For long term yoga practitioners: do you feel you're contacting evil spirits?

Wow.

Yes, and farts are escaping evil spirits seeking out new victims. (Why aren’t there more atheists?!?)

LOL, that’s hilarious XD

And here I thought these crazy religious nutjobs couldn’t get any stupider.

What is their reasoning that makes them think yoga does that lol, I’d love to hear their explanation lol.

Yeah, that’s nothing new. I got that same message decades ago from my Christian upbringing. It was because of Yoga’s roots as a Hindu (i.e. “pagan”) religious discipline. The thinking was that pagan religions are the Devil’s tool for bringing people under his influence, so yoga is just a way of opening the door.

Of course, yoga is more than “stretching”. Americans have turned it into a kind of exercise/wellness program, but it was developed as a path to spiritual insight. It just happens to be a form of insight that Christianity doesn’t endorse, so they’re deeply suspicious.

@thorninmud what sort of spiritual insight? I don’t know what this means.

@Aster “Spiritual insight” is a lousy term, but it’s the one that has the most currency, so we’re stuck with it.

The religious traditions that use yoga believe that it’s possible for people to access levels of consciousness that are obscured by our ordinary ways of thinking and understanding the world and the self. That’s the kind of insight I’m referring to. Yoga is thought to quiet the obstructive thoughts by getting the attention down into the body, and using body position to support concentration.

If this were really true, I’d join a yoga class. Sounds kind of cool.

@thorninmud yes; when you are doing the postures you aren’t thinking of family members , the President or the weather. If that’s what you meant by quieting obstructive thoughts. This is very temporary.
But what does accessing levels of consciousness mean?

@Aster Disclaimer: I’m not Hindu (I’m Buddhist), and most forms of Yoga come from Hindu traditions. What we Buddhists do is similar in many ways, but we don’t put as much emphasis on the body stuff.

Obstructive thoughts are thoughts that separate the self from the world of objects. Most thought has at least some of that character, because we think in subject/object terms. Throwing yourself wholeheartedly into an activity and concentrating your attention tends to disrupt that kind of thought. It is, as you say, temporary, but insight only takes a moment. It may take a lifetime for that moment to come, though.

Hinduism (like Buddhism) posits that consciousness is like a movie projected onto a screen. You can only see the movie because of the screen, and in the truest sense all you’re ever really seeing is the screen. The screen, in turn, would be invisible if not for the movie playing on its surface. But in watching the movie, you forget all about the screen and get lost in the illusion of the movie. Ordinary consciousness is like being lost in the illusion of the movie, a movie in which you’re one of the actors. If the projector flickers off for just a moment that illusion is broken, and you become aware of the screen, which is unchanging and empty. That’s like a moment of insight.

Religious obstructionists fear intelligent and/or creative people. Christian oppressors would routinely murder people who could read and write during the dark ages. It would take me several thousand words to address your questions here. Many spiritually inclined nonreligious people now think that fundamentalist Christian beliefs are of the Devil, so there we’re even.