“…Union with God is the real Yoga. So now, you can see the connection between the devotional side of the religious teachings and Yoga. There is no difference between religion and Yoga. Yoga is the basis of all the religions. With the light of Yogic understanding you can walk into even the difficult corners of the scriptures and understand every religion well.”1
I’ve been in yoga teacher training since February, and I’ve been doing a lot of related reading on the philosophy and ethics of yoga in addition to the physical training. There are many translations of the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali with their own commentaries, but this one stood out to me. Without knowing at the time that that particular translation was written with a Christian audience in mind, I thought… well, that it would be a great quote to pull out next time a Christian says they can’t practice yoga because it’s a religion. In fact, it seems like yoga might even be a pretty good way to go more deeply into one's Christian (or other) faith.
I don’t belong to or closely follow any religion. I had an automatic belief in god as a kid growing up in a casually Christian family, which later progressed to a brief fling with high school youth group evangelism, then tapered off somewhere into a general sort of agnosticism after high school, and pretty much kept settling back there after various interests in other religions came and went.
I’ve gone through anti-religion phases that were probably very annoying to the people around me, but I never fully embraced atheism. This is probably largely due to the sheer existential terror that thinking about death has always brought me and the attendant hope that there was something more, but I also feel that I can’t claim to know for certain that there is no god if I can’t say for certain that there is, either.
I also went through phases where I wanted to give church another try because I wanted to feel the community aspect or fill a need for a spiritual path of some kind. I’ve looked into converting to both Catholicism and Judaism over the years, finding both to be interesting in similar ways, then inevitably abandoning both every time because I ultimately just didn’t believe in any of it enough to justify officially committing myself to the faith. For what? I could never really answer the question beyond “a sense of community,” and it felt — feels — too dishonest.
I thought maybe a more nature- and ancestor-based approach might make more sense for me, someone who loves being outdoors doing things like camping, hiking, or being on the water. “Worshipping” nature made more sense to me than worshipping a deity I couldn’t see or hear or otherwise feel. Modern and ancient Celtic paganism intrigued me. I also spent a lot of time fixated on Kabbalah even though I never understood much beyond the concept of the mystic spiral, which stuck with me.
Even Mormonism sounded interesting enough for awhile after binging too much Big Love and diving into rabbit holes about the LDS and FLDS churches and their respective histories. Those LDS Mormons always seem so darn happy all the time. Alas, I wasn’t about to try to convince my very-atheist husband that I should start tithing 10% of our money just so I could be allowed to get into a cool temple. And anyway, I couldn’t ever say I believed any of that crazy shit with a straight face. It was never to be. But one thing I appreciated about the LDS folks is that they believe that God never stopped talking to people, which is a comforting thought to me and makes more intuitive sense than the idea of God just stopping after all the important books were written.
Over the years, I’ve read a lot of books about various religions and vaguely religious philosophies, trying to find something that fit. I took a little from everything and settled on that trite “not religious, but spiritual” label, at least internally. And the more I read as part of my yoga teacher training, the more I realize they’re all the same, anyway. They all say the same thing in different ways and different colors and use different names and origin stories, but they’re fundamentally pretty much exactly the same, and so are their primary lessons, with the exception of various regional and time period quirks.
I used to jokingly call yoga my religion. It was one thing I’ve consistently enjoyed since I started learning it on the Wii Fit in my living room back in 2009, and as someone who’s always preferred a more independent kind of exercise to team sports, it was perfect for me with its blend of stretching and strength training. The meditative aspect was an unexpected bonus that I heard about but never really thought I’d experience, for some reason. Then I actually learned how to meditate.
A fellow yogini once told me that her religion was her vegetarianism. She said that helping to avoid the unnecessary deaths of other living beings was her way of worshipping. I respect(ed) her reasoning for being a vegetarian, but I didn’t, and still don’t, fully agree with the idea of diet-as-religion. I feel like it would be okay for her to just say she’s an atheist. I think that to be religious, one must believe in a higher power of some kind. I am of course familiar with the concept of nontheistic religion and have a lot of respect for organizations like TST (my affiliation with many of my old city’s members is actually how I met my husband), but I personally think a sincere belief in something outside of this earthly plane and/or human existence is kind of required to call oneself “religious.” So I stopped thinking of yoga as my religion since I don't think exercise alone counts, either. But.
At this point in all my reading over the years and especially in its most recent and current concentrated form, whether or not yoga is really a religion, it does, like Satchidananda implied in his commentary on Sutra 1.26, encompass the main ideas and form the basis of them all. It seems to me that my path toward any kind of spiritual realization I’ve spent my life looking for so far may come through yoga and the lifestyle changes that accompany a devotion to a regular practice. So maybe yoga really is my “religion,” in a sense.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I’m just finding myself a lot more centered and content these days, and I think it is a direct result of going hard on the yoga. This is one of the few times in my life where I find myself naturally driven to succeed rather than slogging through something for the sake of it, or getting lazy about it and finding an excuse to quit before I could finish. I’m finding that learning to teach yoga actually allows me more creativity than I thought it would in the form of curating playlists, creating sequences, and deciding on themes. It fits nicely with my other creative hobbies like making aromatherapy oil blends and turning them into yoga mat sprays and oil rollers used in a lot of hot classes, and casually making jewelry has given me a lot of bead stock with which to make my own mala prayer beads, one of my new favorite activities. I have a little fantasy of taking a small troupe of yogis on a 6-month retreat-adventure, hiking the Appalachian Trail with yoga and meditation every day.
I quit my job at the post office in August to go back to school and learn how to be a data analyst. Yoga Teacher Training wasn’t on my radar yet, and I just wanted to make a decent salary doing something I found fun, like digging around in data and making pretty charts and graphs and maps with it. And that part of me that likes to do things like recite all the area codes I’ve memorized from each state or obsessively research demographics of various regions for no discernible reason still exists in there and will probably go back to learning Python and Tableau after teacher training is over. I still want to make maps. I will always want to make maps. But since I found this teacher training and have been imagining life after it, I think I might actually be a happy person as a yoga teacher. Assuming I figure out how to stop tweaking my back in such a way that breathing wrong hurts for a week, anyway.
Satchidananda, Swami. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: Commentary on the Raja Yoga Sutras by Sri Swami Satchidananda (p. 67). Integral Yoga Publications. Kindle Edition.