Christianity and Yoga in Conversation

By Jillian Maxey

With the flip of a switch, darkness turns to light. From the lighting of a match to the burning of a fire, a small initial spark grows larger and more intense with the right fuel. As the sun rises over the horizon, there is a gradual shift from darkness to light, a series of gradations on the way to complete transformation. All three of these images can work as metaphors for my experience of Ignatian¹ Yoga as an embodied spiritual practice.

During a period of difficulty spurred by a professional setback, I found myself experiencing a crisis of identity, discernment and vocation, that left unchecked and uncontemplated was causing physical, emotional and spiritual dis-ease. Tapping into an already well-established practice of prayer and self-reflection in the Ignatian tradition of the Examen,² I sensed that I needed an anchor—something to “calm the fluctuations”³ during this tumultuous period in my life. By coincidence or by Providence, I heard about an Ignatian Yoga retreat that would be happening several months later and several states away.⁴ I was immediately intrigued and set about making the necessary arrangements to attend.

Depending on the starting point, the juxtaposition of “Ignatian” and “Yoga” might strike a person as completely incongruous or utterly intuitive. I fall into the utterly intuitive camp. My graduate work is in Comparative Theology, my professional experience has mostly been in Jesuit and Ignatian contexts and my gut instinct has always been that the ascetical turn in religion, especially Christianity, that seeks to deny the physical and denigrate the material is out of sync with the nature of the cosmos and the lived experience of being in a body.

I went into my first Ignatian Yoga retreat both eager and skeptical—this sounded precisely like what I needed at this exact moment in my life, but I had high expectations for how the retreat would treat the Hindu and Buddhist foundations of yoga given my training in comparative theology methodology⁵ and commitment to interreligious dialogue. I also had high expectations for how the retreat would engage my Catholic sensibilities and push me in my own spiritual growth in the Ignatian tradition. Done well, the experience could be the beginning of the kind of integration I was yearning for; done poorly, it would confirm the critical voices (real and imagined) that questioned a view of the world in which seemingly different things and people could come together in dialogue for mutual enrichment and learning.

The retreat directors, Bobby Karle, SJ and Alan Haras—who founded Ignatian Yoga—and the other workshop facilitators, I was relieved to learn, were “the real deal,” so to speak. The pairing together of “Ignatian” and “Yoga” was not a haphazard attempt to appeal to a new audience and fill retreat beds, nor was it a water-downed syncretistic version of both that preserved little of the distinctiveness of either tradition. It was a masterful weaving of expertise and experience, The Spiritual Exercises⁶ of St. Ignatius and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the religious and the spiritual, the soul and the body.⁷

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The retreat took place from Friday evening to Monday morning. As people arrived from varying distances and settled in, the weekend began with an optional meditation. Set in the vestibule of the retreat center’s Catholic chapel, it felt both strangely familiar and utterly new. I am a cradle Catholic and the inside of churches are as comfortable and familiar to me as my grandparent’s living room. The sights, smells and sounds called to mind countless masses served, sacraments received and moments of stillness and prayer in the presence of the body of Christ. The previous spring, I had spent another weekend in retreat at Blue Cliff monastery with the monks and nuns of Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in upstate New York.⁸ There was a sense of delight in bringing together the bodily memories of sitting in the meditation hall there, together with the sense memories of a lifetime of Catholic liturgy in this opening experience of my Ignatian Yoga retreat.

The following morning, Alan Haras’ first talk of the day introduced aspects of St. Ignatius’ biography—a story of setback, self-reflection and gradual spiritual conversion—and his own manual for prayer known as The Spiritual Exercises. The focus was on Ignatius’ initial impulse toward asceticism and extreme physical penances during an intense period of prayer and withdrawal in Manresa. In confronting his own sinfulness, he initially felt unworthy of God’s love. The talk encouraged those of us on the retreat to consider if we, too, feel as though we have to earn God’s love because we aren’t good enough, and then asked us to consider what it would look like to let people (and God) love us as we are. The talk then asked us to consider what it means to be human, to be fully human and drew on the work of Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche.⁹

It highlighted the integration of the head and the heart and the difference between deriving your importance and self-worth not from what you do but from who you are. This then gave way to an introduction to the koshas, described as layers of the body, or “sheaths” that cover and obscure the true self, or atman in the Hindu tradition. I was impressed by the scope of the talk, by the beautiful integration of several different themes and by the fact that it cut right to one of the biggest aspects of my own recent struggles—an over emphasis on the “head” and a denial of the “heart.” It was my heart that had gotten me into the professional work I had been doing for almost a decade, but it was only my intellect that seemed to matter as I forged through a grueling push to complete a major writing project. And it was my body that suffered. In order to put my mind to work and to get the thoughts and ideas out of my head and on to the page, I had to ignore my body’s cry for movement, for exercise, for healing and for rest.