Yoga - Backbending or Backsliding?

So today the BBC published an article “Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?  As a born again Christian and deeply in love with Jesus, I have fought the common dilemma that sadly so many Christians face; does doing Yoga make me a bad Christian?

If you had asked me 2 years ago, if Yoga was for Christians, I would, without hesitation, say; I wouldn’t advise it.  My lack of experience at the time would have led me to a conclusion that yoga involves worshiping Hindu Gods, chanting mantras, mediating to an ‘om’ sound, loosing my mind, never mind just emptying it and becoming a tie-die wearing, ‘peace man’ saying, hippy. Ignorance is a terrible terrible thing.

For 18 months now I have been regularly practicing Bikram Yoga, there I said it, I’m a Christian and I practice Bikram Yoga. Now before you drag me in for some ‘casting out of demons’ sessions, or throw me out the ‘church’ for worshiping false God’s, let me tell you that taking part in Yoga has been, without doubt, of the most spiritually enlightening experiences of my life…

 

1)     Not all types of yoga are weird! Indeed, there are types of yoga that I wouldn’t touch with a barge poll.  Deciding where to start was tough!

I went into yoga cautiously and prayerfully. In some yoga sessions I had a great sense of peace, the classes were primarily stretching, a bit of silence to allow for meditation (which simple means breathing by the way!) and some relaxation techniques.  Other styles were different and in these I felt, a level of spiritual darkness as I walked into the room, those classes I never returned to. So while I advocate some forms of yoga, I recognise that all yoga it is a spiritual experience and should be handled cautiously.  I pray a simple prayer each time I enter my class – Lord, protect me from anything not of you and let me meet with you in this time. I trust that He will keep to His promises, He always has.

I can see why the churches mentioned in the article are nervous or against having yoga in church buildings and fully understand why the NLCP are opposing the bill to have yoga taught in schools as part of the curriculum. As a Christian I think I would feel the same, as I wouldn’t know what style of yoga was being taught.  But I would fully endorse some of the techniques used in yoga as a way of allowing the next generation a chance to experience focus, relaxation and a mind that isn’t stressed and fried but full of truth and peace.

 

 

2)     Christ tells us to take every thought captive.  One of the hardest things about yoga is not bending yourself into all types of postures, but stopping the mind from wandering off.  Within seconds of the class starting I’d find myself thinking about work, the dinner, the phone call I had to make, the presents I forgot to buy.  It’s incredible when you stop and be still, just how much your brain is still going at a hundred miles an hour.  Each day you listen to that brain and try and keep up with it, is it any wonder we’re all stressed out of our heads?! Are we listening to that voice in our heads telling us to try harder, do more, be better and don’t stop until it’s all done?! Because if we are, we ain’t listening to God.  Because when I read God’s word I read of someone who sat at God’s feet, who rested in Him, who knew who he was, who’s identity was in Him not in work, who surrendered to Him, who was so full of the fathers love that it poured out of Him into others.  When I see Gods church, I’m afraid that a lot of the time, I see stressed out, tired leaders who have burned out from trying to do it all.  Is this what God wants? By being still every day in Yoga, by telling my mind to slow down, to stop and remember the truth of who God is and therefor who he says I am, I am aligning my thoughts with His and moving into life out of a place of rest and security not pressure and a sense of chasing.

3)     Lastly, the whole focus of any Yoga is the breath – Pranayama.  You are told it’s the life force.  That when you align the mind and body with the breath everything functions as a whole.  I can’t tell you how much focussing on my breathing has revolutionised my world. Whenever I would get stuck striving to get into a posture, I would try harder, dig deeper, work tougher.  But never did it work.  When I asked my yoga teacher about this he said “stop striving and just breathe”. “Hippy” I though, what a load of guff.  But one day I found myself striving again, trying so hard to get into this posture and nothing! I got to the end of my own efforts and gave up trying.  All I could do was breathe, my body wasn’t doing much else.  When I just breathed, something incredible happened, my body relaxed and moved into positions it had never reached before. Incredible. Just from breathing.  Isn’t this what God tells us to do?  Stop striving? To get to the end of ourselves because it is there that we find him? Just from breathing.  When God created Adam, he was nothing before what?  Before God breathed into him.  Before the world was created what was present?  RUACH, God’s spirit, His BREATH. God is breath.  Each time you breathe in you are literally breathing in God himself.  How incredible, that as we walk around the world, searching for God, he is in fact, in the very air that we breath in with every single breath.

 

Yoga has brought me closer to God and into more of a real relationship with him than ever before.  One that is dependant on him, one that grows from the foundation that he is love and has me securely in his arms and one that only moves when he leads me.  In short it has given me a deep rooted, assurance and confidence in his word when he says – “Be still and know that I am God”.

“No GPS, I think you’re wrong…”

What a great invention the Sat Nav is ehh? Just this morning I drove through central London during rush hour to find a florist in the middle of this massive big industrial estate with about 50 other florists engulfing it.  But, thanks to Sat Nav this journey looked easy.  Incredible isn’t it? That this tiny little device that sits on your dashboard is such a powerful thing. It receives signals from the Global Positioning System housed high up in the earths atmosphere.  This GPS is made up of 24 satellites that circle the globe.  Each one of these satellites sends information through signals in an instant to your tom tom, sat nav or whatever you call yours. These signals travel at the speed of light towards and based on how long it took them to arrive there, information is generated to determine where you are in the world!  Ohh and it can also tell you what time it is and how long it’ll take you to arrive at your destination!

 

Absolutely brilliant.  This wonderful little device devised a route straight to the door of this florist and got me there with no problem at all, or at least would have done if I’d have listened to it!

 

Why why why do we do it? We punch in the postcode, we get our route, but somewhere along following those specific directions we have a crazy notion – What if, I know better? You know, despite the years of technology involved it seems perfectly logical to think “Hang on a minute Mr Sat Nav, Im not quite sure you do know the way”. You get a bit cocky, you decide that the left turn at the next set of traffic lights should actually be a right turn and before you know it, you’re half way down a one way street that’s a dead end! 40 minutes extra it took me, I was stressed out, I hated the journey.  When will I learn to trust the Sat Nav!?

 

Same goes for life. The Creator who made us knows best.  We all wonder off, try and do things our way. Let’s try and remember to listen to the one who is outside of this earth sending us signals every minute of every day on how to journey through life. All we have to do is listen.

Proverbs 3:5-6 : “ Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding,  in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight”.

 

No Pain No Gain

When I was 10 I tore ligaments in my left ankle while playing tennis, when I was 17 I tore them in my right ankle while doing aerobics. When I was 24 I tore a ligament in my right knee playing netball and in my late 20’s my lower back began to hurt due to all the long distance running I’ve done.  And they say sports good for you right? I recently went to my sports masseuse who said that all the later injuries could well have been caused by that original tearing of my ligaments back when I was 10. You see when our bodies experience pain a system called the ‘withdrawal reflex’ kicks in.  It is the system  that works in such a way that when we feel pain our bodies quickly and without conscious recognition, adjusts to change what we are doing in order to not feel that pain anymore.  An example of this would be when you sprain your ankle, messages are sent to the brain saying ‘ouch’, this activates the danger threat and the response is a reflex resulting in you hopping on your opposite foot and taking the weight off the injured foot.   

Clever ehh? How helpful!  

Well, not always.  You see much like my own body, when your body doesn’t heal the original pain you get a nasty knock on affect which can lead to other pains in the future. The withdrawal reflex helps short term, but actually adjusting all the time only leads to an imbalance and more injury.

This doesn’t just apply to our physical bodies but our emotional bodies too.  

 “Self-preservation is behavior that ensures the survival of an organism. It is almost universal among living organisms.  Pain and fear are parts of this mechanism. Pain motivates the individual to withdraw from damaging situations, to protect a damaged body part while it heals, and to avoid similar experiences in the future”.

When we experience emotional hurt we adjust, we put in place things that will avoid the pain and protect us from being hurt again in the future.  Ever decided after your last break up to never let anyone hurt you again? That’ll be why your still single. At the end of the day if you don’t get close to people they have less chance of hurting you right? What about that absent parent? Surely learning to be utterly independent will ensure that you never need to depend on anyone again right? Yes, this will definitely ensure you wont’ ever feel let down by the one who should have been there for you.   What about the self loathing?  Surely a nice sugary chocolate bar each time you hear the internal criticism will take that voice away and reinstate you as the loving person you know you are. Yes, that cigarette will be your companion rather than experience the pain of singleness and that bottle of wine on a Friday will be the most excellent reward for making it through another week at a job you feel  too inadequate for.

We all do it, we all avoid pain by creating ‘pleasures’ in our life.  The trouble is, these pleasures are lies, they are false, they are placebos. You see when we avoid pain, we in fact create more. The life of solitude breads loneliness, the chocolate creates weigh gain, the cigarette Lung cancer, the lack of intimacy anxiety and body tension, the wine,  addiction and what’s the solution to these new pains? More avoidance – solitude can leads to meaningless sex, weight gain can lead to diet obsessions, the wine is an issue so let’s just swap it for drugs. And so it continues. What we think free’s us from our emotional pains, in fact binds us more! Our emotional alignment adjusts  too much and our emotional posture is that of an 80 year old!

Go back and deal with the original source of pain.  Don’t look for plasters to cover it up and quick fixes to make you feel better. Expose the wound, sit with the pain and accept it, only then can true healing begin and this is where the true beauty is.  

“The most beautiful people are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” – Elizabeth Kuble Ross

Choose Life

Choose Life
Choose a job
Choose a career
Choose your family
Choose a flippen' big television
Choose washing machines, cars, Cd players and electrical tin openers
Choose buying leisure wear and matching luggage
Choose a three piece suit in a range of funky fabrics
Choose DIY and wondering who the heck you are in the Sunday morning
Choose sittin' on the couch watching mind numbing game shows
Stuffin' junk food into your mouth
Choose routin' away , pishin' in a miserable home, an embarrassment to the selfish brats you spawned to replace yourself
Choose your future
Choose life.
I choose not to choose life
I choose something else

                                                                                      Choose Life – Trainspotting

 

Life; we all query the meaning of it, wonder what our role is in it, appreciate the fragility of it and want to live out more of it. We want to live it to the max, get everything out of it, squeeze it dry, so by the time we leave it we have given it all we’ve got and left it wanting us, we want to go with a sense of a job well done, a game well played a race well run.

I have bungy jumped, skydived, ran a marathon, 2 triathlons, 1 ‘hell’ run and completed the powerman challenge.  I’ve been to New Zealand, fiji, LA, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Amsterdam, Portugal, Spain, France, Ireland, Poland, Belgium Germany and Italy.  I’ve lived in 3 different countries, 7 different homes, had 3 different careers, owned 3 cars, 2 houses and 1 fish!  I’ve fallen in love, fallen out if it and nose dived towards it.  I’ve laughed lots, cried more, learn more than I studied and studied more than I partied. :/ According to Ewan McGregors monolog I chose life. Indeed I did.  But I’ve got a bone to pick with Ewan McGregor – I’m not satisfied!

I’ve even ‘got religion’ right? And still not satisfied.

I’m not satisfied, I don’t feel full! BUT, nor do I ever want to be, and neither do you. 

Imagine true satisfaction – not wanting anything, having everything, knowing absolutely everything, being able to do everything, not needing anyone! How aweful! What would you do?!  You’d be bored! You’d have no drive for anything and not need to do anything.

Actually life’s secret is about realising that you will NEVER know it all NEVER have it all, NEVER feel utterly satisfied and NEVER not need others.  Doesn’t sound too appealing does it?  Of course not, we are conditioned to think that if we have it ALL we will then be truly satisfied, utterly happier and better than the guy next to us. But it’s a lie!

There is nothing more liberating than knowing that you’ll never have it all, know it all, be it all, and be all you need – NEVER!  Once you accept that, you can chill out and stop trying to attain it through strife and grief.  That doesn’t mean you don’t go after it – I still want to learn, want to be fitter, want to get married, want to do more and experience more, but my drive is out of sense of adventure and wanting to do it not out of a striving to ‘get it all’ – there is such liberty, peace and contentment from this!

I said before that knowing Jesus didn’t truly satisfy me, and as I’ve explained this is true. I don’t want to feel satisfied, but I do feel utterly content and truly deeply happy and at peace. Because actually what we seek is not satisfaction it’s acceptance and love and THIS I DO get from Jesus. Once you know that you have utter value and lovability for who you are not what you do or what you have, that thing you’ve been striving for gets met . Jesus knew what he was saying when he said “I have come to give you life in abundance” He follows this up with advice on leaving your possessions, feeding the poor, consider others more valuable than yourself, live simply, be compassionate… He knows that LIFE in ABUNDANCE is actually in having very little and being content in who you are in God, not by having much and be left wanting more.

I chose not to choose life, as this world would have me believe, I chose something else.  Will you?

 

Core Strength

As a fitness instructor I get inundated with questions that start with how – How do I loose weight? How do I tone up my arms? How do I get a six pack? How do I train for a marathon? How do I bulk up? How do I improve my fitness?  In the past I have attempted to try and answers these questions, and often with much success.  The clients are happy , they see results and come back time and time again.  But I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  Surely if I was helping people to become fitter they would need me less and less right? But it seems they need me more and more. You see I’ve noticed, as soon as one ‘how ‘get’s met, another one appears.  It isn’t that they have not succeeded in the first place, indeed they have! They have lost weight, they have toned up, they have met their fitness goals. But the observation I make is that it doesn’t satisfy them.  The marathon becomes a triathlon , the 1 stone becomes 2, the bingo wings become a flabby arse and on and on and on…

I had a conversation with two personal trainers last week. I asked them why they thought people kept coming back to them.  They both observed that it was because the clients saw results in their fitness. But as we continued to talk something else emerged.  Both of them, without prompting said – “all my clients could do the exercises I give them by themselves, they are very capable of doing that, but they pay for me to be there, they connect with me,  in a weird way I think they pay me to spend time with just them”.  Wow.

Both of the above scenarios confirm to me what I’ve believed in my heart for a long time. This world, at the core of it, craves love.  And even the people who don’t think they crave it – do.  It manifests itself in so many different forms.  In my line of work I see it so prevalent. The woman who wants to loose weight nine times out of ten actually doesn’t.  Actually she wants to be loved, she wants someone to find her hugely attractive and pursue her.   The man who wants to complete 5 triathlons in a year actually wants someone to say – Wow you’re the best!  Because they’ve never been told it. The man who wants big bulging biceps is hiding under that insecurity of not being ‘man’ enough.  The women who ‘needs’ her personal trainer three times a week is craving someone, anyone to give her the undivided attention she never got.

It might sound Freudian and indeed this certainly does not apply to all, I know many people with a very healthy attitude towards fitness, but unfortunately it applies to more than we care to admit to.   More and more the answer to so much of life’s problems is love.  As a Christian I often get tied up in the bible of all the suggestions for living a good and godly life, but recently I’ve relied on just this one, Jesus called it the greatest commandment of all -

Love God, Love yourself, Love your neighbour – it’s that simple.

So, now when people ask me How…  I ask them a question back – Why?  Why do you want to loose weight?  Why do you want more toned arms?  Why do you want a six pack?  Why do you want to do a marathon?  Asking why uncovers their core motivation for wanting to do what they do.  Once we know what motivates us, it’s a lot easier to pursue our true dreams and reach true lasting satisfaction. 

I Dreamed a Dream

I love to ask the question – stripping everything back… if you didn’t have to worry about money, or status or living up to other people’s expectations what is it you would do?

I love asking this question because one of my greatest joys in life is seeing people do what they were put on the earth to do. Unfortunately what we were put on the earth to do is often never achieved because it gets shadowed by money, status and pride.   Despite this, I still love to hear the answers…

Over the last few weeks I’ve asked this to a number of people. One guy told me that he’d give up teaching and go and build orphanages and schools in Africa.  Another girl, an admin assistant, told me she’d hang out in coffee shops purely to watch out for people who look lonely and go and sit with them and chat. A close friend told me they would give up their high powered career to become a life coach and help and inspire others and another told me they would be at home being a mum rather than letting the nanny do it.

I can’t help but be equally sad and excited by these conversations. I absolutely love to hear the hearts of people; what it is deep deep down that they would LOVE to do.  I love the passion that rises in their voice, watching their eyes twinkle and their voice raise as they imagine touching that dream;  being that person inside they know they are, catching a glimpse of the person they know they were created to be.  And yet in the same moment I get saddened that people feel they’ll never achieve their dream, because it is in fact just that - a dream.

 I don’t believe that.

Surely helping those less fortunate than ourselves, being a great mum, being available to others in need and inspiring a generation is more honourable that sticking to the status quo because we’re sacred of the unknown.  Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that teachers, lawyers, admin workers and bankers don’t have their place, they absolutely do, and for some people this is infact their dream! But I believe one of the greatest joys in life is getting paid to do what you would do for free.

It saddens me that so many leave this earth having never even pondered the question what if? What if, I could follow my dream?  What if the joy I just described as my dream, could In fact be a reality? What if what makes me happy could be my career too? What if what makes me passionate  and I believe in I could do each day of my life?  You see, God says in His word that he calls us to will and to act according to His good purpose.  The thing you wake up each day wishing you could do is EXACTLY WHAT YOU SHOULD DO! There is no harm in doing in a job you actually, God forbid, enjoy!  When we are close to God, His will acts out in our life, His will becomes our will. Nothing gives me greater joy than teaching people to love and honour who they are and the mind, body and spirit God gave them.  I love my job, I’d do it for free would you?

“For it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his good purpose”. Philippians 2:13

Scars, Marks and Tattoos

An ex heroine addict has scars of where he used to shoot chemicals straight into his blood stream. A mum who’s given birth looks at her stretch marks and remembers the agony and the absolute joy… A middle aged man stares at his fading tattoos and remembers when he decided to mark a sign of his youth and identity.  We all have them in one way or another – Scars Marks and Tattoos.

As I looked down at my body I began to rip off, one by one, the self adhesive ECG pads that had been stuck on earlier that day.  Rip... wrists... Rip… ankles…. Rip… chest…. Rip…shins… They sure make them robust. As I began scrubbing away at the residual  grey rings of glue that had been left behind, I sobbed… “Why can’t they figure it out?  Why can’t they just find out what’s wrong? What can’t this nightmare be over?!!!” Then I remembered what I’d been taught just a month earlier – Scars and marks are not signs of injury but signs of survival!

The definition of a scar is “A mark left by a healed wound”. I smiled. I had a mind shift.  These marks where not there as a sign of unanswered questions, lack of diagnosis or  mystery illness but they were there as yet another signs that once again I had survived.

We all have scars, physical and emotional. They are not signs of damage or loss, spoils or faults,  but signs that you survived. They are marks that say – I fought, I got bruised, but I won.

John 20:26-27  Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you!”  Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.”

 

(This title and idea is not my own, it was brought to my attention by a wonderful person called Barry Woodward who has an incredible story of freedom from heroine addiction - please listen to his story and visit his site at www.proclaimtrust.org )