Why I Teach Yoga as a Christian: On History, Evidence, and the Courage to Stop Being Afraid of a Posture

Prefer to listen? I read this one aloud for you.

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I have been asked this question more times than I can count: is it okay for a Christian to practice yoga?

The honest answer touches on history that is richer and stranger than most people realize, evidence that is harder to ignore than it used to be, and a Jesus who was far less interested in institutional safety than we sometimes pretend. What follows is my honest attempt to work through all of it, because courage and fear cannot occupy the same posture.

What Yoga Actually Is, and What It Has Become

It is worth being precise about what we are talking about, because “yoga” covers a wide range of practices, and conflating them is part of what makes this conversation so muddled.

The word itself comes from the Sanskrit yuj, meaning union, to yoke oneself to something greater than the self. In its oldest form, yoga was a comprehensive spiritual system developed in ancient India, encompassing philosophy, ethics, breathwork, meditation, and physical postures, all oriented toward liberation and union with the divine. It is a serious tradition with deep roots, and it deserves to be understood as such rather than caricatured.

What most people encounter in a Western studio today is something quite different. The physical practice of yoga as it exists in American fitness culture has, in most settings, been largely emptied of its original religious framework. A power yoga class at a gym, a yoga sculpt session, a vinyasa flow at a neighborhood studio, these are primarily movement and breath practices, structured sequences of postures coordinated with breathing, sometimes with a brief moment of intention-setting at the start or final rest at the end. The spiritual architecture of classical yoga has not traveled with the poses into most of these spaces.

A 2022 Yoga Alliance survey found that fewer than 15% of US yoga practitioners say they practice for spiritual growth, with the majority citing flexibility, stress relief, and physical fitness as their primary reasons. The practice, in other words, has already migrated considerably from its origins in the minds and intentions of most people who show up to a class.

It is also worth noting that mindful movement practices with similar qualities have existed across many ancient cultures. Kemetic yoga, rooted in the postures depicted in ancient Egyptian temple art, is one example, a practice that scholars and practitioners have traced to the same impulse toward intentional, breath-connected movement that predates the Indian tradition by centuries. The point is not to establish a hierarchy of origin, but to recognize that the human instinct to move the body with awareness and intention is ancient and cross-cultural.

Claiming yoga belongs exclusively to one religious tradition, and that it is therefore off-limits to everyone else, misunderstands both history and the nature of embodied practice.

None of this is to say yoga belongs to any one group, religious or otherwise. At its core, yoga is breath connected to movement, attention brought to the body, an intentional time carved out to feel more at home in your own skin. That is not a niche interest or a spiritual commitment. It belongs in the same category as good food, clean air, and real connection — things every person benefits from regardless of what they believe.

As a Christian, I am deliberate about the yoga I seek out and the yoga I teach. I look for practices that treat movement, breath, and present-moment awareness as the point, rather than serving as a vehicle for a spiritual system I do not subscribe to. The physical practice, stripped of religious content, is what I bring to my students, and I want to be honest about that rather than pretend all yoga is the same thing. Most options available in conventional gyms and yoga chains are purely secular forms of exercise. It is usually easy to tell whether a teacher is following a spiritual practice, and if it is not clear, asking the instructor or studio directly is always a reasonable step.

If you have ever felt guilty about your yoga practice, or quietly wondered whether it crosses a line, this is for you.

Maybe someone you respect raised an eyebrow when they found out you were curious about yoga. Maybe you have been carrying a quiet guilt about a practice that has genuinely helped you. Maybe you are a parent trying to figure out where the line is, and nobody has given you a real answer, only a reaction.

I understand – I grew up in this too. The instinct to protect what is sacred comes from love, and I am not here to dismiss it. I am here because I wish someone had sat with me earlier and walked through the actual evidence, the actual history, and what Jesus actually did, before I spent years being unsure about something that was quietly helping me heal. That is what I am trying to offer here.

What Christianity Has Always Done With Outside Practices

This distinction, taking what serves and releasing what does not, is not a compromise of Christian integrity. It is actually one of the oldest and most consistent patterns in Christian history, and understanding that history reframes the entire yoga conversation.

The very word liturgy, so central to Christian worship, comes from the Greek leitourgia, meaning service of the state. Early Christians adopted it wholesale from civic and philosophical culture around them. The words dogma and orthodoxy came from Greek philosophical vocabulary. Even in the Gospel of John, the author adopts Greek philosophical concepts to explain the very person of Christ. The word Logos, often translated “the Word” in the New Testament, is the root of the English word “logic” and referred to a universal governing principle in Greek philosophy. The entire theological framework of the early church was built using conceptual tools borrowed from the pagan intellectual world and reoriented entirely toward Christ. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Mystery Religion and Christianity.”) The terms and concepts were taken, but they did not shape Christ or Christianity. Rather, they were used as tools in the pursuit of faith and as a way to reach pre-Christian cultures and meet those people where they were.

The date of Christmas was deliberately set on December 25 to displace the great festival of the sun, celebrated across the ancient world for centuries before Christianity existed. (Encyclopaedia Britannica, ibid.) In the ninth century, Pope Gregory moved All Saints’ Day to November 1st to coincide with existing Celtic fire festivals, absorbing Samhain into the Christian calendar rather than simply condemning it. (History.com, “Samhain.”) The Eucharistic prayers at the heart of Christian liturgy trace their origins to Egypt, where researchers have concluded that the most ancient formula of consecration was likely of Egyptian origin, adopted by the Roman clergy. (Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Midlands, “The History of the Liturgy.”)

The musical tradition of the Coptic church, among the oldest continuous liturgical music in the world, carries pharaonic melodies directly into Christian worship. Tradition holds that the “Calvary” hymn sung every Good Friday originated as a melody played by ancient Egyptian priests at the burial of their kings. When Christianity came to Egypt, early believers replaced the pharaonic text with Christian words, and the music continued unbroken. (Egypt Independent, “Humming the Oldest Tune in History,” 2012.)

“The key to the mystery of Pharaonic music will be found in a good edition of Coptic ecclesiastical music in use in our days.”

– Dr. Étienne Drioton, French Egyptologist, in a letter to musicologist Dr. Ragheb Moftah. (Library of Congress, Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant and Hymnody Collection.)

Paul himself modeled this posture in Acts 17, when he stood at the Areopagus in Athens and quoted Stoic and Epicurean poets to reach his audience, meeting people inside their own tradition rather than demanding they step outside it first. He was not compromising his faith by doing so; he was extending it to a new audience and meeting them where they were.

In all these examples, the church does not conform to the patterns of the world. Rather, it adopts tools and concepts that are useful, acknowledges them appropriately, and uses them in pursuit of God and of daily life. The early church was not corrupted by these adoptions; it was practicing a kind of wisdom that has gotten lost in some contemporary faith communities: the understanding that truth and human benefit do not belong exclusively to any one cultural tradition.

When a practice serves human flourishing, the more useful question is what it does and how it is used, not where it came from.

The parallel to yoga is not a stretch. The practice has already been substantially emptied of its original religious content in most modern settings, and it can be further oriented toward gratitude, toward God, and toward honest self-examination. I am not arguing that yoga ought to be adopted as a communal church practice. I am simply saying that the movements themselves do not pose a barrier to faith, and can in fact be a tool for living a healthy, mindful life, for grounding oneself, building discipline, calming the nervous system, improving focus, and developing a healthier and more functional body. Anything we do toward those ends, much like weight-lifting or other physical training, can be offered to God in gratitude for our bodies, and can strengthen our ability to use them to care for ourselves and serve others.

Dr. Christine Mangala Frost, a Hindu convert to Orthodox Christianity and research associate at the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies at Cambridge, put it plainly: a Christian who is well grounded in their faith can take what is good in yoga and set aside what does not belong, just as the early church fathers drew on the tools of pagan learning to brilliant effect in Christian theology.

Two Paths

This is the language my faith gives me for something I think most people feel at some point: the difference between a life that happens to you and a life you choose. Most of us are on what I think of as the wide path, though we did not consciously choose it. The wide path is the path of least resistance, and in our culture it looks like this: giving in to the priorities of a materialistic world, living primarily for ourselves, reaching for the easy answer, the convenient food, the numbing distraction. It is chronic stress worn as a badge of busyness, dishonesty in small and large doses, indifference to the suffering of people we do not have to look at directly. It is the pull toward self-glorification and the quiet erosion of integrity that comes when we stop examining what we actually believe and why. The wide path, followed long enough, produces spiritual emptiness, physical strain, and a diminished capacity to serve anyone well, including ourselves.

The narrow path is genuinely hard. It asks for self-awareness, which means confronting things about ourselves we would rather not see. It asks us to heal generational patterns we inherited rather than simply passing them on, to remain faithful to our convictions under pressure rather than quietly softening them to keep the peace. For those who follow Jesus, it includes something more specific still: following his teaching even when inconvenient, repenting when we get it wrong, and accepting that this particular path has always come with a cost.

Caring for the body is part of that path, though it is only one part. The other part is the soul, and the two are not in competition. Physical health, when pursued with the right orientation, actually serves our capacity to be present for the people God has placed in our lives and for the work we are called to do. It is stewardship, not vanity. But anyone who mistakes physical wellness for the full story of the Christian life has misread the map. The soul is the deeper work, and it is ongoing.

The narrow path is also where yoga, practiced intentionally and without spiritual confusion, belongs for me. It looks like learning a harder pose, not for the Instagram photo, but because staying present with difficulty teaches you something real about yourself. It looks like breathwork and honest self-examination, supporting local farmers, cooking real food, addressing the limiting beliefs that live in the body as tension, as posture, as the way you hold your breath when something frightens you. It is about choosing a life rather than simply inheriting one.

The world hands us its values and priorities without asking whether we agree, and the narrow path begins the moment we start to question them.

Last year, I developed a framework for making decisions from this place. I call it the Values-Based Decision Matrix, and it draws inspiration from Eisenhower’s well-known urgent/important quadrant model, though it asks a different question entirely. The Eisenhower matrix asks: how urgent is this? My matrix asks: does this align with the values I hold dear and with who I am becoming?

The Values-Based Decision Matrix

At the center of the matrix is a circle: Core Values. Every decision, every choice, every habit passes through this filter first. Where do our values come from? They come from our upbringing, our communities, our experiences, and what we understand to be true about what it means to live a good life. For those who hold a Christian faith, these values are not arbitrary. As Paul writes in Romans 2, they are written on the heart, present even in those who have never heard the law, expressed through the conscience God placed in every human being.

Surrounding the core are four quadrants:

Honor (aligned action) holds the things we do because they reflect our deepest commitments. These are non-negotiable, the practices, relationships, and choices that make us more fully ourselves. When I ask whether yoga honors my values, the answer is yes. Moving my body with intention honors the belief that this body is a gift worth caring for.

Nurture (sustainable growth) holds the things that require investment and patience. They may not feel urgent, but they matter enormously over time. A marriage, a friendship tended carefully across years, a creative project that brings genuine joy — these belong here, and so does the ongoing work of stewarding the body. Yoga, along with other forms of exercise, lives in this quadrant for me, as a way to cultivate calm, support my daily tasks, and stay grounded in both my spiritual and physical life.

Nurture is the quadrant that most people sacrifice first when life gets loud.

Simplify (ease and efficiency) holds the things that support our life without overcomplicating it, like the systems, habits, and routines that free up energy for what matters most. A consistent movement practice simplifies the relationship between mind and body and makes the rest of life more navigable.

Release (letting go) holds the things that no longer serve us. Fear-based thinking lives here. So does perfectionism dressed up as devotion, the habit of saying yes when we mean no, and the dead weight of shame that keeps us circling the same ground instead of moving forward. Releasing the assumption that yoga is spiritually dangerous, without evidence, belongs here too.

When I apply this matrix to yoga, the question shifts. Instead of asking “is this practice from a Hindu tradition?” I ask: does this honor my values? Does it nurture my growth? Does it simplify my relationship with my body and my mind? And if I am afraid of it, is that fear worth releasing? For me, the answer to each of those questions is yes.

What I Know From My Own Life

To be a light to the world, to be present for the people you love, you have to be home in your own body first. Yoga is where I learned to come home.

After the birth of my child, I went through a period of postpartum depression that was one of the hardest seasons of my life. God carried me through it, and so did my family, whose steadiness during that time I will never stop being grateful for. But there was something I needed to find my way back to on my own, with their support around me: the sense that my body was mine to inhabit again.

Childbirth does something to that relationship. The body goes through so much, and then suddenly it is asked to belong entirely to someone else, to sustain another life, to be available in ways that leave very little room for oneself. The feeling I kept returning to in those months was that I had no space in my own body, no quiet ground to stand on. Yoga gave me a place and a practice to change that narrative, not through possessiveness, and not through reclaiming the body as something that exists for my own sake, but through the understanding that in order to serve my family, in order to be present and whole and genuinely useful to the people I love, I had to be home in myself first.

One day it crystallized: “In order to serve my family and be a light to the world, I have to be home in my own body first. And there is nothing wrong with that. That is the birthplace of growth.”

That conviction is what led me to formalize what had already been a decade-long personal practice. I enrolled in yoga teacher training in 2020, during the pandemic, when the world had gone quiet enough for me to finally hear what I actually needed. What began on my own mat in 2010 had become something I felt called to share.

I am a Yoga Alliance Registered Yoga Teacher with over 550 hours of formal training and have taught 520 classes as of the publication of this article, representing over 1,000 hours of focused yoga and mobility instruction in a professional setting.

I also hold certifications in Culinary Nutrition, Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) coaching, and personal training through NASM, and I am currently completing my Nutritional Therapy Practitioner training. I have studied the body from multiple angles for many years, and what I experienced in those postpartum months is far from unusual. The research confirms it, and so do the women who have quietly told me their own versions of that story over the years.

The body holds what the mind cannot yet process, and movement done with care and intention is one of the few things that reaches both at the same time.

That is why I teach yoga, and that is why I take this question seriously.

What Jesus Actually Modeled

Christians are called to follow Jesus, and when I look carefully at what Jesus actually did, I see something that many of us have quietly set aside in our preference for institutional safety.

Jesus was not a rule-follower in the way the religious establishment of his day expected. He upheld God’s law fully but consistently cut through the legalism and human tradition that had accumulated around it. “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” he said in Mark 2:27. He was unbothered by imposed rules that existed primarily to give religious elites a way to measure themselves against others. He healed a man on the Sabbath, knowing the religious authorities were watching and would object. He touched lepers. He ate with tax collectors and the very people the religious establishment dismissed as sinners. He stopped to speak with a Samaritan woman at a well, crossing every social and religious boundary that existed in that moment. When he was criticized for these choices, he did not apologize or recalibrate. He explained, patiently and without flinching, that the law was made for people, not the other way around.

That pattern runs through the entirety of his ministry. Jesus was consistently more interested in the person in front of him than in the rule that governed the moment. He asked what each human being needed, and then he provided it, regardless of what the institution said. He was a healer and a teacher, and the through-line of his life was proximity to suffering combined with the willingness to do whatever actually helped. So when someone asks me how I can teach yoga as a Christian, I find myself turning that question around.

If a practice helps people breathe more fully, move more freely, release stored tension, and become more present in their own bodies, on what theological grounds do we forbid it?

The Inconsistency We Don’t Talk About

Christian communities across the country preach that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, a direct teaching from 1 Corinthians 6:19-20. And yet, by almost every measurable health marker, Christian populations are among the least healthy in the country. A longitudinal study tracking 2,433 adults over eighteen years found that young adults with high religious participation were 50 percent more likely to be obese by middle age compared to less religiously active peers. (Northwestern University / CARDIA Study, American Heart Association, 2011.) Heart disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes appear at least as frequently in communities of faith as anywhere else, and in many studies more so.

We serve highly processed cookies and donuts in the church reception hall. We hand out red dye-laced candy full of sugar and artificial ingredients to children in Sunday school when they memorize their Bible verses. We have organized entire social cultures around artificial food that, consumed regularly, contributes to the chronic illness that is shortening our lives and diminishing our capacity to serve.

And then we call yoga spiritually dangerous, or we simply dismiss it because thousands of years ago it had non-Christian religious origins, while proudly declaring the Pharaonic roots of some of the musical and linguistic elements in our worship, or the Greek philosophical references in early Christian texts. There is rarely any concern shown for the gross neglect of health in many religious communities, the workaholic grind that has become standard for many of us, or the prioritization of profit over people’s wellbeing. All of these stem from the quiet adoption of worldly priorities and conventions that erode our Christian lives and witness.

Consider this: call the same class a mobility and stretch session, and the resistance evaporates.

The movement, the breathwork, the intentional slowing down, the attention to the body, the stillness at the end, all of it can be identical. The only thing that changed is the word on the flyer. The question worth sitting with is whether the objection was ever really about what happens in the room, or whether it was always about what we decided the name meant before we ever walked through the door.

I want to name this inconsistency with love, because I believe it comes from confusion rather than ill intent. I have been in those rooms and have had those conversations with people I respect and care about deeply. We have accepted, without examining it, that sugar is innocent and stillness is suspect, that an artificial donut at the fellowship hour is fellowship and a breath exercise is a gateway to something dark. That posture is a cultural habit dressed up as discernment, and it deserves to be examined with the same care we bring to everything else we claim to believe.

Caring for the body God gave us is an act of stewardship and gratitude. Mindful movement, breathwork, and honest self-examination can be expressions of faith, among the most genuine ones available to us. Yoga need not be a far-Eastern spiritual practice, and it need not be converted into a Christian spiritual practice either. It can simply be a supportive tool, a form of exercise and a way to quiet the mind and our anxious physiology.

A Practice Is Neither Good Nor Bad. How You Practice Is.

I want to be honest about something, because the integrity of this argument depends on it: there is a wrong way to practice yoga.

Modern wellness culture has, in many cases, turned yoga into a vehicle for something that concerns me too. The version that centers on relentless self-optimization, that encourages you to be your own highest authority, that substitutes perfecting a pose for genuine growth, can pull people away from humility, from community, and from God. A practice organized entirely around the self, in service of the self, for the glorification of the self, carries its own spiritual hazards regardless of whether it involves breathwork.

And yet that is true of every practice. Fasting can be an act of devotion or an eating disorder. Prayer can be a genuine opening toward God or a performance for an audience. Exercise can build health or mask anxiety about one’s appearance. The practice itself carries no inherent morality; the practitioner does.

The physical analogy holds: if you force a pose your body is not ready for, you can injure yourself. That tells you something was approached carelessly or without proper guidance, but it says nothing conclusive about yoga. The same logic applies at every level. Yoga practiced with intention, with humility, with gratitude for the body as a gift, can be one of the most worshipful things a person does with their morning. Yoga practiced as ego performance, as competition, as escape from accountability, will not serve you, regardless of how many headstands you can hold.

I teach it the way I understand it: as a tool for becoming more fully present in the life you have been given. Strengthening the body, improving its function, and learning to regulate the mind and emotions alongside it – these are not small things. They are part of how we show up for everything else that matters.

Evidence Worth Knowing

For those who want to see the research, the evidence on yoga is no longer preliminary. It is extensive, peer-reviewed, and accumulating steadily.

Regarding mental health: A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Depression and Anxiety (Moosburner et al., University of Tübingen) examined yoga as a therapy for diagnosed depressive disorders across PubMed, Cochrane, and Scopus databases and found meaningful clinical benefit. A 2023 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry (Wu et al.) confirmed yoga as an effective intervention for major depressive disorder across multiple studies.

For the postpartum population specifically, a 2025 randomized controlled trial found yoga significantly reduced depression and anxiety symptoms, consistent with a 2026 systematic review of 35 studies confirming yoga’s benefits for perinatal mental health. I lived through postpartum depression, and this research does not read as abstract to me. Yoga held me while I was healing, and the data now shows that experience was not unusual.

Regarding cardiovascular health: A 2023 meta-analysis published in Current Problems in Cardiology (Isath et al., NYU Langone / Baylor College of Medicine) analyzed 64 randomized controlled trials involving 16,797 participants and found that yoga significantly reduced systolic blood pressure by an average of 4.56 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure by 3.39 mmHg, with meaningful improvements in cholesterol profiles. A separate 2024 systematic review in PLOS One examining yoga for arterial hypertension across 30 RCTs and 2,283 participants found reductions in systolic pressure of nearly 8 mmHg, diastolic pressure of nearly 5 mmHg, and heart rate of more than 4 beats per minute. In a country where heart disease remains the leading cause of death, those numbers represent real people whose lives were measurably improved.

Regarding pain and joint health: A 2024 meta-analysis in PLOS ONE (Lu et al.) found significant reductions in pain and improvements in function for knee osteoarthritis patients who practiced yoga, and a 2024 analysis in Yoga Mimamsa found significant reductions in chronic back pain intensity compared to non-intervention groups. For the person who has been told to simply manage their pain and live with it, that is worth knowing.

Regarding cancer care: Yoga has become one of the most studied complementary interventions in oncology, and the findings are consistent enough that major cancer centers now actively incorporate it into patient care. A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis published in Medicine (Hou et al., Peking University) examined 18 studies on yoga and cancer-related fatigue in breast cancer patients and found that yoga effectively reduced fatigue, improved sleep quality, and improved overall quality of life. (Hou et al., Medicine, 2024.) A broader 2024 umbrella review published in Cureus, analyzing multiple systematic reviews and meta-analyses across cancer types, found consistent and significant reductions in anxiety, depression, and stress, alongside improvements in fatigue and sleep quality across diverse patient populations. (Yoga as a Therapeutic Intervention in Cancer Care, Cureus, 2024.)

A bibliometric analysis published in PMC in 2024 identified 42 systematic reviews and meta-analyses on yoga in cancer care, reflecting what the authors described as a growing global interest in yoga as an integrative cancer therapy. For someone going through treatment, managing the exhaustion, the fear, and the disrupted sleep that cancer brings, that is not a trivial body of evidence.

Regarding autoimmune conditions: This is the research that touches me most personally, given my own work in Autoimmune Protocol (AIP) coaching. A 2023 randomized controlled trial published in Scientific Reports (Gautam et al., AIIMS New Delhi) found that yoga helped maintain a healthy balance between inflammatory and regulatory immune cells in rheumatoid arthritis patients, and slowed a marker of immune cell aging. A 2024 systematic review in Annals of Behavioral Medicine examined 26 randomized controlled trials across multiple autoimmune conditions, including multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and inflammatory bowel disease, and found yoga improved fatigue, balance, quality of life, and depression, while also reducing inflammatory markers in rheumatoid arthritis. A separate 2023 trial found that eight weeks of yoga practice improved mitochondrial health and reduced disease severity in rheumatoid arthritis patients.

For anyone living with an autoimmune condition, managing an unpredictable disease that affects energy, pain, and mood all at once, that kind of evidence is not abstract. It is the difference between a body that feels like an adversary and one that feels, even briefly, like an ally again.

Regarding impulse control and behavioral rehabilitation: The Prison Yoga Project, founded in 2002, has brought trauma-informed yoga to thousands of incarcerated people across the US and internationally, focusing on mindfulness, stress management, impulse control, and addiction recovery. A randomized controlled study across nine Swedish correctional facilities found that after ten weeks of yoga, participants showed significant improvements across thirteen of sixteen measured variables, including stress, sleep, emotional wellbeing, and reduced antisocial behavior, compared to a control group that improved in only two. (Kerekes, Fielding & Apelqvist, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2017.)

The NIH has confirmed similar results for at-risk youth in institutional settings. (PMC / NIH, 2021.) These are people carrying the heaviest life circumstances, in the least forgiving environments, learning through yoga to pause before they react and to stay present with discomfort rather than act from it. That outcome is worth taking seriously.

The capacity to pause before reacting, to stay present with difficulty without being consumed by it, is what yoga teaches at its core, and it is, not incidentally, what spiritual formation has always sought to cultivate.

Fear Is Not Faith

The last thing I want to say is about fear, because I think it sits at the root of most of the resistance to conversations like this one.

There is a way of moving through the world that presents itself as discernment but is actually fear. It shows up in the impulse to shield faith communities from anything unfamiliar to their culture and in the habit of treating the unknown as automatically threatening. These impulses are understandable, coming from love, or at least from something that started as love. But they carry a cost.

A life organized around fear is a smaller life.

You miss the person whose story would have changed how you see. You miss the practice that would have helped you heal. You miss the encounter that would have deepened your faith rather than threatened it. You stay in a corner calling it safety, when it is actually a kind of poverty.

One of the most common objections I hear is the fear that yoga and meditation involve emptying the mind, leaving it open and unguarded for something dark to enter. I understand where that concern comes from, but it rests on a misunderstanding of what these practices actually ask of you. Neither yoga nor modern commonly-practiced meditation asks you to empty your mind. They ask you to observe both mind and body, to notice what is there without being dragged around by it. That is not vacancy; it is the opposite of vacancy, and it is one of the most demanding forms of self-awareness available to us. A mind brought into honest awareness is not a door that swings open to deception. It is a mind learning to stay present rather than react blindly, which is the opposite of vulnerability to external forces.

The unexamined mind, one that is never still and never brought into honest awareness, is far more susceptible to being led by impulse, fear, or whatever the culture happens to be offering than a mind that has been trained to pause and observe. For the Christian specifically, contemplative prayer is a form of intentional inner stillness oriented entirely toward God, one that has existed within the tradition since the early Christian contemplatives of the third century and runs through the medieval mystics to the present day. It is not borrowed from outside the faith; it is native to it.

Psalm 46:10 puts it simply: “Be still, and know that I am God.” That verse is not a suggestion to zone out or leave the mind unguarded. It is an invitation into the kind of present, attentive quiet that makes genuine encounter with God possible. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 1:7 that God did not give us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. He is writing to Timothy as a believer filled with the Holy Spirit, and the implication is clear: a mind rooted in God’s Spirit is not a vulnerable mind. The stillness is not the threat. It is where the Spirit has room to work.

The people practicing yoga on institutional floors in correctional facilities, working through the residue of trauma in their bodies, learning to pause before they act, have something to teach us, if we are willing to be in the room. The stranger whose practice looks different from ours has something to offer, if we approach with curiosity instead of suspicion.

I teach yoga because it helps people, because I have watched it change bodies, calm nervous systems, and open something in a person that they had closed off years ago and forgotten was ever there. I watched a woman in one of my classes, rigid with grief she had been carrying for years, finally exhale in a way that sounded like the beginning of something. I teach it because I believe the body is sacred and deserves to be tended, and because the narrow path asks for courage. Courage and fear cannot occupy the same posture.

I teach it because I am a Christian. Following Jesus is a whole life, not a single practice. But caring for the bodies and minds of the people in front of me, helping them breathe, helping them heal, helping them come home to themselves, that is very much part of what that life looks like.

If this resonated with you, I would love to know. Have you ever quietly practiced yoga and wondered whether you should? Or avoided it because someone you respect said you should? I would love to hear your story in the comments.

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Heba Saleh is the founder of Key of Life Ventures, a mindset and wellness brand rooted in the belief that growth becomes sustainable when we honor our values, nurture our communities, simplify what supports us, and release what no longer serves us. She holds a Master’s in Cultural Studies, is a Certified Culinary Nutrition Expert, NASM-CPT, AIP Certified Coach, and RYT-550 yoga instructor, and is currently completing her Nutritional Therapy Practitioner certification. She teaches yoga across the DC area and writes about mindset, wellness, and integrated living.

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11. Kerekes, Nóra et al. “Yoga as Complementary Care for Young People Placed in Juvenile Institutions — A Study Plan.” PMC / National Institutes of Health (2021). https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8211756/

12. Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Mystery Religion: Mystery Religions and Christianity.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/mystery-religion/Mystery-religions-and-Christianity

13. History.com Editors. “Samhain.” History, updated 2025. https://www.history.com/articles/samhain

14. Coptic Orthodox Diocese of the Midlands, U.K. “The History of the Liturgy.” https://ukmidcopts.org/resources/spiritual-articles/the-history-of-the-liturgy/

15. Abdel Hafez, Ahmed. “Humming the Oldest Tune in History.” Egypt Independent, October 23, 2012. https://www.egyptindependent.com/humming-oldest-tune-history/

16. Library of Congress. “Ragheb Moftah and Coptic Music.” Coptic Orthodox Liturgical Chant and Hymnody Digital Collection. https://www.loc.gov/collections/coptic-orthodox-liturgical-chant/articles-and-essays/collection-galleries/moftah/coptic-music/

17. Yoga Alliance. “2022 Yoga in America Study.” https://www.yogaalliance.org/Research

18. Frost, Christine Mangala. “Yoga and the Christian Faith.” Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge. https://www.iocs.cam.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/m_frost_yoga_and_christianity.pdf

19. Hou, Lingyu et al. “Effect of Yoga on Cancer-Related Fatigue in Patients with Breast Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Medicine 103, no. 1 (2024). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10766251/

20. “Yoga as a Therapeutic Intervention in Cancer Care: An Umbrella Review of Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses.” Cureus, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11259513/

21. “Yoga in Cancer Care: A Bibliometric Analysis of Systematic Reviews.” PMC, November 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11570914/

22. Gautam, Surabhi et al. “Yoga Maintains Th17/Treg Cell Homeostasis and Reduces the Rate of T Cell Aging in Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Scientific Reports 13 (2023). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10495372/

23. “Yoga in Autoimmune Disorders: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials.” Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2024. https://academic.oup.com/abm/article-abstract/59/1/kaaf049/8195080

24. Gautam, Surabhi et al. “Yoga Improves Mitochondrial Health and Reduces Severity of Autoimmune Inflammatory Arthritis: A Randomized Controlled Trial.” Biological Psychology 183 (2023). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1567724921000362

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