I find the practice of yoga a key to good health because it helps reduce stress, but I also find it provides a stillness that opens me to a deepened appreciation of the unity of body and spirit.

There seem to be three main ways that the faithful, particularly of the Abrahamic faiths, regard other religions. One is to claim absolute and final truth for one’s own faith and to cry “heresy!” or “unbeliever!” at all others. Another way is just to ignore other faiths as lacking any interest for the true believer. A third way, however, is to look at other religions and say, “Oh, good. More.”

I don’t become a Buddhist because I start my morning doing yoga poses and then breathing deeply as I enter into prayer. But I do know that those who created the practice of yoga knew something about the unity of body and spirit, a unity that is often either neglected in contemporary Christianity or actually despised by some Christians who believe that the body is the vessel of sin.

In fact, it may be that through practices such as yoga Christians today can retrieve more of the unity of body and spirit that was characteristic of Christianity in its first three centuries. The incarnation of God into a human body and Jesus’ insistence that the Kingdom of God is “in our midst” invested both the human person and the society with tremendous spiritual value. Early teachers such as Irenaeus taught that as humans were created in the image of God, the “fall” (the sin of Adam and Eve) was a fall “upward” toward salvation. Life teaches us to grow in spiritual strength, Irenaeus thought.

When Christianity became the official religion of the empire, however, some such as Augustine regarded the body more as a vehicle for sin and as estranged from the spirit. This fit well with the militarism of the Holy Roman Empire and the religious practices of denial of the body (asceticism). The military ideology of the body, like the religious practice of asceticism, is to deny and suppress the body and separate it from the spirit.

Christianity must heal from these centuries of alienation and recover the unity of body and spirit. Yoga practice may be of aid in this effort, though there are other ways some Christians are working to overcome the alienation of body and spirit today.

It is also the case that in collaborative work I have done with Buddhists, I have come to believe Buddhism can benefit from the stronger doctrine of evil in Christianity. But that is a topic for another time!