Is Yoga Religious? An Honest Answer

Yoga has religious roots, and what happens in most modern sessions is physical exercise. Both of those are true at once, and people who tell you only one half are usually selling something. Either a claim that the practice is spiritually essential, or a claim that it has no history at all.

This article is the long version of that answer, because it is a fair question and it deserves better than a slogan.

Where it actually comes from

Yoga developed over roughly two thousand years within the religious and philosophical traditions of the Indian subcontinent. It appears in Hindu texts, in Buddhist and Jain ones, and in the writing of teachers who disagreed with each other about almost everything else. Calling it "Hindu" is too narrow; calling it "not religious" is not honest either.

What is worth knowing is that the posture practice most people mean by the word today is recent. The physical, exercise-shaped practice of standing shapes done in sequence took its modern form in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on older yoga, on Indian wrestling and physical culture, and on European gymnastics that had arrived with the British. That history is worth reading properly if the question interests you.

So the shapes you would do in a session have a shorter and more physical history than the word attached to them suggests.

What is actually in a session

This is the part that matters more than the history, because it is the part you can decide about.

A physical yoga session is movement and breathing. Shapes held or moved through, attention on what the body is doing, some slow breathing, usually a few minutes lying still at the end. Nothing in that list requires belief in anything.

Some classes add elements that are religious in origin: chanting in Sanskrit, an invocation at the start, references to deities, sometimes a small shrine in the room. These are real, they are not imagined by people who notice them, and they are optional. A great many teachers leave them out entirely.

In a one-to-one, this stops being a question you have to navigate from the back of a room. You say at the start what you do and do not want in the session, and that is what you get. Nobody has to guess, and you are not quietly opting out of something while twenty other people take part.

The word "namaste" and other small things

Worth saying plainly, because it comes up. Namaste is a common greeting in several Indian languages, the equivalent of "hello" said respectfully. It is not a prayer. Whether a teacher uses it at the end of a session is a matter of habit and taste, and you can ask them not to.

Sanskrit names for shapes are similar: they are the names those shapes have, the way ballet positions have French names. Using them is not devotional. Not using them is fine too.

What we think, since you are reading our site

We teach live sessions with India-based teachers, and we think the lineage of the practice is worth being honest about rather than sanded off. Pretending yoga has no religious history to make it more marketable is its own kind of disrespect, to the tradition and to you.

At the same time, we are not going to tell you that you must accept a philosophy to benefit from the movement. The physical practice works on the body whatever you believe. Plenty of our students are religious, of several religions, and plenty are not.

If your own faith leads you to avoid certain elements, tell your teacher before the first session and they will build around it. That conversation takes two minutes and it happens more often than you would think.

Questions people ask

Do I have to chant or say anything in a session?

No. Chanting, invocations and any spoken element are optional and can be left out entirely. In a one-to-one you agree the content of the session with the teacher beforehand, so this is settled before you start rather than something to sit through.

Is yoga compatible with being Muslim, Christian or Jewish?

That is a question for you and, if you want one, a religious authority you trust, not for a yoga teacher, and not for us. What we can tell you is what the practice actually contains, so that you are deciding about the real thing. Many practitioners of every faith practise the physical side without difficulty; some prefer to avoid specific elements, and those elements can be removed.

Why do teachers use Sanskrit names if it is not religious?

Because those are the names the shapes have, in the language the older texts are written in. It is closer to using Italian words in music than to using liturgy. A teacher who prefers English names is not doing anything wrong either.

Is meditation part of yoga, and is that religious?

Meditation appears in yoga and in most religious traditions, and also in entirely secular clinical settings. The attention and breathing practices taught in a physical session are usually the secular kind. If you would rather skip them and keep the session to movement, say so.