Religion: The Christian as Yogi

Sit on the floor, or preferably on a large, but firm cushion, and stretch out your legs in front of you. Fold in the left leg and put the left foot so that the heel is pushed well into the fold of the groin . . . Then fold in the right leg, grasp the foot and place its sole uppermost on the folded left leg . . . Sit up straight and then without pausing lean the trunk forwards as far as possible, stretching the arms vigorously behind you, right hand grasping left wrist. . . Breathe deeply in this position for a few seconds, then sit up.

This yoga position, called “Reintegration,” is recommended by a new sort of yogi. Not only a Westerner but a Benedictine monk, Father J.M. Dechanet found in yoga a valuable approach to Christian prayer and practice. Last week his book, Christian Yoga (Harper; $3.75), was on U.S. bookstands, complete with nihil obstat and imprimatur. Father Dechanet, 54, now prior of the Monastery of Saint-Benoit at Kansenia in the new Congo republic, has already found a following for his ideas in France among Christians who admire the physical and psychological disciplines of the East without accepting its negative and impersonal theology.

The Tripartite Man. Benedictine Yogi Dechanet has no use for such Western Orientalists as Jean Herbert, who has written: “Nothing is simpler than to supply Western Christian names in place of Hindu in the treatises on yoga technique.” Dechanet is also on guard against the danger that the practice of yoga turns him toward “the Self, the It, the Absolute, the Wholly-One, the vague ‘Ungraspable’ of Hindu mystics” instead of toward “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the living God, my Creator and Father.” What Dechanet set out to do when he first began to practice yoga in his early 40s was not to turn it into something Christian, but to use it for Christian purposes. His main Christian purpose: to harmonize the three elements in man which the early church fathers designated as anima (the body and its functions), animus (the reasoning, analytical mind) and spiritus (the loving soul, yearning toward the Divine).

Father Dechanet chose one of the most basic forms of yoga: hatha-yoga, the discipline of the body and breathing. The hatha-yogis of India use 84 different asanas, or postures. For Christian yogis, Dechanet recommends 14, and illustrates them with simple diagrams (see cuts).

Breathing & Faith. At first a Westerner may feel ridiculous, he admits, standing on his head and blocking his nostrils alternately while he breathes. But in a short time he will feel the physical benefits of the practice (“a general unwinding, a euphoria”) as well as the spiritual ones. After ten minutes in the Pole position, followed by another ten in the Full Backwards Bend or Reintegration position, “when breathing has become so slow and deep that it may seem as if the breath reaches the base of the intestines . . . there is no difficulty in attaching yourself wholly to the subject of prayer. I say ‘wholly,’ for you feel truly ‘re-collected,’ gathered together.” With the body perfectly relaxed and still and the mind quiet, “from the depths of the soul there rises up towards God a silent concert, as it were, of praise and adoration.”

Though the Christian yogi does not appear to be different from other men, “a trained eye may be able to recognize him by his gait, bearing, gestures or reserve.” There is a seal on everything he does because he shuns habit and auto matic behavior—he is present with his whole being in whatever he is doing. The Christian yogi knows that he has gradually made his body into a faithful servant. “You order it (and it obeys) to help you to practise fully even virtues as great as faith, hope and Christian charity.”