The girl walked into my studio lobby like she was entering the cavernous foyer of a haunted house. I came around the front desk and greeted her warmly. She tentatively shook my hand.
“What can do for you?” I asked.
“I wanted to ask about your Pilates classes.”
While she continued to look about furtively as if awaiting a ghost or vampire to leap from behind our lockers, I launched in to my spiel about Pilates. When she didn’t respond, I segued into the class that dominated our schedule—Yoga.
She flinched as if I had blasphemed and said, “Oh, I don’t do yoga. It’s evil.”
She went on to explain how her church had recently hosted a Yoga Bashing seminar where they warned their parishioners that yoga was of Satan and that you could actually get your soul sucked out of your body if you participated.
Just shy of four years as a yoga instructor and 30 years as a faithful and practicing Christian, I internally shook my head. Ignorance. It has divided more people in the last…well, since man has walked the face of the earth, than just about anything else.
Just to set the record straight. Yoga is not evil. Like ANYTHING in life, it is what you make of it. Sure it has its roots in Brahmanism, a branch of the Hindu religion, but just because you sit in a Lotus position, close your eyes, and take deep breaths doesn’t make you a pagan. (Actually it makes you healthier.) Did you know that Christmas is actually rooted in pagan religion yet this past holiday season, I don’t recall seeing anyone walk into the Florida Mall the way this young woman did into my studio.
More de-mystifying tomorrow.
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