During my college years in the mid-1990s, I explored the ancient practice of yoga. It started off as a seemingly healthy activity. I even found a great sense of community with fellow practitioners; it felt like a throwback to the 1960s hippie spiritual culture. We were seeking enlightenment through Eastern practices, and there was no critical analysis regarding it. Eventually, I stopped doing yoga. It wasn’t the panacea that adepts promised it would be. I found more inner peace being engrossed in books about the connection between emotional distress and physical illness than when I was doing yoga postures and Eastern meditation all those years.
By the end of the 1990s, the momentum of yoga’s popularity started accelerating. Today it is a normal component of many Americans’ fitness and self-care routines. In 2023, according to Statista, over 34 million people in the U.S. participated in yoga. But is this actually a good thing for our Judeo-Christian values?
Being a middle-aged man, I no longer have the naivety of a college kid. The accumulation of about 30 years of hindsight has led me to this assessment of yoga—the deeper you get into its world, the more it resembles mankind’s fall from grace.
Diabolical Attacks on the Mind
One red flag that I took no heed to was the mental health issues among those in my yoga community. Several struggled with depression, suicidal ideation, and explosive anger. This goes against the many studies that suggest that yoga and meditation improve mental health and reduce stress. I made the simpleton assumption that perhaps my fellow yogis weren’t practicing enough.
The psychological ills I noticed years ago are very similar to what has been revealed in social media and blog discussions recently. The occult-practicing community has been taken in by the notion of “ascension symptoms.” In short, practitioners of esoteric meditation techniques believe as they become more proficient in their spiritual practices, they are reaching higher levels of being, and as a byproduct of spiritual ascent, physical and psychological symptoms start to present themselves. Under this New Age deception, indications such as depressed mood, increased anxiety, disorientation, or fatigue are seen as milestones rather than warning signs.
Instead of egging people on this speculative path, the adherents should be pointing out its glaring inadequacies. This collective denial of forewarnings of a downward spiral suggests there is something insidious afoot. People involved in Christian deliverance ministry would point out the familiar snares of the occult.
Exorcists warn us that one of the ways preternatural beings attack humans is through diabolical obsession, which are demonic attacks on a person’s mind. A barrage of intrusive thoughts would be an example of this kind of demonic activity. Another common evil that encroaches on us is what Isaiah 61:3 calls the “spirit of grief” (sometimes translated as the “spirit of heaviness” or a “faint spirit”). At present day, we would call this the “spirit of depression.” If yoga fails to improve your mood even with a steady dose of medication and counseling, you might as well add deliverance prayers to your daily routine and renounce the occult. If you read the New Testament, you’ll notice healing is often accompanied by the forgiveness of sins or deliverance from evil spirits. Only the authority of God can give you that grace, but you must repent if you want the chains of diabolical obsession broken.
The Occult Third Eye
When you go beyond the physical exercises of yoga, you end up experimenting with its various forms of meditation. One common aim of these techniques is to open the “third eye.” This invisible eye located in the forehead, between the eyebrows, is advertised as the eye of clairvoyance. It allows you to perceive what is beyond the natural world. Practitioners of the occult think they’re getting information from the supernatural world through it, but empirical knowledge from exorcists indicates that occultists have opened portals that should not have been opened. The Catholic Church gravely warns about these kinds of practices and so does Scripture (see CCC 2116-2117 and Deuteronomy 18:10-12).
The Serpent of Old
Another common practice in the various meditative forms of yoga is the upward pulling of energy from the base of the spine to the brain. This energy sitting in the coccyx area is seen as an evolutionary force that awakens horizons of consciousness as it makes its ascent to the brain. This evolutionary energy, referred to as kundalini, is actually depicted as a serpent rising through several energetic points in the spinal and cranial areas. The energetic points, known as chakras, are believed to contain particular spiritual attributes and power. The third eye, which is also known as the ajna chakra, is the endpoint of the kundalini’s path for certain systems of yoga; in other systems, it’s the chakra at the crown of the head. Mantras and secret breathing techniques are used to pull the kundalini through the various energy centers and also push it back down to the coccyx.
Another terrible surprise about kundalini yoga is that the spine and brain together are sometimes visualized as a tree with roots and branches. Are you seeing an ugly, familiar picture here? You have a serpent rising up a tree offering you fruits of forbidden knowledge. Why would anyone want to reenact that tragic biblical scene? But such is the fallen nature of man. It’s no wonder that online discussions are talking about the prevalence of ascension symptoms, which is an obvious misnomer. Back when I was doing yoga, the people in my community called it “kundalini syndrome.” Whatever they want to call it, at some point they’ll have to admit that they’re taking fruit from a branch of the occult.
Editor’s Note: This article is part one of a two-part series examining the practice of yoga.
Photo by Avrielle Suleiman on Unsplash
