stretching, they lied to you.”
2. The traditional yoga doctrine is linked to the liberation of matter
For this reason, the doctrine of yoga “is directly contrary to the Christian and Catholic teaching about a single creator God who has made everything that exists and who therefore does not want or need us to free ourselves from material things but rather that we know how to use them in order to justice and charity.”
3. Hinduism is practiced with yoga
“Yoga has a text (religious, of course) that is like its manual: the yogasutra. “In this text, the repetition of the ‘Vedas’, that is, the religious texts of Hinduism, is included as part of the liberation exercises,” explains Friar Nelson.
The Colombian priest then emphasizes that “the recitation begins with jealously maintaining the names of the postures, which are nothing other than expressions of prayers of that religion.”
4. The end of yoga
“The ultimate purpose of yoga is íswara-pranidhana which literally means: ‘surrender to the Controller’ that is, to the god who announces that religion and who of course is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
For this reason, Brother Nelson concludes his reflection by asking a question: “How could a Catholic enter into such risks and accept such serious damages for seeking a few goods, which he could licitly have within his faith anyway?”
What does the Catholic Church say about yoga?
In the “Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on some aspects of Christian meditation” of 1989, the Congregation – today the Dicastery – for the Doctrine of the Faith, does not expressly condemn yoga but specifies that caution must be exercised in the face of “oriental methods” inspired by Hinduism and Buddhism: “Proposals or other analogous harmonization between Christian meditation and Eastern techniques must be continually sifted with careful discernment of content and method, to avoid falling into a pernicious syncretism.”
Numeral 14 specifies that the idea that human beings unite with “a divine cosmic consciousness” contradicts the teachings of the Church.
In 2003, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue published the document Jesus Christ: Bearer of the Water of Lifewhere yoga is located as one of the many New Age practices, something “difficult to reconcile with Christian doctrine and spirituality.”
The text warns that, for the New Age, spiritual life “does not refer to an encounter with the transcendent God in the fullness of love, but to the experience caused by a turning on oneself, an exultant feeling of being in communion with the universe, of letting one’s own individuality sink into the great ocean of Being.
Walter Sanchez Silva
I have been a husband since 2008. My wife and I have three children here and one who went to heaven in 2023, before he was born. Since I joined ACI Prensa in 2005, I have had the opportunity to cover various events of the Catholic Church. Among them, the World Youth Days in Cologne, Madrid and Rio de Janeiro and the apostolic trips of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico and of Pope Francis to South Korea. I have been sent to the Vatican to cover the Family synods, in 2015; of the Amazon, in 2019 and that of Synodality, in 2023. I closely follow the situation of the Catholic Church in Nicaragua, which suffers persecution from the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega, as well as current ecclesiastical events in the region.