Yoga Yeshua: Connecting Body and Spirit to God

There is a widespread perception that Eastern and Western spirituality are as distant and divergent as a Japanese Buddhist temple and an Anglican Christian church. This is a myth. Rudyard Kipling said “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,” but the adjacent river valleys where Abraham and yoga were born met constantly for commercial and cultural exchange at the time these ancient ancestors of Judaism, Jesus, Hinduism, and Buddha arrived on earth. That is a fact. The authentic core disciplines of Yoga (yoke) and Yeshua (Jesus) are harmonious not contradictory, so we can now discuss a core of life enhancing practice that I call Yoga Yeshua.

After doing my master’s degree in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic literature, I lived in India, where I practiced yoga and completed a yoga teacher training. This motivated me to pursue terminal studies in Hindu, Buddhist, and Yogic philosophy at Oxford University, which culminated in highest honors. My highest honor is to share with you these teachings of Yoga and Yeshua that have filled my life with health and contentment. If you desire a fit body and a tranquil spirit, Yoga Yeshua is a map for your journey.

Yoga is a Sanskrit word for a yoke, such as four oxen aligned in a harness plowing a field with all their life force concentrated in one direction and multiplied by four. Yoga discipline is similar. Body, mind, heart, and spirit are aligned and focused to concentrate and multiply a person’s life force. Multitasking moderns with multiple gadgets often lack concentration. Their life force is scattered rather than harnessed and multiplied to plant the seeds that produce fruit in a life of excellence.

Yeshua said “Come to me, all who are world weary and burdened down, then I will give you rest. Accept my yoke and learn from me, for I am compassionate, then you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Yoking body, mind, heart and spirit in a disciplined life is not the easy way at first. Still, it is the best way. It leads to a place of tranquility, while an undisciplined life leads to the heavier burden of an unfit, stressful and meaningless existence. Guru Yeshua clarifies the options: voluntarily shoulder the burden of a good life that is called our dharma in Sanskrit or be crushed under the growing burden of a body and spirit pulling against each other and against the design and Designer of life.

Yeshua also said that the greatest life duty or dharma is to “love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Religion often lacks this balance. It produces intellectual faith without the heart or spiritual devotion without physical discipline. True spirituality creates harmony. Yoga Yeshua is a sacred path to the balanced and blissful life that is your destiny.

In the ancient Indian Upanishads, a sage explains that the sacred sound “AUM is both immanent and transcendent, so using it one can attain the personal and the impersonal.” AUM includes all the sounds a human mouth can make from wide open to tightly closed lips. Likewise Yeshua says, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last, the Beginning and End.” The Greek letters Alpha and Omega also include the sounds of the Sanskrit AUM. Thus, Yeshua and Yoga observe that the ultimate reality is everything from an immanent personal God to a transcendent incomprehensible force. We can connect to this reality above us and within us.

There is little benefit to a transcendent incomprehensible force so far above us that it is irrelevant to the practicalities of life. The question of how one should live here and now in this body remains unanswered. Likewise, a God so personal that it is indistinguishable from oneself offers no fixed guiding star by which to navigate. The question of how one should live here and now in this body is answered more or less any way one desires. However, those who map the cosmos with themselves as the center rarely chart a course to a blissful and meaningful life. Spirituality is a life necessity not an optional hobby.

The enlightening and empowering core of life skills found in the teachings of Yeshua and the disciplines of yoga that I impart to my university students can also be happily shared with other groups and organizations. If you would like to set up a Yoga Yeshua training at your location, send me a message and let’s talk. Having stumbled into a life of bliss and meaning so mismatched to my mostly unspiritual self, I can’t really decline passing along the bliss buzz to far more spiritual folks. I wish you the tranquility of the greatest yogi and the wisdom of the greatest guru: Yeshua.

Yoga and Buddha: What's the relationship?

Yoga scholars often differ in characterizing the exact relationship between Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras and Buddhism. Karen O’Brien finds the text weaving Buddhist strands into a Sankhya textile with the Buddhist terminology paralleling the Sankhya metaphysics. Pradeep Gokhale believes Sankhya and Buddhism to be the text’s primary influences with the Yoga Sutras fitting Buddhist psychology into a Sankhya framework. He sees Patañjali learning from Buddhists as Gautama learned from Brahmanists and hears echoes of the Buddhist Dhammapada rustling through Patañjali’s eight limbs.

What is Authentic Yoga?

Imagine yoga’s history as India’s geography. You are flying over the Ganges River from its source in the Himalayas to its mouth on the Bay of Bengal. You can’t see much. Most of the terrain is blanketed in clouds just as much of yoga’s past is cloaked in the mists of time. Occasionally, the vista opens up. You gaze intensely at each of these viewpoints to note the flow has grown in size and changed in color from tributaries that fed the river at junctions you did not witness but can reliably assume, much like academics squinting at the few yoga texts that dot the course of yoga’s development note shifts suggesting a new ideological stream has added to the winding course of yoga’s historical evolution.

Yoga Olmeca IV: Constructing a Monumental Life

The Olmec city of La Venta has both warrior intimidation entrance and also a geek stimulation entrance, so dorks now rush in where savages once feared to even tread. There’s no pen holder bulging from my shirt or toilet paper dangling from my pants. Still, I proudly show my university professor ID for free admission and then bounce through the doorway into the tourist museum with unsightly glee.

Yoga Olmeca III: Revving the Engine and Hugging the Curves

Not all who wander are lost!” wrote J. R. R. Tolkien. Yet, society urges folks to settle down, stay put, and fit in. The gray clouds drifting across the Veracruz sky above me look truly majestic, but drifters are gazed upon less fondly down here. When did humanity’s shift from hunting to planting become a moral imperative? I often feel more compelled to hunt for meaning than plant myself on the turf. 

Yoga Olmeca II: Penetrating the Olmec World

The tossed concrete-block salad that is today’s Acayucan recalls the crumbling stone-block ruins of yesterday’s Olmec settlements without the justification of the passing time. Mexicans lack the gringo compulsion to order the world. Still, they often derive greater happiness from that world they feel less need to control, which may partly explain this American’s pursuit of happiness in this disorganized place.

Yoga Olmeca I: A Fertile Night in the Rainforest

A crocodile thrashes beneath me. Squawking and dripping of the rainforest where Mel Gibson filmed Apocalypto and Sean Connery filmed Medicine Man surround three sides of my cozy wood cabin that overhangs a lily-choked shore and overlooks a mist-shrouded isle broadcasting monkey chatter across the glassy lake. It’s Christmas in the jungle. The lush fertility extends to a curvaceous young form peacefully dozing under the blanket beside me and deeply inhaling from the cool oxygenated air. I recall a perfect day.

Sacred Yoga Texts III: The Yoga Sutras

Between the Bhagavad Gita’s spiritual yoga and the Hatha Pradipika’s physical yoga lies the Yoga Sutras text. The wisdom of the Yoga Sutras was passed down by sages from early times then later written down by Patañjali. There’s a myth that Patañjali was a serpent, who overheard the secrets of yoga while being worn as God's necklace. Here's my translation:

Sacred Yoga Texts II: The Hatha Pradipika

As detailed in our last post, the Bhagavad Gita expounded classical yoga with an epic drama. Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras then expanded classical yoga with a how-to manual of mystic proverbs. However, this inward spiritual quest for the eternal soul and ultimate reality left much confusion regarding outward physical reality. Was the body a prison of the spirit as Greek philosophy mused or a temple of the spirit as Jewish scripture held? Is the world a garden of delight, a hellhole of suffering, or just an illusion? For a thousand years, this controversy swirled around India weaving diverse philosophical strands into a sturdy rope called Hatha yoga, which is encapsulated in the Hatha Pradipika text we will discuss in this essay.