A Prayerful Practice

When I decided to commit myself to yoga teacher training, there was a small critical voice that kept raising the question about how my training might somehow interfere with my spiritual beliefs. It felt as if Eastern and Western religions might clash in a way that could possibly force me to remove yoga from my life in order to choose God.

I had always spent the early days of my yoga practice in deep prayer. I found my practice to be a perfect opportunity to just be with God. Setting out on my teacher training path made me wonder if I would be taught something different from the yoga practice I had come to love. This weekend, I was amazed by how much God was infused in the training. Here are a few things that came up:

• On Saturday, we learned about the seven chakras - physical places in your body that embody specific energy. In the book, "Anatomy of the Spirit", author Carolyn Myss, Ph.D. explores the connection between the 7 chakras and the seven sacraments and how people must pass through these stages in the search for higher consciousness and spiritual maturity.


• In our C2 yoga class on Sunday morning, our instructor started out with a meditation on the Prayer of St. Francis.


• I was thumbing through another book that was being passed around, and there was a beautiful writing that I'll share with you here. It read:

God

The Immovable Mover

The One

behind all events in the cosmos

is the still point

around which

everything revolves,

because He is still

with peace of love

and yet

dancing eternally

in everything that exists.

- Harish Johari

So, yoga for me has become all the more a spiritual practice, "for in Him we live and move and have our being." - Acts 17:28.

Namaste!