What’s the deal with Ignatian yoga? A skeptical Jesuit finds out.

“Ignatian yoga,” a new entity that is drawing enthusiastic crowds to retreats and workshops across the country, sounds like a gimmick. People love yoga. People love the spirituality of St. Ignatius Loyola. Mash the two together, and you have created a nice, marketable concept that can sweep a bundle of folks into the arms of the Lord and/or the Society of Jesus. 

A Jesuit yoga teacher in a cobalt blue T-shirt (“IHS” nestled in the middle of a lotus flower) guides students through Christian spirituality and then mesmerizes them with yoga poses. They do this in a church sanctuary, rubber mats spread on marble floors. It seems perfect for a world in which anything can become anything, in which all spiritualities and traditions are completely fluid and can bleed into each other with little self-awareness or sense of fundamental boundaries.

It seems perfect because the Catholic faith is spiritual and yoga is spiritual and both have to do with people and people are good and they have souls and a corner of a good person’s soul touches Jesus and another corner of the soul brushes against yoga because yoga exists, and thus Jesus and Patanjali, Francis Xavier and Swami Vivekananda, Rome and Delhi, the empty tomb and the emptying of desire are essentially in some broader cosmic sense part of, if not the same thing. Why make distinctions between the two when to distinguish is to deny, to exclude, to create harsh boundaries? And so yoga and Christian spirituality can be in some ways two co-equal wings of the same Creator and his entire recommended path of living, and so it all works out. It all works out. Time for final savasana.

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