TORONTO STAR: Jul. 30, 2005

Practising yoga is a lot like going to church, though Western yoga students and churchgoers might be reluctant to see themselves engaged in related activity.

True, yoga practitioners and church parishioners sport different attire, fit into different age groups, and follow different earthly teachers. And church priests or ministers are usually older and less flexible than are yoga teachers. (If the priest at our church suddenly turned his backside to the congregation and touched his toes it would be quite a surprise.) Nonetheless, both practices are fundamentally linked by a spiritual pursuit of the divine, which likely accounts for the similarities.

For starters, both yoga practice and church service stress punctuality, which is actually odd given that each is ultimately linked to a timeless eternity. As well, the payment of a fee is normally required in each case, either up front or after the sermon. Both yoga classes and church services include a confusing combination of standing, sitting, and kneeling. In yoga, the teacher tells you exactly what to do even though the same order of poses is always followed. Churches don’t provide the same degree of guidance (and usually offer more advice on what to do after the service) which makes it easier to be caught out Ëœ perhaps left standing when everyone else is kneeling.

Yoga emphasizes deep breathing exercises with loud inhalations and exhalations. The Darth Vader breath, as one of my yoga teachers calls it, is apparently an effective way to get rid of stale air in the lungs. This breathing is also common in church: some of my co-parishioners practise the Darth Vader breath, with eyes closed, during our priest’s sermon.

Both places emphasize peace and tranquility with candles, incense,and comforting statues to replace the chaos of the outside world. This stillness allows you to connect with what’s up there or inside
yourself, or wherever you happen to be looking for the divine. Despite this peacefulness both yoga and church attach some importance to suffering. In yoga, the suffering is when you are contorted in a pose that brings you face to face with a body part you have previously only seen in diagrams. For churchgoers suffering in this life is often touted as a guarantee for avoiding it in the afterlife.

Both yoga and church have their ritual chants; oms and shantis in yoga take the place of amens and allelulias in church. In each case, the chants make you feel part of something bigger than yourself,
even universal Ëœ like the feeling you get chanting “Go Leafs Go” with a crowd of fans at a hockey game.

Like the array of church denominations, yoga has its own varieties. It is, admittedly, easier to change your brand of yoga than to change church affiliations. I have practised Hatha, Ashtanga, Bikram, and Moksha yoga but I have yet to join an Anglican, Evangelical, or United Church. Yoga also has various levels of
difficulty from beginner upwards while churches offer a more limited range of devotion. Parishioners are expected to follow all the rules right from the start (although forgiveness for non-compliance is
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In addition, yoga and church both have prayer poses and, more important, corpse poses. In yoga, the corpse pose ˜ called sivassana ˜ is usually done at the end of class for relaxation. My yoga teachers say it is a crucial pose, a view shared by church teachers. Indeed, churchgoers spend most of their lives preparing for, if not necessarily looking forward to, the corpse pose. Unlike yoga, however, this corpse pose is only practiced once.

Despite the many similarities, yoga and churches can still learn from each other. Yoga, which has been around for twice as long as the oldest Western church, could adopt the church tradition of
after-service socializing ˜ replacing coffee and donuts with herbal tea and organic fruit ˜ to remind students that the communal aspect of the practice is not limited to chanting om. Churches, on the
other hand, could learn from so-called “hot yoga” that is practised in temperatures over 400C. By heating churches to similar levels, parishioners who ultimately end up in the other place instead of heaven would at least be prepared for the temperature increase.

Of course doing yoga’s physical exercises or postures, called the asanas, does not in itself make you a full-fledged adherent, just as going to a church barbecue doesn’t make you a Baptist. The yoga
exercises are part of a larger program ˜ not so different from that of churchgoers ˜ that includes meditation, restraint, and the observance of purity and tolerance. But although your attendance may
have been motivated by a desire to stretch your back (or to have a burger), you can’t help but be influenced by what you hear and see. Yoga students, for example, often exchange the Nepali greeting Namaste, which means “the Divine within me salutes the Divine within you” while churchgoers might say “God be with you.”

For yoga, which means, “divine union,” the divine is within rather than somewhere up above. The yoga notion of the divine may account for the prevalence of mirrors in practice studios. By reflecting
your image, the mirrors remind you where to look for the divine (and that your investment in the latest yoga fashion was well worthwhile).

In the end, however, the similarities between going to church and practising yoga simply confirm that we are all more or less stretching in the same direction.