Stephan (Praus), a disciple of Jesus Christ by the will of God, to all Christians.
I am writing to clarify a few things about the practice of yoga. There is copious amounts of alarmist material on the web regarding yoga, most of it from people who have only read about yoga, and neither practiced it nor traveled to India.
As Christians, we are charged to be sober (1Th 5:6, 1Pe 1:13, and more)--alarmist thinking is the opposite of that. I prefer to remain calm in the Holy Spirit and show you how Satan really leads people away from Jesus Christ.
During my lost years I studied yoga for six years and traveled around India twice so I will tell you nothing outside of my direct experience. I have seen many, many things in India, including exorcisms, that most Indian people don't know exists. Those are stories for another day, this is about one experience in one yoga studio in Los Angeles--one of many things that my Savior Jesus Christ saved me from.
Yoga is not a “new age” practice by any definition of that term. Mircea Eliade describes yoga as possibly 10,000 thousand years old in his seminal and highly readable book “Yoga: Immortality and Freedom”. Postures and meditation are derived from shamanic practices in the time when people still worshiped totem gods and storms--long before written language, agriculture, or systematic theology.
After a long period with binge drinking (I was and remain an alcoholic) I managed to dry out with the help of yoga. I was suffering from severe anxiety and depression which I medicated with alcohol. I wasn't seeking any kind of spiritual power or kundalini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini) experience, I only wanted peace of mind where I could find it.
It was 2003, I lived in west Los Angeles and yoga was very fashionable then like it is today. It would be fair to call south Santa Monica and Venice Beach the capital of yoga outside of India, there are just so many studios. I ended up at Sivananda Yoga, which was very systematic--not just asana (postures); but also pranayama (breathing exercises), meditation, bhakti yoga (chanting in Sanskrit, musical worship of idols), vedanta (mostly the study of the Bhagavad Gita), jnana yoga (different kind of meditation), and so on. Sivananda is Sanskrit and refers to the Hindu god Shiva, and ananda is “bliss” or “delight”. So the literal translation is “Shiva-bliss”. Everyone at the yoga studio was very welcoming, with no pretension or artificiality, which is rare in west Los Angeles, even at yoga studios.
I had practiced yoga daily for four months before I had my first kundalini experience. I took a 90 minute class every day and practiced another 60 minutes on my own. I had been vegetarian for months and many days at no animal products at all (vegan). My body was primed for kundalini flow.
It was the end of a hard yoga session, the last asana is the savasana (corpse posture), lying on your back. Yoga postures build up lactic acid in the muscles and bloodstream so the savasana is supposed to oxygenate the blood and drive the lactic acid into the into the exhaled breath. It is also very meditative, you count your breath or something like that so that you don't fall asleep.
The yoga teacher was leading us through a guided relaxation starting with our toes, slowly relaxing each body part, ending with the eyes and the jaw. She would repeat slowly in a soothing voice, “relax you calves, relax your calves”, then a moment later “relax you thighs, relax your thighs”, naming each body part twice.
After that exercise my body was in a state of relaxation so that essentially I felt like a block of concrete on the ground--pretty relaxed. I achieved this state often at the end of a yoga session and clearly this is desirable for someone seeking relief from anxiety.
Then she said something none of the other teachers had ever said before: “relax your mind, relax your mind” and that's when happened. My eyes were closed but it felt like a huge eye opening on the top of head, which is called the sahasrara (crown chakra). I couldn't see everything but it was like 160 degree vision in every direction. From my perspective, forward wasn't in front of me, it was out the top of my skull.
I was in a very bright place and I saw a beautiful humanoid shape that was the source of all the light. I was in a state of extreme bliss beyond anything I thought that humans could experience. It felt so good that I tried to concentrate on the light being and the bliss. Concentration, of course, broke the relaxed state of my mind, so the bliss was extreme for about two seconds, better than heroin or cocaine or ecstasy, but slowly dissipated over the next eight or ten seconds.
I was overwhelmed. I rolled over onto my side and formed a tight fetal posture and staring crying. I was quiet and when the lights came on the yoga teacher came over gave me a hug. All I could say was “It was....it was so... it was so...” She told me it's OK.
I shared this story with several friends, mostly yogis. The consensus was that the light being was my own soul and that yoga allowed me to see it. As you would expect, this led me deeper into yoga and further away from my Savior Jesus Christ. I ascribed the bliss not just to yoga, but to Hinduism in general. Ideas that seemed horrifying before, like the Hindu caste system, suddenly made perfect sense to me--they even became desirable. My thinking was cloudy and didn’t get better until the day that Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit into my life.
It's only in the past few days, after chatting with a south Indian sister, God bless her, that I understand that the light being was not my own soul--it was Satan. The Holy Spirit used our sister in Christ to lead me to 2 Cor 11:14. Satan appeared an angel of light of indescribable beauty when I was in the kundalini bliss. That's the snare. If you fall into it you may soon find yourself doing yoga on the bank of the Ganges River at sunrise, standing on your head, praying silently to an elephant head god named Ganesha that you can maintain the headstand for five minutes. This lead nowhere else but into the lake of fire.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen. (2 Cor 13:14)
I am writing to clarify a few things about the practice of yoga. There is copious amounts of alarmist material on the web regarding yoga, most of it from people who have only read about yoga, and neither practiced it nor traveled to India.
As Christians, we are charged to be sober (1Th 5:6, 1Pe 1:13, and more)--alarmist thinking is the opposite of that. I prefer to remain calm in the Holy Spirit and show you how Satan really leads people away from Jesus Christ.
During my lost years I studied yoga for six years and traveled around India twice so I will tell you nothing outside of my direct experience. I have seen many, many things in India, including exorcisms, that most Indian people don't know exists. Those are stories for another day, this is about one experience in one yoga studio in Los Angeles--one of many things that my Savior Jesus Christ saved me from.
Yoga is not a “new age” practice by any definition of that term. Mircea Eliade describes yoga as possibly 10,000 thousand years old in his seminal and highly readable book “Yoga: Immortality and Freedom”. Postures and meditation are derived from shamanic practices in the time when people still worshiped totem gods and storms--long before written language, agriculture, or systematic theology.
After a long period with binge drinking (I was and remain an alcoholic) I managed to dry out with the help of yoga. I was suffering from severe anxiety and depression which I medicated with alcohol. I wasn't seeking any kind of spiritual power or kundalini (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kundalini) experience, I only wanted peace of mind where I could find it.
It was 2003, I lived in west Los Angeles and yoga was very fashionable then like it is today. It would be fair to call south Santa Monica and Venice Beach the capital of yoga outside of India, there are just so many studios. I ended up at Sivananda Yoga, which was very systematic--not just asana (postures); but also pranayama (breathing exercises), meditation, bhakti yoga (chanting in Sanskrit, musical worship of idols), vedanta (mostly the study of the Bhagavad Gita), jnana yoga (different kind of meditation), and so on. Sivananda is Sanskrit and refers to the Hindu god Shiva, and ananda is “bliss” or “delight”. So the literal translation is “Shiva-bliss”. Everyone at the yoga studio was very welcoming, with no pretension or artificiality, which is rare in west Los Angeles, even at yoga studios.
I had practiced yoga daily for four months before I had my first kundalini experience. I took a 90 minute class every day and practiced another 60 minutes on my own. I had been vegetarian for months and many days at no animal products at all (vegan). My body was primed for kundalini flow.
It was the end of a hard yoga session, the last asana is the savasana (corpse posture), lying on your back. Yoga postures build up lactic acid in the muscles and bloodstream so the savasana is supposed to oxygenate the blood and drive the lactic acid into the into the exhaled breath. It is also very meditative, you count your breath or something like that so that you don't fall asleep.
The yoga teacher was leading us through a guided relaxation starting with our toes, slowly relaxing each body part, ending with the eyes and the jaw. She would repeat slowly in a soothing voice, “relax you calves, relax your calves”, then a moment later “relax you thighs, relax your thighs”, naming each body part twice.
After that exercise my body was in a state of relaxation so that essentially I felt like a block of concrete on the ground--pretty relaxed. I achieved this state often at the end of a yoga session and clearly this is desirable for someone seeking relief from anxiety.
Then she said something none of the other teachers had ever said before: “relax your mind, relax your mind” and that's when happened. My eyes were closed but it felt like a huge eye opening on the top of head, which is called the sahasrara (crown chakra). I couldn't see everything but it was like 160 degree vision in every direction. From my perspective, forward wasn't in front of me, it was out the top of my skull.
I was in a very bright place and I saw a beautiful humanoid shape that was the source of all the light. I was in a state of extreme bliss beyond anything I thought that humans could experience. It felt so good that I tried to concentrate on the light being and the bliss. Concentration, of course, broke the relaxed state of my mind, so the bliss was extreme for about two seconds, better than heroin or cocaine or ecstasy, but slowly dissipated over the next eight or ten seconds.
I was overwhelmed. I rolled over onto my side and formed a tight fetal posture and staring crying. I was quiet and when the lights came on the yoga teacher came over gave me a hug. All I could say was “It was....it was so... it was so...” She told me it's OK.
I shared this story with several friends, mostly yogis. The consensus was that the light being was my own soul and that yoga allowed me to see it. As you would expect, this led me deeper into yoga and further away from my Savior Jesus Christ. I ascribed the bliss not just to yoga, but to Hinduism in general. Ideas that seemed horrifying before, like the Hindu caste system, suddenly made perfect sense to me--they even became desirable. My thinking was cloudy and didn’t get better until the day that Jesus Christ sent the Holy Spirit into my life.
It's only in the past few days, after chatting with a south Indian sister, God bless her, that I understand that the light being was not my own soul--it was Satan. The Holy Spirit used our sister in Christ to lead me to 2 Cor 11:14. Satan appeared an angel of light of indescribable beauty when I was in the kundalini bliss. That's the snare. If you fall into it you may soon find yourself doing yoga on the bank of the Ganges River at sunrise, standing on your head, praying silently to an elephant head god named Ganesha that you can maintain the headstand for five minutes. This lead nowhere else but into the lake of fire.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all. Amen. (2 Cor 13:14)
