Can Christians Do Yoga? Sixteen Years of Practice, and a Post-Evangelical Answer

I've been asked this in church lobbies, in DMs, and honestly wondered it myself for many years. So let me answer it plainly.

Yes, Christians can practice yoga. The physical practice most Westerners mean by "yoga" (postures and breath) is one limb of an eight-limbed system, and engaging the body in prayer has a long, formally defended history inside Christianity itself. The distinctions worth making are about what you say, what you intend, and what you're honest about — not about whether stretching can cause spiritual danger.

Now...the longer version.

What the objection actually says

I want to state this fairly, because I was taught it and to some extent, I believed it.

The argument goes: yoga is not exercise. It originates in Hindu religious practice, and the postures aren't neutral shapes — they're devotional forms, some named for deities. Sun Salutation is a salutation to the sun. According to this logic, you cannot separate a practice from the religion that produced it; the body learns what the mind is ignorant of. This reminds me of the argument in 1 Corinthians about food that was offered to idols.

This argument takes embodiment seriously, which I appreciate. I might think the people who believe this are being paranoid, but at the core of it, they believe the body is a real site of spiritual formation, which happens to be something I now believe very strongly.

Where I part ways is the conclusion.

I've worked through a version of this question before, from the other direction. When I started paying attention to the moon in my spiritual practice, I ran into the same panic. That's pagan, that's occult, that's a door you shouldn't open. The structure of the fear is identical. So is the thing that dissolves it, which is actually reading what Scripture says instead of what you were told it says.

The eight limbs, and what's actually in them

The objection assumes yoga is a religious system you either enter or don't. It's more specific than that.

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras describe eight limbs. In order: yama (ethical restraints), niyama (personal observances), asana (posture), pranayama (breath regulation), pratyahara (withdrawal of the senses), dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditative absorption), and samadhi (union).

Notice what that list is mostly made of. Six of the eight are ethical and contemplative. One is posture. One is breath.

When an American says "I do yoga," she nearly always means asana, sometimes with pranayama. She is practicing one or two limbs of eight, and it's the least theologically loaded one. Most of the devotional content people are worried about lives in the parts that were dropped long before yoga reached her gym.

I have issues on both sides of this, and I'll come back to it.

The church already had this argument about its own prayer

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, there's a practice called hesychasm: the Jesus Prayer, repeated, in stillness. By the fourteenth century it had developed a physical method. Nicephorus the Hesychast wrote instructions telling novices to fix their eyes on the "middle of the body" during prayer in order to gather their attention, and to attach the prayer to their breathing.

Sit still. Regulate the breath. Fix the gaze. Repeat the prayer until it runs through you at all times.

Hand that instruction to an evangelical pastor without the label and he will tell you it's (possibly demonic) Eastern meditation.

Which is roughly what happened. A Western-trained scholar named Barlaam of Calabria attacked the practice in the first half of the fourteenth century, mocking the Hesychasts as omphalopsychoi — people with their souls in their navels. The charge was that directing the gaze toward the chest or navel during prayer confused the spiritual with the corporeal. (And now I'm on a rabbit trail about the origins of the term navel-gazing and why it seems to only be used against female memoirists these days...)

That is the identical objection: You are treating the body as a vehicle for spiritual experience and therefore muddling categories that ought to stay separate.

Gregory Palamas, a monk of Mount Athos and later archbishop of Thessalonica, defended them. His argument refused the dualism outright: the body is not evil, it is a temple of the Holy Spirit, and God placed the intellect within the body — so keeping it there during prayer is not degradation but restoration.

The councils of Constantinople between 1341 and 1351 vindicated Palamas and the Hesychasts. The church convened councils on whether breath-regulated, posture-specific bodily prayer was legitimate Christian practice. The side arguing no lost.

I'm not claiming hesychasm is yoga. I'm claiming that the principle the objection rests on, that bodily technique in prayer is inherently suspect, is not the historic Christian position. It's a position Christianity examined and rejected. Some of the most procedurally explicit breath-prayer instruction anywhere sits in the Philokalia, a collection Orthodox Christians have read devotionally for centuries.

Nobody told me this. Years of church, and I learned about the desert tradition in a yoga teacher training.

The complication I'm not going to skip

Here's where I break from the easy version of my own argument.

"It's just stretching, the religion is optional" is convenient for Christians. It's also a line some Hindus find insulting because of appropriation.

The Hindu American Foundation launched a "Take Back Yoga" campaign in 2008, after writing to Yoga Journal about how consistently foundational texts were described as "ancient Indian" or "yogic" but rarely as Hindu. One of the foundation's co-founders framed it to the New York Times as a branding problem: yoga thrived while Hinduism lost control of it. (The organization is politically contested, and plenty of Hindu practitioners disagree with the campaign's framing — but the underlying grievance is widely shared and worth sitting with rather than waving off.)

So: some Hindus and some conservative Christians agree that you can't cleanly separate yoga from its religious roots. They draw opposite conclusions. One says therefore don't touch it. The other says therefore stop pretending you invented it.

I find the second harder to answer, and more worth answering. Which brings me to where I actually land.

Where I draw my own line

I have been practicing yoga since 2010. I took a 200-hour certification course in 2016 mostly for my own personal deepening of the practice. Rather than teach asana, I became more invested in the meditation and mindfulness practice and I've been teaching meditation since 2016. This is my practice, offered as mine rather than as a rule:

I don't pretend it's mine. As much as I can when describing yoga asanas, I use the Sanskrit names. I say where the practice comes from. Stripping out the lineage to make it palatable to Christians is the appropriation — not the practice itself.

I don't engage in devotion to deities I don't worship. I'm not going to chant something I don't mean. That isn't squeamishness about Hinduism; it's the same reason I no longer recite creeds I don't hold.

I do use posture and breath as prayer. This is the something my evangelical formation had no category for, and the part the hesychasts would have understood immediately. It's also not unique to yoga. The Christian tradition has its own embodied practices, most of which were never taught to me either.

I'm honest that this is syncretic, in the sense that all living religion is. Christianity absorbed Greek philosophy, Roman civic structure, and northern European seasonal festivals without anyone convening a council about it. The purity anxiety seems to activate mainly around practices from the global South. That's worth noticing.

That's my line. Yours can sit somewhere else. What I'd push back on is the idea that there's an obvious, settled Christian answer here — because there isn't.

If you want to try

Start with breath, not postures. Sit, and attach a short prayer to the inhale and the exhale. That's hesychast practice, and it's about as unambiguously Christian as a practice can get. Five minutes is genuinely enough. Consistency matters more than duration, and the thing people usually get wrong is assuming they need thirty.

If you want something with more shape to it, circling prayer is an old Celtic practice that moves the body through the prayer rather than asking it to sit still.

Add gentle asana when you want your body in it. Then notice whether it makes you more loving, more present, more able to live inside your own skin. Good fruit was always the measure. It still is.

If you were taught that your body is the thing standing between you and God, this will feel transgressive for a while. Sit with that. There's information in it. It's most of what my book is about.