Explore our Writers’ Perspectives
Why We Need More Bubbles
On parenting and blowing bubbles as a meditation on joy...
Yoga and Easter
As I’ve been editing and posting Father Clooney’s reflections on Lent and the Yoga Sutras for the past few weeks, I’ve been struck--again--by how much the practice of yoga prepares the body for prayer and meditation, for being still before God.
Introduction to Sacred Chanting with Cynthia Bourgeault.
In these videos, Cynthia Bourgeault discusses sacred chanting.
Yoga has deepened my relationship with God
To me, there are so many connections between Christianity and the spiritual “lights” I discover in yoga. It is my desire and ambition to better connect the two and then to share that with those Catholics and Christians who are afraid of yoga.
Lent: What It Means to Me
I wonder sometimes just how strong and dedicated I really am in my faith and as a person. This year Lent will help me answer my own question.
Why I Teach Yoga from a Christian Perspective
I wanted my yoga classes to build up the body of Christ on every level – body, soul, and spirit, especially the level of the spirit since Christians are told to “live by the Spirit.”
News Years Resolutions: Experiencing Beauty and Joy in 2016
This year... I'm asking God to give me new eyes, eyes filled with grace to see beauty in my life...even in the painful and difficult aspects of my life.
Holy Waiting: Advent
Renee offers two meditations on waiting this advent season.
Chanting Resources
Resources to help you get started chanting.
Interview with Yahweh Yoga: Christian-Style Yoga
It can be confusing to both Christians and the secular yoga industry to call it Christian Yoga as some people have said, "If yoga is not a religion, why call it Christian Yoga?"
Confessions of a Beginning Meditator
I don’t know how to sit.
I'm at a yoga retreat, and we finish every class with twenty minutes of meditation. Each sitting position I try results in searing back pain at about nine minutes. That’s eleven minutes of meditation on pain.
Jesuit Yoga IV
The final question I wish to address has to do with the end of the two texts: if a person practices yoga as understood by Patañjali, or meditation as taught by Ignatius, and if she or he reaches a fairly advanced state (by effort, by grace) — then what kind of person is this, and how does she or he live? Do Ignatius and Patañjali produce very different kinds of persons?
Jesuit Yoga III
When the object of our meditation alone illumines us...
Jesuit Yoga II
One of the things that most attracts people to yoga, I think, is that it is wholesome, challenging, and able to bring a deep sense of well-being to body, mind, and spirit — all without seeming to impose an alien worship on the practitioner. Even in the ancient Indian traditions, and certainly now in America, it has always seemed possible to practice yoga and at the same time maintain, even deepen, our original and continuing faith commitments. But at the same time, this very point is a source of worry for others, since yoga seems blithely unconcerned about matters of religion: as if its energies were elsewhere, making religious commitment seem not so much a problem, as simply optional. If yoga is a powerful religious system, shouldn’t it conflict in a more direct way with Christian commitment? Or are we missing something?
Jesuit Yoga I
Yoga is extremely supple in its ability to take on various rationales -- nondualist, devotional, health-oriented, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. -- and my impression is that even expert teachers of disciplined yoga practice are rather fluid -- sometimes unhelpfully vague -- in their explanations as to what it is all for. The Sutras help pin down a succinct attitude toward the practice and its purpose.