Members of Latter-day Saints turn to yoga for its physical and spiritual benefits

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Wendy Cullum lay flat on her back completely relaxed in “shavasana” or “corpse pose,” a common closing position in a yoga class.

She and several other members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were finishing up a 90-minute session in the sanctuary of the only Hindu temple in Spanish Fork, Utah, a bucolic community about 55 miles (88 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City.

This small Thursday evening yoga class at Shri Shri Radha Krishna Temple in the heart of Mormon country is an example of the embrace of yoga and meditation among members of the faith, widely known as the Mormon church.

Yoga in Sanskrit means “union with the divine.” For Cullum, her practice helps deepen her connection to her Mormon faith and God, though yoga originated as an ancient spiritual practice in India rooted in Hindu philosophy.

“When I close my eyes and focus on him during shavasana, it helps me leave all my worries behind and trust in God more,” said Cullum, who has been practicing for five years.

She’s not alone. Many Latter-day Saints who do yoga and other contemplative practices — mindfulness, breath work, meditation and more — say they are able to seamlessly integrate their faith into the process.

This is not a new phenomenon either. A 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center found 27% of members of the church believe in yoga not just as exercise, but as a spiritual practice, compared with 23% of the general public who share this belief.

Reconciling a spiritual identity crisis

Philip McLemore, a former U.S. Air Force and hospice chaplain, taught other members of his faith how to meditate for more than a decade. His yoga practice started earlier than that following a spinal injury. Yoga not only helped him heal physically, he said, but it also made him more compassionate.

Unable to achieve this positive change with his faith alone, McLemore questioned his spiritual identity.

“I had to ask: Who am I?” McLemore said. “Am I a Mormon guy, a Christian? Or am I this yogi guy?”

He found his answer in Matthew 11:28-30: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

McLemore emphasized the word “yoke,” which shares the same Indo-European root word — yeug or yuj — as “yoga.” It means to join or unite.

He determined that Christ’s teachings are consistent with the classic yogas in the Bhagvad Gita, the main Hindu sacred text, which speaks to the eternal nature of the soul. McLemore’s struggle ended there and his two worlds merged.

His practice now takes place in front of a small shrine in his study, with a figurine of Christ in a meditative pose flanked by those of Hindu gods Krishna bearing a flute and Shiva performing his cosmic dance.

The body-mind connection

Like McLemore, LeAnne Tolley’s yoga practice began with an injury that left her unable to do her typical gym workouts. Tolley, a Latter-day Saint and a yoga teacher, uses yoga therapy to help her clients with eating disorders and other behavioral issues.

Tolley said when she started practicing yoga, she met with resistance from some Christians outside her faith, even though she saw no conflict. She said yoga changed her life by helping her overcome “exercise addiction” and understand that the mind and body are connected.

“Most Western spirituality sometimes places excessive focus on the spirit and leads people to believe that the body doesn’t matter,” she said. “My faith teaches that God has a physical body — an exalted, celestial, perfected body. What it means to become like God is to get to a point where my body is just as important as my spirit, that they are all perfectly aligned.”

It’s dismaying, she says, for her to hear some people tell her she cannot do yoga and be a Latter-day Saint.

“What I’ve learned from yoga only fortifies, enhances and deepens my personal faith,” she said. “The pieces in yoga that don’t fit in with my faith practice, I just leave them out. I just take those pieces that help me and make sense for me.”

While many Latter-day Saints have adopted yoga for health and fitness, the church took the intentional step of recommending yoga as a way for its missionaries to stay physically fit, said Matthew Bowman, chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.

He said some church members, particularly women, have talked about how yoga helped them get in touch with their own divine identity and their identity as women. It has also helped some unpack a contradiction within the church’s theology, where there is sometimes shaming around the body while also insisting that bodies are divine, Bowman said.

Spiritual practice in lieu of religion

For Naomi Watkins, who says she left the Latter-day Saints after experiencing a disconnect between her body and mind about eight years ago, yoga offered a spiritual lifeline.

“Being a woman in Mormonism, I felt very cut off from my body because of the garments I had to wear and having seen how women were treated differently,” she said, adding that breathing exercises, or breath work, in yoga helped her make that vital body-mind connection and quiet the constant inner chatter.

Above all, Watkins said, yoga gave her the freedom to take cues from her body and move in ways that felt right and good.

Now, yoga is her spiritual practice.

“It’s about reclaiming my own inner voice, my wisdom,” Watkins said. “Our cells carry generations of practices and stories and knowledge. Yoga has helped me tap into those things for myself in a way my faith did not. I know how my body talks to me now. My body often knows things before my brain does.”

Synthesizing yogic practices with Mormonism

For some like Thomas McConkie, delving deeper into “yogic meditative paths” led him back to his Mormon roots. He had left the faith at 13 and stayed away for two decades.

“I realized there were resonances in the depths of that practice that were calling me back home to my native tradition, to my ancestry,” he said.

As he re-embraced the faith of his childhood, McConkie said he began to see a path unfold before him forged by contemplatives, such as the early Christian hermits who traversed the Egyptian desert in the 4th and 5th centuries. Eight years ago, McConkie founded Lower Lights in Salt Lake City, a community of meditators, many of whom, like him, synthesize their contemplative faith with their Mormon faith.

“In Latter-day Saint theology, all matter is spirit and all creation is actually composed of divine light,” McConkie said. “Yogic and meditative practices help us bring forth that light and live our lives in a way that glorifies the divine.”

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