August 13, 2024 • 58 mins
Welcome to the Seeds of Change podcast! In this episode, host Mark A. Turnipseed dives deep into the intersection of yoga and Christianity. Mark shares his personal journey of surrendering his life to Christ and how he integrates his faith into every aspect of his life, including his fitness routine.
Joining Mark is Tracy Winn, a yoga instructor from Atha Yoga Chalet in Delray Beach. Tracy shares her inspiring story of how yoga brought her closer to God, reigniting her faith and reshaping her life. Together, they explore the complexities of practicing yoga as Christians, addressing common concerns and misconceptions.
Through personal anecdotes and thoughtful discussion, Mark and Tracy provide a fresh perspective on how yoga can be a tool for spiritual growth and divine union. They emphasize the importance of intention and how every action, including yoga, can be an act of worship to God.
If you've ever wondered how to reconcile your faith with your yoga practice, this episode offers valuable insights and hope. Tune in to discover how you can embrace both your love for yoga and your devotion to Christ, creating a harmonious and fulfilling spiritual journey.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome back to the Seeds of Change podcast. I am your host, Mark A.
Turnipseed, and I'm absolutely excited to chat with you today.
But come to think of it, I've never actually started a show where I say,
I'm not really excited to talk with you today.
This is just something that I love to do. And I've got some really,
really interesting stuff going on in my life right now, because I've recently really wanted to.
(00:32):
I just had this desire inside my heart, and a lot of you might have had this
as Christian followers, but it's been to completely give my life to Christ,
my everything, my all. I want to do complete surrender.
And in order to do complete surrender, that means everything.
That means applying the principles of Christianity to everything that I do,
(00:53):
from my relationships, from my romantic relationships, to my friend relationships.
But also the fitness that I do.
Fitness to me has been absolutely essential to who I've become,
to helping me to get out of my heroin addiction and to helping me lose a whole
(01:13):
bunch of weight, to helping me to develop a self-confidence in order to create
things like businesses or write books, to do podcasts.
All of this stuff really started to come about through fitness.
So in essence, fitness was really where God started to really speak to me,
right? Where this whole thing started to go into motion.
So I've got to apply this principle to fitness as well, the Christian-based principles, right?
(01:41):
If I'm going to really surrender everything, or am I just a fitness addict, right?
Am I actually doing something that God doesn't care about at all?
Which that does not make sense to me, because God began to speak to me through fitness, right?
So, obviously, he is there in it.
Now, how can I reconcile aspects of fitness, though, that may have certain, you know...
(02:06):
Certain ideas headed in a different direction, right?
How can you engage in certain fitness programs that might actually be contrary
to some things that some Christians believe in the church, right? And yoga is one of those.
Yoga, but there's many other ones, guys. I mean, even dance.
(02:27):
Like, if we look at it, even dance is something that's like,
is that really Christian?
And if it is And if it is Christian, then what is Christian dance and what is
not Christian dance, right?
And so there's a lot of slippery slopes that as I begin to give my life over
to Christ that I start to go, wait a second, how is this evil?
(02:47):
Like, how is this holding me back?
So today, guys, today what we're talking about over at the Seeds of Change podcast
is going to be that concept as it applies to yoga. So I know that the yoga has
blown up over the past 10 years, really.
10 years ago, I don't believe that I saw a yoga studio on almost every single block.
(03:10):
Right now, in 2024, yoga has taken over the fitness world.
If you have a fitness studio, you also have a yoga room in there.
If you wear fitness clothes, they're yoga fitness clothes.
I mean, yoga has really taken over the world. And for a lot of people,
it's a very beautiful thing, but for a lot of Christians, it's a very horrifying thing.
(03:33):
And so what we're going to be talking about today is that concept.
And I brought in a wonderful yoga instructor down here in Delray Beach.
She works at a place called Atha Yoga Chalet.
And her name is Tracy Nguyen. And Tracy has guided me in multiple sessions throughout the years.
We've developed a good friendship and just enjoy each other's presence.
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And I've always found her sessions to be very uplifting.
In fact, I've found a lot of yoga to be mostly uplifting. However,
there are a couple of instructors...
That particular place that I don't mesh with and that I do not go see the classes
because I come out feeling icky, right?
I come out feeling less than or so.
(04:16):
And so, you know, I think that's an individual level of experience.
I don't think that's a God thing or a not a God thing. I think that's just the
individual level of experience.
And I think that there's something there, there's a little nugget there that
a lot of Christians are missing, that individual, the way that God speaks to
(04:37):
us on a very individual level.
And so I just want to go ahead, guys, and now that I've introduced Tracy to
you, to hand the mic over to Tracy and let her introduce herself.
And Tracy, Gracie, would you just give us a basis of your salvation and what
(04:58):
the Christian faith, how it started in your life, really,
and how much Jesus means to you?
I think that's the best place for us to start, and we won't even get into yoga quite yet. Yeah.
I grew up loving Jesus from a very, very early age. I grew up in the church
and was heavily involved in it in youth group.
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And I think that because of that, it shaped a lot of the way that I turned out and my belief system.
But it was always something beyond religion for me.
I always had a personal, deep love for Jesus and this personal relationship.
I never felt like God was far away from me or something outside of me.
(05:42):
But again, grew up in the church. And like you, I was always heavily involved
in sports and fitness and, you know, really just God moved through my life through
that too, always, through my sports, through running. And...
I became a personal trainer in my early 20s, and the gym that I worked at,
the yoga teacher was like, I want you to come to yoga. And I was like, I'm not going to yoga.
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I don't have time for yoga. I have to run six miles and train for beach volleyball
and lift weights. I don't have time for yoga.
And she was like, come. And I remember going to my first vinyasa class, and it was amazing.
It was like dance met fitness met breath work, and I was more sore the next
day than I had ever been in my entire life. And I was hooked.
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And like two months later, and this was in 2003. And three.
So like you were saying, there was not yoga on every corner.
There were not a million yoga instructors.
And I lived on a little island called Hilton Head Island. So there was definitely
not a lot of yoga instructors there.
And the yoga teacher quit. And the GM was like, hey, Tracy, you're the new yoga teacher.
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And I was like, oh, okay. Okay. So I was thrown into teaching yoga from a very physical perspective.
The physical practice of yoga is called asana. And so that is what I taught for years.
And I loved it. I loved the fitness of it. I loved every aspect of it.
I didn't even know anything about the philosophy or the lifestyle of yoga.
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All I knew is that doing that practice and guiding others through that practice,
opened people up, and it just made them fill with love and joy.
And so I was immediately hooked. And to me, when something fills you with love
and joy, that's the Holy Spirit, that deep love, that deep exuding joy, and that's what I felt.
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And so my relationship with Jesus was strong all the way through that.
And then at some point in my late 20s and 30s, I started kind of going my own way.
I was frustrated with God not laying out life the way that I thought it should look.
And I was going to church through the whole thing, too.
And I just started feeling very far away from God for the first time.
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And it was based on my decisions. It was the choices I was making in my life,
letting those little things that I didn't used to do because I knew they didn't
honor God start to slip into my life.
And the more you start to do those things that you know are out of alignment
with the highest good, you start to pull yourself away from the presence of God.
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You're the one putting the veils over your heart that separate your recognition
of how close that He really is to you.
And I was looking for God again in church and just crying out,
like, help me, speak to me, like, get me out of this mess.
But I was still making the same decisions and the choices that were leading
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me to that path of feeling lost.
And at that point, I started doing a hot yoga practice. I wasn't teaching yoga at this point.
I was a medical device sales rep, which was also out of alignment for me.
And I knew it from the minute I signed the contract.
But I went to a yoga class and it was a Bikram class and it was the hardest
thing I've ever done in my life because my mind, you're holding these poses
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and it's 105 degrees and your mind is screaming at you.
And when you're in a place where you're unhappy with yourself,
you're upset at the choices you're making, you don't feel like you're in alignment,
you're having all these issues, the mind is just running amok and going crazy.
In regular life, it's like that, right? In everyday life. And
then you get into a class like that where you're hot and agitated and
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holding these poses and in pain and it started
undoing me like little by little and I had a
friend who was like you know the whole point
of this is to focus and she was like don't think
about what comes next don't think about how hot you
are don't think about how much you hate the posture she could just focus on
what the teacher's saying and that's it and something about that clicked and
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I started to be able to learn that I could train this mind to focus on what
I wanted it to and I would just lay on the ground in a puddle of my own sweat, crying out to God.
And it was in that quiet, though, when I was finally able to quiet my mind,
that I was able to hear God again.
And I was able to clearly see that my life was going down this little tumultuous
(10:08):
path, not because God wasn't there, because Jesus wasn't there.
It was because of the choices I was making and because I was walking in that
way. Yeah, I find it interesting.
So you have recognized in your life that when you're not walking the right path,
it's almost like symptoms come up, right?
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That is like, oh, I'm not walking the right path right now.
And those symptoms are things that are contrary to love and joy in our life.
Can you give me other examples of things that have caused great amounts of love
and joy in your life, especially if there's any of them that are rooted in the Christian church?
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In your experience, did you experience love and joy growing up in the Christian church?
Absolutely. I was so blessed with just these amazing youth group leaders that
just loved us and showed us the way. and I was very blessed to have friends
who we were all trying to walk this path with Christ together.
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And that was, it was huge. It was everything, you know, who you surround yourself
with is everything. It really matters.
And when did you lose the love and joy in the church?
Like when did that ever start to dissipate for you?
I know it sounded like you went through a time of darkness, a time of,
you know, where I was chasing my own thing.
And do you think that's ultimately because you kind of stopped feeling that
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love and joy in the church at one point?
You know, it wasn't that I stopped feeling the love and joy.
Like, I would get something from the messages, and I would feel love when I
was singing and worshiping.
But I was trying to get involved in different groups there to have that community
again, because all of my community of people were partiers.
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They were part of this other life, and I knew I needed to have these Christian
friends again, and I would go to these groups, and it just seemed like at that age,
I was in my early 30s, late 20s, early 30s, and you go to groups in that age
group, and all they care about is finding a significant other and finding their spouse.
And I would go to these Bible studies, and I would be like, oh, this is so weird.
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I'm sorry, I just can't relate to these people.
And it just wasn't, the message became so, I had grown up with it my whole life
so that the messages I was hearing in the same language, in that Christianese language,
the way that everything was interpreted, everything, it kind of went in one
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ear and out the other because I was so used to it. I'd grown up with it.
I mean, I can tell you every parable, everything, you know? And it just...
I wasn't seeing how it was relating to my life anymore. And I wasn't seeing...
How I was going to find my way out of this situation in those walls when I couldn't find the answers.
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That's so beautiful. I was just writing down a note last night,
or just now, not last night.
I was just writing down this note because the message, it sounded like,
became lost a little bit. Yeah.
And I think that happens a lot for everybody, right?
And Lart, I mean, that might be a little bit because of feelings, right?
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So maybe we're just going through a time where we have low amount of feelings.
We have dysthymia or something, and we're just down, and we don't feel the message.
So therefore, it's not ringing true.
But it sounds like after a whole lifetime of being in the church,
that maybe it was just that the message was not continuing to grow with you in essence, right?
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And I think ultimately what we see in community and in society right now is
that the message, especially in America, America was built on Christian principles.
And what we're seeing right now is symptoms, right, of a lack of love and joy,
which seems symptomatic to the same thing that you went through as an individual
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when you start to walk in a path that's not directed towards Christ.
You start to experiencing things that aren't love and joy, and then you have
to make a decision to kind of come back.
And so what I really recognize there is that what happens on the individual
level is also occurring on the greater level, right?
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And so us as believers in Christ, we need to to tackle these problems very quickly.
And I do believe that you have something here.
You have something here that is the key to that, and that you have found that.
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And so when that message became lost to you, did you lose a sense of hope?
Completely. Yeah. That's exactly what I was going to say.
I was completely hopeless, and there was this day, and this is just one of those
stories that shows God will meet you wherever you're at. if your heart is truly,
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truly seeking, He will pull out all the stops to show Himself to you.
And I was sitting in church one day, and I literally had looked down at this
piece of paper, and I wrote microscopic.
You couldn't even read it. It was this big. And it said, I have no hope.
And nobody could see it but me. It was dark in there. It's a church where all
the lights are off and everything.
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And we got up to sing, and this woman next to me who I didn't know,
I'd never seen her before. She turns to me and she's like, this is so crazy.
She was like, I've never done this before. Please don't think I'm crazy.
And she goes, but I literally just heard God tell me to tell you not to lose hope.
It was crazy. And I mean, you could tell she was freaked out.
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She was like, don't think I'm nuts.
I was like, no, I don't think you're nuts. This is crazy.
You know, and she went on to tell me the story how she had lost hope.
And that was the end of it. And then we finished the song and then we sang the
next song and I looked over and she was gone.
And I was like, and I asked my friends next to me, I was like,
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was there a lady next to me? And they were like, yes, there was. I was like, okay, good.
And then, but it was just crazy that I needed something that big at that point.
I needed a miracle like that. And it happened.
I just think that God will meet you wherever you're at.
And I had lost hope. I had no hope that God's plan for my life was going to play out.
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And because I didn't have hope in that, I didn't trust in the plan.
I didn't trust the alignment.
I was like, well, then I'm going to do it the way I'm going to do it.
I'm going to get the jobs I need to do. I'm going to make all my money.
I'm going to choose where I go, what I do, who I hang out with.
And not regard you because you're not doing it in the timeline that I think it should happen.
So in that desert and then your darkness and in this space of like,
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well, I don't know if it's necessarily dark, but it's a space void of the message, void of the word.
Ultimately, y'all, that's hell if we look deeper into it, you know,
because it's the only place that, I mean, the word is everything, right?
So ultimately, if you're living without the word, you've got a place of emptiness and hopelessness.
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And yeah, you're running around and you're trying to fill it with things of
the world, like your job and for Tracy, like her job, right?
And then a lot of people... And you were married at the time, right?
No, no. I was not married. No. I was dating lots of very wrong people.
Okay. So running around in relationships. Running around and just searching
for it in every other way, searching for it in success, in busyness.
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I mean, I slept like four hours a night. I was training for beach volleyball
every day, playing in tournaments every weekend, like literally never quiet, never still,
never introspective or contemplative, just keeping myself so busy so that I
didn't have to deal with the mess that I was creating.
Did you have any health problems?
(18:21):
Huge. Yeah. My body eventually like shut down and I think I was like 34. for.
And I got so sick that nothing could fix it. And I was crazy.
I was taking Adderall. I was living off of quad shots of espresso every day,
running six miles a day, training for volleyball,
getting off of my work at my medical sales job and bartending all night,
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like literally crazy. Thousand miles an hour.
Yeah. And got so sick. And that getting sick was the beginning of this whole journey. That was...
That was my opening into holistic health, which is what I am in now.
And that's when you were, basically when you were sick was when you got introduced to the asanas.
A little bit after. A little bit after. Yeah, yeah. And I had been teaching
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already for like 13 years.
I was in a break of yoga at this point in my life. Okay, okay, okay.
But it was God slowing me down.
If you're not slowing down enough to hear God, then something in your life will
happen that will make you slow down. because again, he'll try to reach you and
speak to you in any way possible.
And if you're running so hard that you can't see it, you're gonna trip and something's
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gonna happen that's gonna make you slow down and quiet down, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the physical elements caused you to slow down and at that
point, it was now switch jobs.
Switch jobs and switch lifestyle, right?
Almost, I was almost there. Then I moved out to the beach and then I found a
Bikram practice and started doing the yoga. and it was there that I started
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like reawakening to the presence of Christ in my life.
I started hearing again. I started making choices that I knew were in alignment.
And like we, you and I were just talking about before this, I started following
my heart and I knew that I had always wanted to help people. I wanted to serve.
And I think serving, if you're ever in a rut in your life, if you're ever stuck,
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serving others is the surefire, absolute 100% way to get out of it.
And it's a perfect equation because it's the way of Jesus, right?
Yes. Now, I have a question for you because I often come up with this follow your heart idea also.
And then a lot of times a voice will come in my head that's like, no, die to yourself.
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Totally. Die to your desires. Die to. So I think that, you know.
There's a differentiation. It's good. A lot of people, right,
are not conscious enough maybe to differentiate between things of your heart and your flesh or...
And God's heart, right? Totally. Like if you've given your life over to Christ, Christ is within you.
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And so it's almost like you have a two different hearts in essence, right?
Yeah. Or in the terms of yoga, we have this ego and we have the soul.
We are two-part human beings. Yeah. One is not bad. One is not good.
We need the ego, our individual self to live on this planet as humans. That's what we are.
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And then we have the soul, this part of us that's divinely connected to God
at all times. And it's the integration of those two.
And that does come a lot of times in the quiet and the stillness and realizing
where is your egoic nature driving the ship?
Where are your desires out of alignment with the highest good?
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And you can feel that within you. When you make a choice and you feel apprehension,
that's your body's symptom, like you were saying, that you're not in alignment.
So this is ultimately where most of the argument comes from, right?
Is that yoga means to yoke, to yoke with the spirits, the Hindu spirits,
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you know, through the different postures and even hand positions and breathing.
And of course, like I have experienced that aspect of yoga before.
I have yoked to other spiritual influences throughout yoga.
But the yoke that you are talking about is actually the yoking of the spirit
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and our physical presence on this planet, which is very, very biblical, right?
Yeah. I mean, Jesus used to talk about leaving and going to meditate all the time. He went and sat.
I mean, and it never says what he did while he's going off into the desert to meditate.
But that's what he was doing. I could almost guarantee that he was breathing.
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He was paying attention to his breath.
I bet he was- He was being with God. Moving. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think when you read the gospels, you'll see that at every big turn,
at every point where he had a massive crowd following him, at every point that
he had just had like a really big healing and all this buzz was happening,
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always after that, he would leave and he would go off alone by himself to pray and to meditate.
And Jesus was so wise, and he's God, but he was also human.
And to me, he was checking his spirit. He was checking his ego in those times.
You have 10,000 people sitting on a hill listening to every word that you're
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going to say as if it's life itself.
And the egoic nature within us wants to take a hold of that.
He's checking it. Just like his disciples were. The disciples were constantly
like thinking, who's greater?
What's greater? I'm better than you, blah, blah, blah, because that's our humanness.
And I think that when Jesus went off to meditate and pray, it was to realign
himself with God, to get that soul into the front position of the ego,
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to make sure that that natural state stayed in its place.
Yeah. Yeah, that's such a beautiful, beautiful idea that I haven't really thought about. out.
But yeah, that's ultimately what we experience in yoga.
And when we do, it seems like, too, that those are in the Bible,
that those are all the times that God actually speaks to Jesus.
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Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Totally. And I think, you know, as far as the ego
and the soul and yoga meaning to yoke or union,
you know, yoga means divine union, and it is talking about God.
So in Hinduism, they have all of those different gods that are all aspects of
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the one God that we call God or God Almighty in the Christian faith or Father God.
They kind of typify a type of energy, in essence, and a type of experiential,
worldly energy, right? Yeah.
But then if we combine them all together and add them all up,
all those energies combined ultimately lead to creation, which ultimately point
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towards God, right? Yeah.
And so for me, once I learned the philosophy of yoga, and it started with Anuttara
and taking trainings with Philip Christolodou, it completely changed my life.
But I realized why it resonated so much with me because it was learning how
to surrender my ego, learning to surrender those parts of me that wanted to
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keep myself separate from God.
And instead take my soul, peel back those layers that realizes that God and
I are in constant communion. We are divine union.
And if you read the book of John, it's what Jesus is saying,
Father, may they be one as you and I are one.
May they be one in me, may they be one in you, and may we all be one.
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That's yoga. That's what Jesus is saying in that verse.
And I think the book of John is the most mystical book of the Bible.
I'm almost surprised it was allowed to be in the canonical Gospels,
but if you start reading the message from this lens of,
all he was talking about was union with God, he was pointing people to God and
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how to realize this connection to him, you realize how powerful the path of
yoga is actually saying the same thing that Jesus was saying. Yeah.
And yoga is from India. So when the ancient rishis went up on the mountain and
they supposedly had this download of the idea of yoga, when they came down off
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the mountain, they were in India.
And Hinduism and Buddhism were already a part of the world.
Buddhism wasn't yet, but Hinduism was. And so this science, this philosophy
of yoga—yoga is not a religion.
It is a science and a philosophy. But naturally, it started blending with the
Hinduism of the area where it came.
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And that is why the aspects of Hinduism are kind of blended into it.
Hinduism also has the elements of philosophy, and so does Buddhism is a philosophy
as well. It's not a religion. But it started crossing those.
So when you read yogic scriptures, they are a crossover of not Hindu religion,
but Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.
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And like I told you earlier, I think if you read Yogananda, I mean,
Yogananda talks about Jesus more than anything, more than Krishna,
more than any of the other Hindu gods of which he was raised.
Because he wanted to show this message and help people to see the message of
what Jesus was saying from this broader perspective.
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He wanted them to experience the divine union with God that he did.
So how do we reconcile the idea
that these Hindu gods and the poses are connected to these Hindu gods?
How do we reconcile who we're doing the poses for and...
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Is that a process that you mentally go through while you're doing yoga?
Because I don't know if that makes sense to you, but oftentimes when I'm in
my pose, my head goes back to my teachings in yoga and I'll be worshiping the
moon or something, right?
And I recognize what I'm doing and then I go, I consciously roll it back over
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into a different. Interesting. Okay.
And it's like this weird duality that's occurring right now because this is
a fairly new concept for me.
What's your experience there? My experience in every single thing I do in life,
my intention is God show yourself to me, help me to be a vessel that displays your love.
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And so every yoga class that I step into, that's it.
Every single move I'm doing, I don't care what the move is. Every single thing
is an act of worship to God.
Everything I eat, every conversation I have. Everywhere I go is an act of worship to God.
It's just an experiential living of God.
When I stage the room before my class, I'm praying over the room.
(29:02):
I'm praying over my students.
I'm praying that God would reveal himself to them through whatever I'm teaching,
through the postures, through the stillness.
And I think intention is everything.
Do you ever get the feeling, though, that it's like a Ouija board almost?
Most that you're, you're, you know,
it's like, I can have Jesus in my head while I'm doing a Ouija board.
(29:26):
Like, do you ever get that sort of feeling?
That was a big, that was a big thunder. Oh, wow. It sounds weird in these.
I know that must've been really loud. Yeah.
You know what? For me, I haven't. I never thought that yoga was bad.
And this is when a lot of Christians come to me very confused because they have
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other people telling them in their life that yoga is bad and that they are worshiping
other gods and that they're practicing idolatry.
And they're like, but I'm so confused because God's love is so alive in me when I'm in yoga.
And it It has opened my heart more to the teachings of Jesus and to God's love in my life.
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And my question is always, so if nobody said to you that this is bad and that
this is evil, would it be bad to you?
And I think that's where the whole new age to Christianity thing,
I understand people's hearts are in the right place.
They were maybe in a very dark space in new age, and if they lump yoga into
(30:31):
that category, which I don't think yoga is new age because yoga is very old.
But I understand. But to tell people
that their path is wrong and start inciting fear into them when they're experiencing
growth in the Holy Spirit and growth with God through that practice and what
the disciplines teach you is where I get kind of annoyed with it.
(30:57):
Because I've had the same thing, like you said, why we're having this podcast,
people coming to you and telling you that it's evil.
And for me, no one can say that to me because yoga is what brought me back to
God. It's what awakened my heart to the Holy Spirit.
It's what has helped me to fully realize how much this vessel can express God's
(31:19):
love through it in everything we do in our life.
Yeah. And I would be dead without it. I was in rehab.
I really didn't know if I could make it. Wow. I really didn't.
I was in rehab for heroin 10 years ago now, 10 years.
And I remember saying, you know, if I can do yoga in front, like I was in a
(31:40):
men's portion of this big old rehab center, and they had this common area.
And I don't know. I felt like I was so ashamed of everything that I was,
you know, And I was ashamed of my limitations too and my weaknesses.
And I just had this feeling inside my heart, if I could do yoga every morning,
(32:05):
that I was going to be okay.
And so it was so nerve-wracking to do because there's other men waking up in
the morning and they're having their coffee, going and smoking their cigarettes.
And I was like, am I really going to force myself to go do yoga while these
men are being manly men in the morning? it. And I was like, I don't know if I can do this.
I don't know if I can do this. And I woke up, it was about two weeks into the program.
(32:29):
And I, I did yoga in front of people as they were walking out.
And I remember in that moment to go in, this is, this is my answer.
Like I, I instantly there, I saw myself for the first time in a very, very long time.
I saw myself as worthy, capable and confident and all the things that the Bible tells me.
(32:52):
Now, I didn't know anything about
Hinduism, anything about how yoga and anything like that at the moment.
My ex-wife had taught me about some different poses as she used to be a yoga
instructor and I had had a back injury.
And so, you know, I just started stretching. I did a really easy yoga flow.
(33:15):
And man, And it wasn't a lot of time until God began to speak to me a lot more through yoga.
Yoga is also what led me into triathlon, which helped me to overcome all my
other issues, which was all my Xanax and all the stuff that I was stuck on.
(33:36):
And then really set my life on the direction that it is now.
And then yoga became a dark practice for me because I turned it into one.
So I started studying witchcraft after I came out of the closet,
not too long out, about two years after I came out of the closet,
(33:57):
I started studying witchcraft and started to apply that into my yoga.
So a lot of visualizations, a lot of magic, a lot of, you know,
antichrist stuff, honestly.
And And what's crazy though, is that God still ended up speaking to me in that.
And told me, get out of that. And I'm going to start working so much more magic
(34:22):
through you than you've ever been able to imagine comprehending making in yourself.
Just take your hands off the wheel, Mark. You do not have to do any of this
magic. I'm going to do it all for you.
I love that. He taught me that in a yoga session while I was doing that.
Right? While I was doing my magic.
(34:43):
I mean, our paths, God's, the kingdom does not operate in linear time.
We, our brains on this earth, understand our lives from point A to point B,
from a beginning to an end.
And we envision these paths going off to the side that are going to lead us somewhere bad.
But there's not a single line. The kingdom realm is spatial time. It's beyond space.
(35:07):
It's beyond time. And so when we span out, we see that everything in our life
is leading us to God because God is it.
Grace has already won. God is
everything. There is nothing that he has not created. He is the creator.
And all of creation is constantly evolving and unfolding back towards him.
(35:32):
And so it's because of duality. It's because of this dual world we live in.
Going so far into the darkness, going into these places, that we're able to see the good.
And it sucks. Sometimes it's a longer path, right?
And it's a hurtful path, and you hurt yourself, and you hurt others, and things may happen.
But I firmly believe that God's going to use any aspect of your life to show himself to you.
(35:58):
And if that's through the lens of a church and through the teachings of exactly
the Christian doctrine in the Bible, then that's awesome. them.
But there is a whole slew of people who are never going to step foot into a church.
There are a whole bunch of people at rehab who are never going to step foot into a church.
There are a whole bunch of people who are so outside of their body that they
(36:20):
can't even imagine doing yoga or doing fitness.
And so God might not speak to them that way.
But to think that God doesn't speak in these areas that we just don't understand
because we live in this culture where it's not a common thing,
I think it's a little bit crazy.
Yeah. I was just watching this one video that said, Kundalini Yoga is the most
(36:41):
dangerous of all yoga, and you're welcoming the serpent itself into you.
Well, can I tell you something very interesting about my Kundalini Yoga awakening experience?
Yeah. The next day, I was turned on by women.
Literally, I stopped enjoying sex with men that day.
Wow. And then I totally didn't believe what was going on. I totally did not
(37:07):
believe what was going on.
And I kept on practicing with other men, right?
But really, it was like compulsion. I just felt like that's what I did now.
But I started to recognize, I was like, I do not enjoy this whatsoever.
I don't even know what I'm... And I started to be like, man,
I would see these women. I'd be like, man.
(37:27):
So in essence, the yoga aligned me back to the way God had formed me to begin with. Right?
Amazing. And back closer to nature, closer to my normal nature.
Yeah. Isn't that just fascinating?
And so how am I supposed to deny?
(37:47):
And how am I supposed to say that it's demonic? Because I actually,
I've done demonic stuff. You know, I've actually worked with demons,
studied them, you know, connected with them, invited them into me.
Wow. But I can tell you one thing.
Kundalini yoga was not that. It awoke me to another aspect of God.
(38:08):
Now, I will say, though, that what I've kind of recognized is that everything
in yoga offers me, and everything in all these other different religions that
I've practiced, or as you say, not necessarily religions,
but philosophies, including philosophy.
I got my minor in philosophy because I love that stuff so much,
(38:28):
and it can almost be kind of a religion in and of itself. Totally. Right.
But in all my studies of any of those and applying any of those to my life,
I feel like I get to see a glimpse of who God is, but I don't get to see the
whole thing unless I come through the Word.
And so I know that even though I did enlighten something within me that is connected
(38:54):
with my natural self through kundalini yoga and that aligned me with God's purpose with me,
I know that that was only a glimpse of it. I know that that wasn't the answer.
I know that yoga is not the answer to God. No, but it was a part of your path.
Yeah, it's part of my path. Yeah. And it's exercise.
It's connecting that mind and the body. And like you said, there's a lot of
(39:18):
people out there who aren't even connected.
They're so far disconnected that they can't even come to the church.
And y'all, it sounds like what Tracy's he's talking about here is that yoga
could help bring people into the church.
In essence, if you can connect the mind and body through some sort of stimulation, right?
This is what we practice with EMDR therapy, right?
(39:40):
If we can connect mind and body through some sort of stimulation,
then people can actually be present in their life.
And stop being so concerned and so worried and so anxious.
And they can take part in their life. They can be there for their kids.
So all the symptoms start to dissipate of otherwise bipolar mental health issues,
(40:04):
preventing them from being good parents or preventing them from going to the church.
And at that point, they can finally step out of their shell and then start to be human beings.
And yoga is one of those pathways. It's one of those treatments that can help people to Totally.
And it's a practice. And what you and I were talking about earlier,
the eight-limb path of yoga,
(40:26):
you know, the first two limbs of that path start with very much,
it's almost identical to the Ten Commandments, the moral way to live and the choices you make.
That's the first two limbs. There is no getting closer to God if you are out
of alignment with those natural right actions and right motions in life,
(40:46):
the things you know you should be doing, loving others,
not stealing, not coveting, you know, all of these things.
And then the part I feel like that's where a lot of religion stops is with these
thou shalt nots and thou shalt only do this, or God's not going to love you.
You're not going to meet up to his standard. And the practice of yoga keeps going.
(41:08):
It goes into this physical practice of connecting with your body.
Then it goes into your breath, connecting with your breath, learning how to
let go of how you perceive the world, not just seeing with your limited lens
of I am American, I am white.
I grew up in a middle-class family. I grew up in a Christian church.
That means that this is the only way that life can be because there's a whole
(41:30):
world out there of people that did not grow up with these experiences.
And then it leads into unbroken concentration, which leads to meditation,
which leads to bliss or divine union with God, which it's not that God went anywhere.
It's not that you had to climb up a ladder and get your way to God.
(41:51):
Christ died. It's already won. It's
peeling back the layers of ourself to realize, to walk in that freedom.
And to me, that's what yoga does, that I feel like religion leaves out.
Instead of having to focus on the, oh, I can't do this, I can't do that,
I can't watch this, I can't go here, I can't do that, and it being a burden.
(42:13):
Fear, too. Yeah. The practice of yoga helps you to align with God within you,
and that stuff naturally starts to fall away.
And because of that, you start to feel the presence of God in you.
You start to feel who you truly are, like you were saying.
And naturally, that makes you want to experience more of God,
and so a lot of people do become interested then in church.
(42:36):
They want more of this goodness, this feeling that they know is divine love,
which the heart inherently knows is God.
And so a lot of people do end up going to church through that.
You know, I got to thinking that it's a slippery slope to, this is going to
be kind of difficult to articulate, but it's sin is a slippery slope, right?
(43:00):
Going into sin is a slippery slope. quote.
But also the whole philosophy behind sin in and of itself, right?
If we look at yoga as being sinful, but then we start to think about like,
wait, but we are born into sin, right?
(43:21):
None of us can be blameless. None of us can be sinless, right?
We're always going to be be sinless, then to me, as a person who,
I don't know, I guess I kind of like live off of hope, I lose all hope.
Actually, just the fact that I'm born means that I'm in sin anyway, right?
(43:44):
Like, so the slippery slope of even having sin in the first place at all in
the Word of God is that then what's the point?
None of us can actually, so basically you're saying none of us can actually live this way.
And then you're telling us to live this way. And then if we don't live this
way, that we're going to hell because of it.
Right? Exactly. And I think that's where, you know, it's this tiny little switch
(44:09):
in theology, but it makes a really huge difference. Yeah.
What I learned through yoga.
But then through reading the message of Christ with a different lens than what
went in one ear and out the other that I had heard my whole life,
when I actually paid attention to the context of the time when Jesus lived,
(44:32):
to the community of people he came to, to the Jewish people,
when I understood their customs, their religions,
when you look at what he's saying through those frameworks.
It's different than hearing it through here.
The language and the concepts around it matter. And I started to see that this
(44:52):
little switch, that we are born with the spark of God in us. We are the created.
There is no separation from God. We cannot be separate because He's everything.
And there's that spark of Him. Like, if God is the light of all,
we are one beam of that light.
You know, and I love how Philip, my teacher, explains it in the beginning of
(45:15):
creation. God said, let there be light.
And in that original light that was, our souls were the fractals of light that
went out that already were.
And so rather than thinking that we are this awful person carrying this shame
with us that we're unworthy of God, that slight shift that no,
actually, we have the light of God in us from birth. We can't not.
(45:40):
It's already in us. It's we who put these veils of sin on top of it.
And again, that too is part of being born.
It's part of living on this earth. We are born with this ego and with the soul
because it's how we survive.
We're going to sin, but it's what we learn as we're here.
(46:03):
And then it's kind of an undoing to come back to that realization of God in us.
And that's, you know, a lot of, it's not Christian theology to think that way.
But to me, to a lot of people I know who've been very stuck and who actually
walked away from the church because of the harsh teachings and because of the
(46:24):
ridicule and judgment of people from the church, just explaining that tiny shift to them.
Opened their heart right back up to God and brought them back to God.
Yeah, that builds a confidence, right? Because like I said, I'll get hopeless
just by thinking about a philosophical point.
I'll just be like, what's the
point? What's the point? I'm absolutely hopeless in life to begin with.
(46:46):
But what you offer there and what I've experienced actually is the same thing,
is when I make that shift, I have a sense of fearlessness and a sense of confidence
and a sense that no matter what I go through and no matter what happens today,
no matter how much sin that I do today, there's tomorrow,
and I get to wake up, and I get to be a new person, and I get to try my hardest
(47:10):
every single time. And that's great.
And I get to be a lot like this man who sits behind me. My biggest role model
in the Christian faith, in the Bible, is David.
Just a sinner. Every single day he woke up and he just failed miserably.
And every single night he went to bed with a song on his heart.
Lord, please make me a man after your own heart. Purify my heart,
(47:32):
you know? Totally. Help me to see me like you see me.
Yeah. And that is the true cry of his heart, because that is the true essence of who we are. Yeah.
All these sins and these stupid things that we do, that's not our true self.
All they do is distract us, right? That's it. They just take us out.
You know, what's interesting about this whole thing is that,
(47:54):
you know, Jesus says very clearly, like.
The things of like everybody in the religious realm is not going to understand
the things that I'm saying.
Like all of you people in the religious realm are. So, so if you are sitting
there in religion, right.
(48:14):
And you are pointing at a yoga and being like, you guys, that is sinful. That is demonic.
That is right. That's the same
thing the Pharisees and Sadducees were saying as well to other people.
And the only reason why is because, right, they just didn't understand. They didn't see.
And what we've done ultimately there is we've created a closed system of a church.
(48:39):
The church is not supposed to be closed.
Jesus wanted the church wide open. And in order for it to be wide open,
it's got to be able to grow in concepts that continue to evolve, right?
Yeah. And that are expansive. Like this access point. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. So it'll be really interesting in the next 40 years or so that we
(49:02):
get to be on this planet and to be able to experience,
at least be cognitively on this planet, like helping and bringing in content about this.
Because both of us will continue reaching out to people and helping people and
doing the best that we can.
And it'll be interesting to see where we evolve, But it'll also be interesting
(49:22):
to see where the church and where yoga evolves as well.
And I'm sure that you have a lot of visions and dreams of how that plays out too.
And I would be interested in listening to that. But we're kind of at the end,
and I really want to leave everybody with, what is that element of hope?
If you're sitting there in yoga class right now, and you're kind of like me,
(49:46):
guys, and you're doing a yoga pose,
and then you feel like it's, you hear that voice in your head of a TikTok influencer
or somebody in your church being like, it's demonic.
Demonic, you're performing a witchcraft right now.
What would you tell these people for a little bit of hope?
(50:08):
I would say that it's your heart and it's your relationship with God.
The words don't matter. What people say, it doesn't matter.
If God is speaking to your heart, if he's opening your heart to his love and
guiding you towards Christ and you are following in his His way and expressing
His love and you're seeing and feeling that change in your life,
(50:29):
you're seeing God move through you and through the people around you.
Then who's to say that the path that you're on is wrong?
I think all of our paths are different, and I do think intention is everything.
And just as if you're going into your job, you can go into your job with your
ego at the forefront and be like, I'm going to go in and I'm going to trash
(50:50):
this day. I hate everybody.
I'm going to compete. I'm going to be the best. I'm going to make money.
Or you can go into this day and be like, my job is just another facet for me
to share the love of God with.
Every relationship, picking my kids up from the school, talking to the clerk
at the grocery store. Whatever I do is an act of worship.
And then your fitness, your yoga, any of that becomes the same thing. Yeah.
(51:13):
I love that. So bring it around. You create it into where it's a full system of.
Recognizing forgiveness from the Lord and recognizing your gifts to give back
to others and be involved in
a bigger community, but also connecting and staying present with yourself.
(51:36):
It seems like, and your spirit and mind and ego, it seems like that's the trinity at play.
Yeah. Yeah. I think so too.
So I don't know. This has been such a wonderful chat.
I mean, I think there's so much to this topic that needs to be disseminated,
that needs to be looked into deeper to help people to develop more compassion around yoga.
(52:05):
Around everything. Around everything, right?
I mean, yeah. I mean, even Jesus talks about looking into the stars,
looking into the weather.
And you guys look into the weather and you see it coming.
The wise men found Jesus because they followed the stars because they were astrologers.
(52:26):
God uses everything to reach his children.
Yeah. And we're all his children. The entire creation are his children.
And he will use every language, every path.
And there's no fear. There's no fear in it. Doesn't it just make your skin crawl
sometimes when somebody's like, oh no, don't even go into the yoga chalet. Oh, I can't even.
Because it's sinful in there. Like, isn't that so sad that somebody would live a lot?
(52:51):
And for them, what I always think is like, man, my head goes straight into it.
Like, if I lived that way, I wouldn't leave my house.
And in fact, I would become suicidal because there's no way to leave sin.
Living in fear and sin, yeah.
You're always living in sin. The first breath that you take,
the minute that I want food and
crave a desire that's more than prayer is technically sin, right? Yeah.
(53:16):
And I think if you are a Christ follower and you were very deep into yoga and
and it was taking you down darker paths, like you were saying,
like you were going into witchcraft and demons and all of that,
and you became a Christ follower after, and you have no desire to go back to
anything that could open the door to any of that, then that's okay, and that's your path,
(53:41):
and that is what you need for your path.
And I understand that people that are expressing the dangers of that are doing
it from a place of love because they want to show people Jesus too.
But it's doing it from a place of compassion and love and understanding that
everyone's path is different.
My path with yoga and all the 20-something years that I've been teaching it
(54:03):
and practicing has never involved idol worship or demons or the dark aspects
that can go. And that's just my path.
And it's a lot of other people's paths. And nobody's path is the same.
Nobody understands the same language. Like you were saying, you resonate with
some teachers and not with others. and that's because we're all different and
we all hear God's message in different ways.
(54:26):
It's like you can make rock and roll evil or you can make rock and roll not evil.
Exactly. You can make anything evil. You can make church evil.
You can not love people through the church and judge people and push them away. And guess what?
That's not what Jesus would do either. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I think, yeah, just to end to me, the sixth elemental force of nature,
(54:50):
the unknown, that thing that science can't explain, to put it into words, it's grace.
It's grace. And grace is over all. God is in all. He is through all.
All of creation is in Him, and it's all unfolding back towards Him.
Every good thing, every bad thing, every path that we go down is leading us back to Him.
(55:13):
It all reflects back to Him. And in my story, I talk about bringing in demons
and stuff into my yoga practice.
It did get dark then, and God actually provided me another source of exercise
that I've been in for about a year, Pilates.
Cool. So I've been able to get the exercise, I've been able to get the flexibility,
(55:35):
the mobility, and the strength training, kind of all the same,
hits all the same numbers that yoga was hitting for me.
But ever so recently, I've been practicing back again in my own private place.
And so I hope to offer that as a little bit of hope to you guys,
that if you have paired and conditioned yoga as a negative thing, right?
(56:00):
It's much like, I guess, a rock star who gave their life back over to Christ.
At some point, they're going to have to slowly pair music with not Satan,
right? And so just recognize, be patient with yourself.
If your yoga practice is witchcraft like it was mine, step away from it for
(56:23):
some time and let God deliver you from that.
And He will show you whatever you need to do to get into that.
For me, it was Pilates and getting into weight training, actually.
And it's been a wonderful new form of yoga. I've always seen even triathlon
as my form of yoga too, just connecting my mind and body.
So I encourage everybody to get out there and connect your mind and body.
(56:47):
It's so important that we have healthy people in this body of Christ who have
the energy to carry out the message of Christ, which without the message,
if we listen to Tracy's story, we lose hope.
So let's continue the message out there, no matter where you are,
no matter what you're doing, no matter what classes you're scheduled for tonight, night.
(57:10):
Get out there and be a message of hope and be a seed of change in this world
that needs your love so very much.
All right, everybody, this has been Seeds of Change podcast.
I am your host, Mark A. Turnipseed, and this has been Tracy Wynn.
And you can find Tracy on her Instagram.
Tracy, would you give us your Instagram? Yeah, my personal Instagram is Tracy,
(57:34):
C-T-R-A-C-E-Y underscore W-I-N-N.
And I share a little bit more of the mind, body, spirit, wellness,
and spirituality on my professional page, which is spirit.lit.wellness.
Spirit.lit.wellness. Y'all go check it out and get lit. All right. Have a wonderful day.
(57:58):
Music.
Music.
(00:07):
Welcome back to the Seeds of Change podcast. I am your host, Mark A.
Turnipseed, and I'm absolutely excited to chat with you today.
But come to think of it, I've never actually started a show where I say,
I'm not really excited to talk with you today.
This is just something that I love to do. And I've got some really,
really interesting stuff going on in my life right now, because I've recently really wanted to.
(00:32):
I just had this desire inside my heart, and a lot of you might have had this
as Christian followers, but it's been to completely give my life to Christ,
my everything, my all. I want to do complete surrender.
And in order to do complete surrender, that means everything.
That means applying the principles of Christianity to everything that I do,
(00:53):
from my relationships, from my romantic relationships, to my friend relationships.
But also the fitness that I do.
Fitness to me has been absolutely essential to who I've become,
to helping me to get out of my heroin addiction and to helping me lose a whole
(01:13):
bunch of weight, to helping me to develop a self-confidence in order to create
things like businesses or write books, to do podcasts.
All of this stuff really started to come about through fitness.
So in essence, fitness was really where God started to really speak to me,
right? Where this whole thing started to go into motion.
So I've got to apply this principle to fitness as well, the Christian-based principles, right?
(01:41):
If I'm going to really surrender everything, or am I just a fitness addict, right?
Am I actually doing something that God doesn't care about at all?
Which that does not make sense to me, because God began to speak to me through fitness, right?
So, obviously, he is there in it.
Now, how can I reconcile aspects of fitness, though, that may have certain, you know...
(02:06):
Certain ideas headed in a different direction, right?
How can you engage in certain fitness programs that might actually be contrary
to some things that some Christians believe in the church, right? And yoga is one of those.
Yoga, but there's many other ones, guys. I mean, even dance.
(02:27):
Like, if we look at it, even dance is something that's like,
is that really Christian?
And if it is And if it is Christian, then what is Christian dance and what is
not Christian dance, right?
And so there's a lot of slippery slopes that as I begin to give my life over
to Christ that I start to go, wait a second, how is this evil?
(02:47):
Like, how is this holding me back?
So today, guys, today what we're talking about over at the Seeds of Change podcast
is going to be that concept as it applies to yoga. So I know that the yoga has
blown up over the past 10 years, really.
10 years ago, I don't believe that I saw a yoga studio on almost every single block.
(03:10):
Right now, in 2024, yoga has taken over the fitness world.
If you have a fitness studio, you also have a yoga room in there.
If you wear fitness clothes, they're yoga fitness clothes.
I mean, yoga has really taken over the world. And for a lot of people,
it's a very beautiful thing, but for a lot of Christians, it's a very horrifying thing.
(03:33):
And so what we're going to be talking about today is that concept.
And I brought in a wonderful yoga instructor down here in Delray Beach.
She works at a place called Atha Yoga Chalet.
And her name is Tracy Nguyen. And Tracy has guided me in multiple sessions throughout the years.
We've developed a good friendship and just enjoy each other's presence.
(03:55):
And I've always found her sessions to be very uplifting.
In fact, I've found a lot of yoga to be mostly uplifting. However,
there are a couple of instructors...
That particular place that I don't mesh with and that I do not go see the classes
because I come out feeling icky, right?
I come out feeling less than or so.
(04:16):
And so, you know, I think that's an individual level of experience.
I don't think that's a God thing or a not a God thing. I think that's just the
individual level of experience.
And I think that there's something there, there's a little nugget there that
a lot of Christians are missing, that individual, the way that God speaks to
(04:37):
us on a very individual level.
And so I just want to go ahead, guys, and now that I've introduced Tracy to
you, to hand the mic over to Tracy and let her introduce herself.
And Tracy, Gracie, would you just give us a basis of your salvation and what
(04:58):
the Christian faith, how it started in your life, really,
and how much Jesus means to you?
I think that's the best place for us to start, and we won't even get into yoga quite yet. Yeah.
I grew up loving Jesus from a very, very early age. I grew up in the church
and was heavily involved in it in youth group.
(05:19):
And I think that because of that, it shaped a lot of the way that I turned out and my belief system.
But it was always something beyond religion for me.
I always had a personal, deep love for Jesus and this personal relationship.
I never felt like God was far away from me or something outside of me.
(05:42):
But again, grew up in the church. And like you, I was always heavily involved
in sports and fitness and, you know, really just God moved through my life through
that too, always, through my sports, through running. And...
I became a personal trainer in my early 20s, and the gym that I worked at,
the yoga teacher was like, I want you to come to yoga. And I was like, I'm not going to yoga.
(06:04):
I don't have time for yoga. I have to run six miles and train for beach volleyball
and lift weights. I don't have time for yoga.
And she was like, come. And I remember going to my first vinyasa class, and it was amazing.
It was like dance met fitness met breath work, and I was more sore the next
day than I had ever been in my entire life. And I was hooked.
(06:27):
And like two months later, and this was in 2003. And three.
So like you were saying, there was not yoga on every corner.
There were not a million yoga instructors.
And I lived on a little island called Hilton Head Island. So there was definitely
not a lot of yoga instructors there.
And the yoga teacher quit. And the GM was like, hey, Tracy, you're the new yoga teacher.
(06:49):
And I was like, oh, okay. Okay. So I was thrown into teaching yoga from a very physical perspective.
The physical practice of yoga is called asana. And so that is what I taught for years.
And I loved it. I loved the fitness of it. I loved every aspect of it.
I didn't even know anything about the philosophy or the lifestyle of yoga.
(07:12):
All I knew is that doing that practice and guiding others through that practice,
opened people up, and it just made them fill with love and joy.
And so I was immediately hooked. And to me, when something fills you with love
and joy, that's the Holy Spirit, that deep love, that deep exuding joy, and that's what I felt.
(07:33):
And so my relationship with Jesus was strong all the way through that.
And then at some point in my late 20s and 30s, I started kind of going my own way.
I was frustrated with God not laying out life the way that I thought it should look.
And I was going to church through the whole thing, too.
And I just started feeling very far away from God for the first time.
(07:56):
And it was based on my decisions. It was the choices I was making in my life,
letting those little things that I didn't used to do because I knew they didn't
honor God start to slip into my life.
And the more you start to do those things that you know are out of alignment
with the highest good, you start to pull yourself away from the presence of God.
(08:19):
You're the one putting the veils over your heart that separate your recognition
of how close that He really is to you.
And I was looking for God again in church and just crying out,
like, help me, speak to me, like, get me out of this mess.
But I was still making the same decisions and the choices that were leading
(08:40):
me to that path of feeling lost.
And at that point, I started doing a hot yoga practice. I wasn't teaching yoga at this point.
I was a medical device sales rep, which was also out of alignment for me.
And I knew it from the minute I signed the contract.
But I went to a yoga class and it was a Bikram class and it was the hardest
thing I've ever done in my life because my mind, you're holding these poses
(09:02):
and it's 105 degrees and your mind is screaming at you.
And when you're in a place where you're unhappy with yourself,
you're upset at the choices you're making, you don't feel like you're in alignment,
you're having all these issues, the mind is just running amok and going crazy.
In regular life, it's like that, right? In everyday life. And
then you get into a class like that where you're hot and agitated and
(09:23):
holding these poses and in pain and it started
undoing me like little by little and I had a
friend who was like you know the whole point
of this is to focus and she was like don't think
about what comes next don't think about how hot you
are don't think about how much you hate the posture she could just focus on
what the teacher's saying and that's it and something about that clicked and
(09:46):
I started to be able to learn that I could train this mind to focus on what
I wanted it to and I would just lay on the ground in a puddle of my own sweat, crying out to God.
And it was in that quiet, though, when I was finally able to quiet my mind,
that I was able to hear God again.
And I was able to clearly see that my life was going down this little tumultuous
(10:08):
path, not because God wasn't there, because Jesus wasn't there.
It was because of the choices I was making and because I was walking in that
way. Yeah, I find it interesting.
So you have recognized in your life that when you're not walking the right path,
it's almost like symptoms come up, right?
(10:28):
That is like, oh, I'm not walking the right path right now.
And those symptoms are things that are contrary to love and joy in our life.
Can you give me other examples of things that have caused great amounts of love
and joy in your life, especially if there's any of them that are rooted in the Christian church?
(10:52):
In your experience, did you experience love and joy growing up in the Christian church?
Absolutely. I was so blessed with just these amazing youth group leaders that
just loved us and showed us the way. and I was very blessed to have friends
who we were all trying to walk this path with Christ together.
(11:13):
And that was, it was huge. It was everything, you know, who you surround yourself
with is everything. It really matters.
And when did you lose the love and joy in the church?
Like when did that ever start to dissipate for you?
I know it sounded like you went through a time of darkness, a time of,
you know, where I was chasing my own thing.
And do you think that's ultimately because you kind of stopped feeling that
(11:36):
love and joy in the church at one point?
You know, it wasn't that I stopped feeling the love and joy.
Like, I would get something from the messages, and I would feel love when I
was singing and worshiping.
But I was trying to get involved in different groups there to have that community
again, because all of my community of people were partiers.
(11:58):
They were part of this other life, and I knew I needed to have these Christian
friends again, and I would go to these groups, and it just seemed like at that age,
I was in my early 30s, late 20s, early 30s, and you go to groups in that age
group, and all they care about is finding a significant other and finding their spouse.
And I would go to these Bible studies, and I would be like, oh, this is so weird.
(12:22):
I'm sorry, I just can't relate to these people.
And it just wasn't, the message became so, I had grown up with it my whole life
so that the messages I was hearing in the same language, in that Christianese language,
the way that everything was interpreted, everything, it kind of went in one
(12:43):
ear and out the other because I was so used to it. I'd grown up with it.
I mean, I can tell you every parable, everything, you know? And it just...
I wasn't seeing how it was relating to my life anymore. And I wasn't seeing...
How I was going to find my way out of this situation in those walls when I couldn't find the answers.
(13:06):
That's so beautiful. I was just writing down a note last night,
or just now, not last night.
I was just writing down this note because the message, it sounded like,
became lost a little bit. Yeah.
And I think that happens a lot for everybody, right?
And Lart, I mean, that might be a little bit because of feelings, right?
(13:30):
So maybe we're just going through a time where we have low amount of feelings.
We have dysthymia or something, and we're just down, and we don't feel the message.
So therefore, it's not ringing true.
But it sounds like after a whole lifetime of being in the church,
that maybe it was just that the message was not continuing to grow with you in essence, right?
(13:56):
And I think ultimately what we see in community and in society right now is
that the message, especially in America, America was built on Christian principles.
And what we're seeing right now is symptoms, right, of a lack of love and joy,
which seems symptomatic to the same thing that you went through as an individual
(14:18):
when you start to walk in a path that's not directed towards Christ.
You start to experiencing things that aren't love and joy, and then you have
to make a decision to kind of come back.
And so what I really recognize there is that what happens on the individual
level is also occurring on the greater level, right?
(14:38):
And so us as believers in Christ, we need to to tackle these problems very quickly.
And I do believe that you have something here.
You have something here that is the key to that, and that you have found that.
(14:59):
And so when that message became lost to you, did you lose a sense of hope?
Completely. Yeah. That's exactly what I was going to say.
I was completely hopeless, and there was this day, and this is just one of those
stories that shows God will meet you wherever you're at. if your heart is truly,
(15:19):
truly seeking, He will pull out all the stops to show Himself to you.
And I was sitting in church one day, and I literally had looked down at this
piece of paper, and I wrote microscopic.
You couldn't even read it. It was this big. And it said, I have no hope.
And nobody could see it but me. It was dark in there. It's a church where all
the lights are off and everything.
(15:40):
And we got up to sing, and this woman next to me who I didn't know,
I'd never seen her before. She turns to me and she's like, this is so crazy.
She was like, I've never done this before. Please don't think I'm crazy.
And she goes, but I literally just heard God tell me to tell you not to lose hope.
It was crazy. And I mean, you could tell she was freaked out.
(16:03):
She was like, don't think I'm nuts.
I was like, no, I don't think you're nuts. This is crazy.
You know, and she went on to tell me the story how she had lost hope.
And that was the end of it. And then we finished the song and then we sang the
next song and I looked over and she was gone.
And I was like, and I asked my friends next to me, I was like,
(16:24):
was there a lady next to me? And they were like, yes, there was. I was like, okay, good.
And then, but it was just crazy that I needed something that big at that point.
I needed a miracle like that. And it happened.
I just think that God will meet you wherever you're at.
And I had lost hope. I had no hope that God's plan for my life was going to play out.
(16:46):
And because I didn't have hope in that, I didn't trust in the plan.
I didn't trust the alignment.
I was like, well, then I'm going to do it the way I'm going to do it.
I'm going to get the jobs I need to do. I'm going to make all my money.
I'm going to choose where I go, what I do, who I hang out with.
And not regard you because you're not doing it in the timeline that I think it should happen.
So in that desert and then your darkness and in this space of like,
(17:12):
well, I don't know if it's necessarily dark, but it's a space void of the message, void of the word.
Ultimately, y'all, that's hell if we look deeper into it, you know,
because it's the only place that, I mean, the word is everything, right?
So ultimately, if you're living without the word, you've got a place of emptiness and hopelessness.
(17:38):
And yeah, you're running around and you're trying to fill it with things of
the world, like your job and for Tracy, like her job, right?
And then a lot of people... And you were married at the time, right?
No, no. I was not married. No. I was dating lots of very wrong people.
Okay. So running around in relationships. Running around and just searching
for it in every other way, searching for it in success, in busyness.
(18:01):
I mean, I slept like four hours a night. I was training for beach volleyball
every day, playing in tournaments every weekend, like literally never quiet, never still,
never introspective or contemplative, just keeping myself so busy so that I
didn't have to deal with the mess that I was creating.
Did you have any health problems?
(18:21):
Huge. Yeah. My body eventually like shut down and I think I was like 34. for.
And I got so sick that nothing could fix it. And I was crazy.
I was taking Adderall. I was living off of quad shots of espresso every day,
running six miles a day, training for volleyball,
getting off of my work at my medical sales job and bartending all night,
(18:45):
like literally crazy. Thousand miles an hour.
Yeah. And got so sick. And that getting sick was the beginning of this whole journey. That was...
That was my opening into holistic health, which is what I am in now.
And that's when you were, basically when you were sick was when you got introduced to the asanas.
A little bit after. A little bit after. Yeah, yeah. And I had been teaching
(19:08):
already for like 13 years.
I was in a break of yoga at this point in my life. Okay, okay, okay.
But it was God slowing me down.
If you're not slowing down enough to hear God, then something in your life will
happen that will make you slow down. because again, he'll try to reach you and
speak to you in any way possible.
And if you're running so hard that you can't see it, you're gonna trip and something's
(19:32):
gonna happen that's gonna make you slow down and quiet down, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the physical elements caused you to slow down and at that
point, it was now switch jobs.
Switch jobs and switch lifestyle, right?
Almost, I was almost there. Then I moved out to the beach and then I found a
Bikram practice and started doing the yoga. and it was there that I started
(19:54):
like reawakening to the presence of Christ in my life.
I started hearing again. I started making choices that I knew were in alignment.
And like we, you and I were just talking about before this, I started following
my heart and I knew that I had always wanted to help people. I wanted to serve.
And I think serving, if you're ever in a rut in your life, if you're ever stuck,
(20:15):
serving others is the surefire, absolute 100% way to get out of it.
And it's a perfect equation because it's the way of Jesus, right?
Yes. Now, I have a question for you because I often come up with this follow your heart idea also.
And then a lot of times a voice will come in my head that's like, no, die to yourself.
(20:37):
Totally. Die to your desires. Die to. So I think that, you know.
There's a differentiation. It's good. A lot of people, right,
are not conscious enough maybe to differentiate between things of your heart and your flesh or...
And God's heart, right? Totally. Like if you've given your life over to Christ, Christ is within you.
(21:02):
And so it's almost like you have a two different hearts in essence, right?
Yeah. Or in the terms of yoga, we have this ego and we have the soul.
We are two-part human beings. Yeah. One is not bad. One is not good.
We need the ego, our individual self to live on this planet as humans. That's what we are.
(21:22):
And then we have the soul, this part of us that's divinely connected to God
at all times. And it's the integration of those two.
And that does come a lot of times in the quiet and the stillness and realizing
where is your egoic nature driving the ship?
Where are your desires out of alignment with the highest good?
(21:43):
And you can feel that within you. When you make a choice and you feel apprehension,
that's your body's symptom, like you were saying, that you're not in alignment.
So this is ultimately where most of the argument comes from, right?
Is that yoga means to yoke, to yoke with the spirits, the Hindu spirits,
(22:03):
you know, through the different postures and even hand positions and breathing.
And of course, like I have experienced that aspect of yoga before.
I have yoked to other spiritual influences throughout yoga.
But the yoke that you are talking about is actually the yoking of the spirit
(22:25):
and our physical presence on this planet, which is very, very biblical, right?
Yeah. I mean, Jesus used to talk about leaving and going to meditate all the time. He went and sat.
I mean, and it never says what he did while he's going off into the desert to meditate.
But that's what he was doing. I could almost guarantee that he was breathing.
(22:48):
He was paying attention to his breath.
I bet he was- He was being with God. Moving. Yeah.
Yeah. And I think when you read the gospels, you'll see that at every big turn,
at every point where he had a massive crowd following him, at every point that
he had just had like a really big healing and all this buzz was happening,
(23:09):
always after that, he would leave and he would go off alone by himself to pray and to meditate.
And Jesus was so wise, and he's God, but he was also human.
And to me, he was checking his spirit. He was checking his ego in those times.
You have 10,000 people sitting on a hill listening to every word that you're
(23:29):
going to say as if it's life itself.
And the egoic nature within us wants to take a hold of that.
He's checking it. Just like his disciples were. The disciples were constantly
like thinking, who's greater?
What's greater? I'm better than you, blah, blah, blah, because that's our humanness.
And I think that when Jesus went off to meditate and pray, it was to realign
himself with God, to get that soul into the front position of the ego,
(23:52):
to make sure that that natural state stayed in its place.
Yeah. Yeah, that's such a beautiful, beautiful idea that I haven't really thought about. out.
But yeah, that's ultimately what we experience in yoga.
And when we do, it seems like, too, that those are in the Bible,
that those are all the times that God actually speaks to Jesus.
(24:14):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Totally. And I think, you know, as far as the ego
and the soul and yoga meaning to yoke or union,
you know, yoga means divine union, and it is talking about God.
So in Hinduism, they have all of those different gods that are all aspects of
(24:36):
the one God that we call God or God Almighty in the Christian faith or Father God.
They kind of typify a type of energy, in essence, and a type of experiential,
worldly energy, right? Yeah.
But then if we combine them all together and add them all up,
all those energies combined ultimately lead to creation, which ultimately point
(24:59):
towards God, right? Yeah.
And so for me, once I learned the philosophy of yoga, and it started with Anuttara
and taking trainings with Philip Christolodou, it completely changed my life.
But I realized why it resonated so much with me because it was learning how
to surrender my ego, learning to surrender those parts of me that wanted to
(25:23):
keep myself separate from God.
And instead take my soul, peel back those layers that realizes that God and
I are in constant communion. We are divine union.
And if you read the book of John, it's what Jesus is saying,
Father, may they be one as you and I are one.
May they be one in me, may they be one in you, and may we all be one.
(25:45):
That's yoga. That's what Jesus is saying in that verse.
And I think the book of John is the most mystical book of the Bible.
I'm almost surprised it was allowed to be in the canonical Gospels,
but if you start reading the message from this lens of,
all he was talking about was union with God, he was pointing people to God and
(26:07):
how to realize this connection to him, you realize how powerful the path of
yoga is actually saying the same thing that Jesus was saying. Yeah.
And yoga is from India. So when the ancient rishis went up on the mountain and
they supposedly had this download of the idea of yoga, when they came down off
(26:28):
the mountain, they were in India.
And Hinduism and Buddhism were already a part of the world.
Buddhism wasn't yet, but Hinduism was. And so this science, this philosophy
of yoga—yoga is not a religion.
It is a science and a philosophy. But naturally, it started blending with the
Hinduism of the area where it came.
(26:50):
And that is why the aspects of Hinduism are kind of blended into it.
Hinduism also has the elements of philosophy, and so does Buddhism is a philosophy
as well. It's not a religion. But it started crossing those.
So when you read yogic scriptures, they are a crossover of not Hindu religion,
but Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.
(27:11):
And like I told you earlier, I think if you read Yogananda, I mean,
Yogananda talks about Jesus more than anything, more than Krishna,
more than any of the other Hindu gods of which he was raised.
Because he wanted to show this message and help people to see the message of
what Jesus was saying from this broader perspective.
(27:32):
He wanted them to experience the divine union with God that he did.
So how do we reconcile the idea
that these Hindu gods and the poses are connected to these Hindu gods?
How do we reconcile who we're doing the poses for and...
(27:55):
Is that a process that you mentally go through while you're doing yoga?
Because I don't know if that makes sense to you, but oftentimes when I'm in
my pose, my head goes back to my teachings in yoga and I'll be worshiping the
moon or something, right?
And I recognize what I'm doing and then I go, I consciously roll it back over
(28:18):
into a different. Interesting. Okay.
And it's like this weird duality that's occurring right now because this is
a fairly new concept for me.
What's your experience there? My experience in every single thing I do in life,
my intention is God show yourself to me, help me to be a vessel that displays your love.
(28:39):
And so every yoga class that I step into, that's it.
Every single move I'm doing, I don't care what the move is. Every single thing
is an act of worship to God.
Everything I eat, every conversation I have. Everywhere I go is an act of worship to God.
It's just an experiential living of God.
When I stage the room before my class, I'm praying over the room.
(29:02):
I'm praying over my students.
I'm praying that God would reveal himself to them through whatever I'm teaching,
through the postures, through the stillness.
And I think intention is everything.
Do you ever get the feeling, though, that it's like a Ouija board almost?
Most that you're, you're, you know,
it's like, I can have Jesus in my head while I'm doing a Ouija board.
(29:26):
Like, do you ever get that sort of feeling?
That was a big, that was a big thunder. Oh, wow. It sounds weird in these.
I know that must've been really loud. Yeah.
You know what? For me, I haven't. I never thought that yoga was bad.
And this is when a lot of Christians come to me very confused because they have
(29:48):
other people telling them in their life that yoga is bad and that they are worshiping
other gods and that they're practicing idolatry.
And they're like, but I'm so confused because God's love is so alive in me when I'm in yoga.
And it It has opened my heart more to the teachings of Jesus and to God's love in my life.
(30:09):
And my question is always, so if nobody said to you that this is bad and that
this is evil, would it be bad to you?
And I think that's where the whole new age to Christianity thing,
I understand people's hearts are in the right place.
They were maybe in a very dark space in new age, and if they lump yoga into
(30:31):
that category, which I don't think yoga is new age because yoga is very old.
But I understand. But to tell people
that their path is wrong and start inciting fear into them when they're experiencing
growth in the Holy Spirit and growth with God through that practice and what
the disciplines teach you is where I get kind of annoyed with it.
(30:57):
Because I've had the same thing, like you said, why we're having this podcast,
people coming to you and telling you that it's evil.
And for me, no one can say that to me because yoga is what brought me back to
God. It's what awakened my heart to the Holy Spirit.
It's what has helped me to fully realize how much this vessel can express God's
(31:19):
love through it in everything we do in our life.
Yeah. And I would be dead without it. I was in rehab.
I really didn't know if I could make it. Wow. I really didn't.
I was in rehab for heroin 10 years ago now, 10 years.
And I remember saying, you know, if I can do yoga in front, like I was in a
(31:40):
men's portion of this big old rehab center, and they had this common area.
And I don't know. I felt like I was so ashamed of everything that I was,
you know, And I was ashamed of my limitations too and my weaknesses.
And I just had this feeling inside my heart, if I could do yoga every morning,
(32:05):
that I was going to be okay.
And so it was so nerve-wracking to do because there's other men waking up in
the morning and they're having their coffee, going and smoking their cigarettes.
And I was like, am I really going to force myself to go do yoga while these
men are being manly men in the morning? it. And I was like, I don't know if I can do this.
I don't know if I can do this. And I woke up, it was about two weeks into the program.
(32:29):
And I, I did yoga in front of people as they were walking out.
And I remember in that moment to go in, this is, this is my answer.
Like I, I instantly there, I saw myself for the first time in a very, very long time.
I saw myself as worthy, capable and confident and all the things that the Bible tells me.
(32:52):
Now, I didn't know anything about
Hinduism, anything about how yoga and anything like that at the moment.
My ex-wife had taught me about some different poses as she used to be a yoga
instructor and I had had a back injury.
And so, you know, I just started stretching. I did a really easy yoga flow.
(33:15):
And man, And it wasn't a lot of time until God began to speak to me a lot more through yoga.
Yoga is also what led me into triathlon, which helped me to overcome all my
other issues, which was all my Xanax and all the stuff that I was stuck on.
(33:36):
And then really set my life on the direction that it is now.
And then yoga became a dark practice for me because I turned it into one.
So I started studying witchcraft after I came out of the closet,
not too long out, about two years after I came out of the closet,
(33:57):
I started studying witchcraft and started to apply that into my yoga.
So a lot of visualizations, a lot of magic, a lot of, you know,
antichrist stuff, honestly.
And And what's crazy though, is that God still ended up speaking to me in that.
And told me, get out of that. And I'm going to start working so much more magic
(34:22):
through you than you've ever been able to imagine comprehending making in yourself.
Just take your hands off the wheel, Mark. You do not have to do any of this
magic. I'm going to do it all for you.
I love that. He taught me that in a yoga session while I was doing that.
Right? While I was doing my magic.
(34:43):
I mean, our paths, God's, the kingdom does not operate in linear time.
We, our brains on this earth, understand our lives from point A to point B,
from a beginning to an end.
And we envision these paths going off to the side that are going to lead us somewhere bad.
But there's not a single line. The kingdom realm is spatial time. It's beyond space.
(35:07):
It's beyond time. And so when we span out, we see that everything in our life
is leading us to God because God is it.
Grace has already won. God is
everything. There is nothing that he has not created. He is the creator.
And all of creation is constantly evolving and unfolding back towards him.
(35:32):
And so it's because of duality. It's because of this dual world we live in.
Going so far into the darkness, going into these places, that we're able to see the good.
And it sucks. Sometimes it's a longer path, right?
And it's a hurtful path, and you hurt yourself, and you hurt others, and things may happen.
But I firmly believe that God's going to use any aspect of your life to show himself to you.
(35:58):
And if that's through the lens of a church and through the teachings of exactly
the Christian doctrine in the Bible, then that's awesome. them.
But there is a whole slew of people who are never going to step foot into a church.
There are a whole bunch of people at rehab who are never going to step foot into a church.
There are a whole bunch of people who are so outside of their body that they
(36:20):
can't even imagine doing yoga or doing fitness.
And so God might not speak to them that way.
But to think that God doesn't speak in these areas that we just don't understand
because we live in this culture where it's not a common thing,
I think it's a little bit crazy.
Yeah. I was just watching this one video that said, Kundalini Yoga is the most
(36:41):
dangerous of all yoga, and you're welcoming the serpent itself into you.
Well, can I tell you something very interesting about my Kundalini Yoga awakening experience?
Yeah. The next day, I was turned on by women.
Literally, I stopped enjoying sex with men that day.
Wow. And then I totally didn't believe what was going on. I totally did not
(37:07):
believe what was going on.
And I kept on practicing with other men, right?
But really, it was like compulsion. I just felt like that's what I did now.
But I started to recognize, I was like, I do not enjoy this whatsoever.
I don't even know what I'm... And I started to be like, man,
I would see these women. I'd be like, man.
(37:27):
So in essence, the yoga aligned me back to the way God had formed me to begin with. Right?
Amazing. And back closer to nature, closer to my normal nature.
Yeah. Isn't that just fascinating?
And so how am I supposed to deny?
(37:47):
And how am I supposed to say that it's demonic? Because I actually,
I've done demonic stuff. You know, I've actually worked with demons,
studied them, you know, connected with them, invited them into me.
Wow. But I can tell you one thing.
Kundalini yoga was not that. It awoke me to another aspect of God.
(38:08):
Now, I will say, though, that what I've kind of recognized is that everything
in yoga offers me, and everything in all these other different religions that
I've practiced, or as you say, not necessarily religions,
but philosophies, including philosophy.
I got my minor in philosophy because I love that stuff so much,
(38:28):
and it can almost be kind of a religion in and of itself. Totally. Right.
But in all my studies of any of those and applying any of those to my life,
I feel like I get to see a glimpse of who God is, but I don't get to see the
whole thing unless I come through the Word.
And so I know that even though I did enlighten something within me that is connected
(38:54):
with my natural self through kundalini yoga and that aligned me with God's purpose with me,
I know that that was only a glimpse of it. I know that that wasn't the answer.
I know that yoga is not the answer to God. No, but it was a part of your path.
Yeah, it's part of my path. Yeah. And it's exercise.
It's connecting that mind and the body. And like you said, there's a lot of
(39:18):
people out there who aren't even connected.
They're so far disconnected that they can't even come to the church.
And y'all, it sounds like what Tracy's he's talking about here is that yoga
could help bring people into the church.
In essence, if you can connect the mind and body through some sort of stimulation, right?
This is what we practice with EMDR therapy, right?
(39:40):
If we can connect mind and body through some sort of stimulation,
then people can actually be present in their life.
And stop being so concerned and so worried and so anxious.
And they can take part in their life. They can be there for their kids.
So all the symptoms start to dissipate of otherwise bipolar mental health issues,
(40:04):
preventing them from being good parents or preventing them from going to the church.
And at that point, they can finally step out of their shell and then start to be human beings.
And yoga is one of those pathways. It's one of those treatments that can help people to Totally.
And it's a practice. And what you and I were talking about earlier,
the eight-limb path of yoga,
(40:26):
you know, the first two limbs of that path start with very much,
it's almost identical to the Ten Commandments, the moral way to live and the choices you make.
That's the first two limbs. There is no getting closer to God if you are out
of alignment with those natural right actions and right motions in life,
(40:46):
the things you know you should be doing, loving others,
not stealing, not coveting, you know, all of these things.
And then the part I feel like that's where a lot of religion stops is with these
thou shalt nots and thou shalt only do this, or God's not going to love you.
You're not going to meet up to his standard. And the practice of yoga keeps going.
(41:08):
It goes into this physical practice of connecting with your body.
Then it goes into your breath, connecting with your breath, learning how to
let go of how you perceive the world, not just seeing with your limited lens
of I am American, I am white.
I grew up in a middle-class family. I grew up in a Christian church.
That means that this is the only way that life can be because there's a whole
(41:30):
world out there of people that did not grow up with these experiences.
And then it leads into unbroken concentration, which leads to meditation,
which leads to bliss or divine union with God, which it's not that God went anywhere.
It's not that you had to climb up a ladder and get your way to God.
(41:51):
Christ died. It's already won. It's
peeling back the layers of ourself to realize, to walk in that freedom.
And to me, that's what yoga does, that I feel like religion leaves out.
Instead of having to focus on the, oh, I can't do this, I can't do that,
I can't watch this, I can't go here, I can't do that, and it being a burden.
(42:13):
Fear, too. Yeah. The practice of yoga helps you to align with God within you,
and that stuff naturally starts to fall away.
And because of that, you start to feel the presence of God in you.
You start to feel who you truly are, like you were saying.
And naturally, that makes you want to experience more of God,
and so a lot of people do become interested then in church.
(42:36):
They want more of this goodness, this feeling that they know is divine love,
which the heart inherently knows is God.
And so a lot of people do end up going to church through that.
You know, I got to thinking that it's a slippery slope to, this is going to
be kind of difficult to articulate, but it's sin is a slippery slope, right?
(43:00):
Going into sin is a slippery slope. quote.
But also the whole philosophy behind sin in and of itself, right?
If we look at yoga as being sinful, but then we start to think about like,
wait, but we are born into sin, right?
(43:21):
None of us can be blameless. None of us can be sinless, right?
We're always going to be be sinless, then to me, as a person who,
I don't know, I guess I kind of like live off of hope, I lose all hope.
Actually, just the fact that I'm born means that I'm in sin anyway, right?
(43:44):
Like, so the slippery slope of even having sin in the first place at all in
the Word of God is that then what's the point?
None of us can actually, so basically you're saying none of us can actually live this way.
And then you're telling us to live this way. And then if we don't live this
way, that we're going to hell because of it.
Right? Exactly. And I think that's where, you know, it's this tiny little switch
(44:09):
in theology, but it makes a really huge difference. Yeah.
What I learned through yoga.
But then through reading the message of Christ with a different lens than what
went in one ear and out the other that I had heard my whole life,
when I actually paid attention to the context of the time when Jesus lived,
(44:32):
to the community of people he came to, to the Jewish people,
when I understood their customs, their religions,
when you look at what he's saying through those frameworks.
It's different than hearing it through here.
The language and the concepts around it matter. And I started to see that this
(44:52):
little switch, that we are born with the spark of God in us. We are the created.
There is no separation from God. We cannot be separate because He's everything.
And there's that spark of Him. Like, if God is the light of all,
we are one beam of that light.
You know, and I love how Philip, my teacher, explains it in the beginning of
(45:15):
creation. God said, let there be light.
And in that original light that was, our souls were the fractals of light that
went out that already were.
And so rather than thinking that we are this awful person carrying this shame
with us that we're unworthy of God, that slight shift that no,
actually, we have the light of God in us from birth. We can't not.
(45:40):
It's already in us. It's we who put these veils of sin on top of it.
And again, that too is part of being born.
It's part of living on this earth. We are born with this ego and with the soul
because it's how we survive.
We're going to sin, but it's what we learn as we're here.
(46:03):
And then it's kind of an undoing to come back to that realization of God in us.
And that's, you know, a lot of, it's not Christian theology to think that way.
But to me, to a lot of people I know who've been very stuck and who actually
walked away from the church because of the harsh teachings and because of the
(46:24):
ridicule and judgment of people from the church, just explaining that tiny shift to them.
Opened their heart right back up to God and brought them back to God.
Yeah, that builds a confidence, right? Because like I said, I'll get hopeless
just by thinking about a philosophical point.
I'll just be like, what's the
point? What's the point? I'm absolutely hopeless in life to begin with.
(46:46):
But what you offer there and what I've experienced actually is the same thing,
is when I make that shift, I have a sense of fearlessness and a sense of confidence
and a sense that no matter what I go through and no matter what happens today,
no matter how much sin that I do today, there's tomorrow,
and I get to wake up, and I get to be a new person, and I get to try my hardest
(47:10):
every single time. And that's great.
And I get to be a lot like this man who sits behind me. My biggest role model
in the Christian faith, in the Bible, is David.
Just a sinner. Every single day he woke up and he just failed miserably.
And every single night he went to bed with a song on his heart.
Lord, please make me a man after your own heart. Purify my heart,
(47:32):
you know? Totally. Help me to see me like you see me.
Yeah. And that is the true cry of his heart, because that is the true essence of who we are. Yeah.
All these sins and these stupid things that we do, that's not our true self.
All they do is distract us, right? That's it. They just take us out.
You know, what's interesting about this whole thing is that,
(47:54):
you know, Jesus says very clearly, like.
The things of like everybody in the religious realm is not going to understand
the things that I'm saying.
Like all of you people in the religious realm are. So, so if you are sitting
there in religion, right.
(48:14):
And you are pointing at a yoga and being like, you guys, that is sinful. That is demonic.
That is right. That's the same
thing the Pharisees and Sadducees were saying as well to other people.
And the only reason why is because, right, they just didn't understand. They didn't see.
And what we've done ultimately there is we've created a closed system of a church.
(48:39):
The church is not supposed to be closed.
Jesus wanted the church wide open. And in order for it to be wide open,
it's got to be able to grow in concepts that continue to evolve, right?
Yeah. And that are expansive. Like this access point. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely. So it'll be really interesting in the next 40 years or so that we
(49:02):
get to be on this planet and to be able to experience,
at least be cognitively on this planet, like helping and bringing in content about this.
Because both of us will continue reaching out to people and helping people and
doing the best that we can.
And it'll be interesting to see where we evolve, But it'll also be interesting
(49:22):
to see where the church and where yoga evolves as well.
And I'm sure that you have a lot of visions and dreams of how that plays out too.
And I would be interested in listening to that. But we're kind of at the end,
and I really want to leave everybody with, what is that element of hope?
If you're sitting there in yoga class right now, and you're kind of like me,
(49:46):
guys, and you're doing a yoga pose,
and then you feel like it's, you hear that voice in your head of a TikTok influencer
or somebody in your church being like, it's demonic.
Demonic, you're performing a witchcraft right now.
What would you tell these people for a little bit of hope?
(50:08):
I would say that it's your heart and it's your relationship with God.
The words don't matter. What people say, it doesn't matter.
If God is speaking to your heart, if he's opening your heart to his love and
guiding you towards Christ and you are following in his His way and expressing
His love and you're seeing and feeling that change in your life,
(50:29):
you're seeing God move through you and through the people around you.
Then who's to say that the path that you're on is wrong?
I think all of our paths are different, and I do think intention is everything.
And just as if you're going into your job, you can go into your job with your
ego at the forefront and be like, I'm going to go in and I'm going to trash
(50:50):
this day. I hate everybody.
I'm going to compete. I'm going to be the best. I'm going to make money.
Or you can go into this day and be like, my job is just another facet for me
to share the love of God with.
Every relationship, picking my kids up from the school, talking to the clerk
at the grocery store. Whatever I do is an act of worship.
And then your fitness, your yoga, any of that becomes the same thing. Yeah.
(51:13):
I love that. So bring it around. You create it into where it's a full system of.
Recognizing forgiveness from the Lord and recognizing your gifts to give back
to others and be involved in
a bigger community, but also connecting and staying present with yourself.
(51:36):
It seems like, and your spirit and mind and ego, it seems like that's the trinity at play.
Yeah. Yeah. I think so too.
So I don't know. This has been such a wonderful chat.
I mean, I think there's so much to this topic that needs to be disseminated,
that needs to be looked into deeper to help people to develop more compassion around yoga.
(52:05):
Around everything. Around everything, right?
I mean, yeah. I mean, even Jesus talks about looking into the stars,
looking into the weather.
And you guys look into the weather and you see it coming.
The wise men found Jesus because they followed the stars because they were astrologers.
(52:26):
God uses everything to reach his children.
Yeah. And we're all his children. The entire creation are his children.
And he will use every language, every path.
And there's no fear. There's no fear in it. Doesn't it just make your skin crawl
sometimes when somebody's like, oh no, don't even go into the yoga chalet. Oh, I can't even.
Because it's sinful in there. Like, isn't that so sad that somebody would live a lot?
(52:51):
And for them, what I always think is like, man, my head goes straight into it.
Like, if I lived that way, I wouldn't leave my house.
And in fact, I would become suicidal because there's no way to leave sin.
Living in fear and sin, yeah.
You're always living in sin. The first breath that you take,
the minute that I want food and
crave a desire that's more than prayer is technically sin, right? Yeah.
(53:16):
And I think if you are a Christ follower and you were very deep into yoga and
and it was taking you down darker paths, like you were saying,
like you were going into witchcraft and demons and all of that,
and you became a Christ follower after, and you have no desire to go back to
anything that could open the door to any of that, then that's okay, and that's your path,
(53:41):
and that is what you need for your path.
And I understand that people that are expressing the dangers of that are doing
it from a place of love because they want to show people Jesus too.
But it's doing it from a place of compassion and love and understanding that
everyone's path is different.
My path with yoga and all the 20-something years that I've been teaching it
(54:03):
and practicing has never involved idol worship or demons or the dark aspects
that can go. And that's just my path.
And it's a lot of other people's paths. And nobody's path is the same.
Nobody understands the same language. Like you were saying, you resonate with
some teachers and not with others. and that's because we're all different and
we all hear God's message in different ways.
(54:26):
It's like you can make rock and roll evil or you can make rock and roll not evil.
Exactly. You can make anything evil. You can make church evil.
You can not love people through the church and judge people and push them away. And guess what?
That's not what Jesus would do either. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I think, yeah, just to end to me, the sixth elemental force of nature,
(54:50):
the unknown, that thing that science can't explain, to put it into words, it's grace.
It's grace. And grace is over all. God is in all. He is through all.
All of creation is in Him, and it's all unfolding back towards Him.
Every good thing, every bad thing, every path that we go down is leading us back to Him.
(55:13):
It all reflects back to Him. And in my story, I talk about bringing in demons
and stuff into my yoga practice.
It did get dark then, and God actually provided me another source of exercise
that I've been in for about a year, Pilates.
Cool. So I've been able to get the exercise, I've been able to get the flexibility,
(55:35):
the mobility, and the strength training, kind of all the same,
hits all the same numbers that yoga was hitting for me.
But ever so recently, I've been practicing back again in my own private place.
And so I hope to offer that as a little bit of hope to you guys,
that if you have paired and conditioned yoga as a negative thing, right?
(56:00):
It's much like, I guess, a rock star who gave their life back over to Christ.
At some point, they're going to have to slowly pair music with not Satan,
right? And so just recognize, be patient with yourself.
If your yoga practice is witchcraft like it was mine, step away from it for
(56:23):
some time and let God deliver you from that.
And He will show you whatever you need to do to get into that.
For me, it was Pilates and getting into weight training, actually.
And it's been a wonderful new form of yoga. I've always seen even triathlon
as my form of yoga too, just connecting my mind and body.
So I encourage everybody to get out there and connect your mind and body.
(56:47):
It's so important that we have healthy people in this body of Christ who have
the energy to carry out the message of Christ, which without the message,
if we listen to Tracy's story, we lose hope.
So let's continue the message out there, no matter where you are,
no matter what you're doing, no matter what classes you're scheduled for tonight, night.
(57:10):
Get out there and be a message of hope and be a seed of change in this world
that needs your love so very much.
All right, everybody, this has been Seeds of Change podcast.
I am your host, Mark A. Turnipseed, and this has been Tracy Wynn.
And you can find Tracy on her Instagram.
Tracy, would you give us your Instagram? Yeah, my personal Instagram is Tracy,
(57:34):
C-T-R-A-C-E-Y underscore W-I-N-N.
And I share a little bit more of the mind, body, spirit, wellness,
and spirituality on my professional page, which is spirit.lit.wellness.
Spirit.lit.wellness. Y'all go check it out and get lit. All right. Have a wonderful day.
(57:58):
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