Yoga for Spiritual Formation: How Embodied Practice Deepens Spiritual Growth For Christians

As Christians, spiritual formation is a lifelong process of becoming more like Jesus. This often involves intentional practices that help us to align our lives with God’s will. While most Christians are familiar with spiritual disciplines like prayer, fasting, and Scripture reading, one often overlooked tool for spiritual growth is the practice of yoga.

Can Christ-centered yoga be a tool for spiritual formation? You may be surprised, but the answer is yes! 

Though yoga has roots in Eastern worldviews and traditions, it offers Christians a form of embodied worship and prayer. It can help us focus our scattered minds and cultivate awareness of God’s presence. When approached with Christ at the center, yoga advances beyond mere exercise to become a powerful vehicle for spiritual growth. 

In this blog, we explore how the discipline of yoga can be practiced as a form of spiritual formation—offering Christians an embodied approach to spiritual growth and soul formation.

Should Christians Practice Yoga?

To begin, we should answer the question, “Should Christians Practice Yoga?” This is a valid question asked by many followers of Jesus and it’s worth exploring with humility, wisdom, and discernment. Traditional yoga practices often stem from Eastern religious philosophies, which can understandably raise concerns for Christians committed to honoring God and keeping Christ at the center of their spiritual lives. 

However, yoga itself (defined by Patanjali’s eight-limbed path: moral teachings, physical postures, breathing techniques, and various stages of meditative focus) is not inherently spiritual or religious. 

In fact, if you look at the earliest yogic texts, yoga is simply a tool for becoming still, setting distractions aside, and coming home or reconnecting with our true nature. Its purpose and meaning depend entirely on who is practicing, what they believe, and how it is used. 

For Christians, practicing yoga for spirituality can help still the storms of the mind and awaken us to the presence of God. It can become a sacred space for prayer, a purposeful setting of our minds on heavenly things, and an act of worship.

Yoga as a Discipline for Spiritual Growth

True spiritual formation is not merely about beliefs or intentions, but about how those beliefs are lived out through our actions. Dallas Willard, a leading voice in Christian spiritual formation, in his book Renovation of the Heart writes:

“Spiritual formation in Christ is the process of transformation of the inmost dimension of the human being — the heart — which is the same as the spirit or will. It is being formed (really transformed) in such a way that its natural expression comes to be the deeds of Christ done in the power of Christ.” (Renovation of the Heart

Spiritual formation for the follower of Jesus requires intentional practices, or disciplines, that shape our hearts and minds toward Christ. 

The tradition of Christian spiritual disciplines spans centuries and includes a rich diversity of voices from St. John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Ávila, and Julian of Norwich to modern authors like Henri Nouwen, Richard Foster, Ruth Haley Barton, and John Mark Comer. 

Though these authors span centuries, denominations, and cultural contexts, they share core practices that transcend time and tradition, such as:

• Silence and solitude
• Prayer as communion
• Detachment and simplicity
• Scripture meditation
• Self-Examination and Confession
• Rest, Sabbath, and Slowing

Where Does Yoga Fit In?

Yoga offers Christians an embodied approach to spiritual growth. When practiced with intention, it becomes a meaningful discipline for deepening spiritual formation in Christ. 

Unlike many physical exercises that focus solely on external results, yoga integrates breath, movement, and presence, making it an embodied practice that nurtures both body and soul. 

Yoga naturally complements spiritual disciplines such as silence and solitude, meditation, prayer, and slowing. Each movement becomes a kind of prayer and an offering of the body as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1). Each breath becomes an opportunity to re-center in God’s presence.

By engaging the body in a posture of attentiveness, yoga helps quiet mental noise, cultivate stillness, and foster awareness. These are key ingredients for practices like contemplative prayer, scripture meditation, and discernment. 

In this way, yoga can act as a bridge between the physical and the spiritual, helping Christians inhabit their faith not just in thought, but in an embodied experience.

At its best, yoga becomes a practice of creating space for God, in our bodies, our schedules, and our hearts, to be present, to listen, and to be transformed.

How to Center Christ in Your Yoga Practice

Centering Christ in your yoga practice involves more than simply listening to worship music or reading scripture at the start of a yoga class. It’s about orienting the entire practice (all eight limbs!) around a relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Theologically, this means exploring yoga’s moral teachings through the lens of Scripture. Additionally, Christ-centered yoga recognizes the body as a sacred temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19-20), inviting each movement, breath, and moment of stillness to become an act of worship and surrender to God.

A yoga practice with Christ at the center cultivates intentionality and awareness of His presence throughout the practice, allowing the physical discipline to serve as an expression of spiritual formation. This includes prayer, mindfulness, scriptural meditation, and adopting a posture of dependence rather than self-reliance. 

For Christians, the focus of the practice shifts from personal achievement or physical wellbeing to embodying Christ’s character, his humility, peace. patience, and most of all his love.

Ultimately, placing Christ at the center acknowledges that spiritual transformation is the work of the Holy Spirit within us, not our own striving. 

Rooted in this truth, yoga becomes a tool for cultivating stillness, discernment, and alignment in heart, body, and mind. It creates a space where body and soul meet, inviting God’s grace to deepen our communion with Him and shape us into Christ’s likeness.

Want to Go Deeper? Explore Yoga for spiritual growth in our Christ-centered Yoga Teacher Training

As a follower of Jesus who has practiced yoga for over 30 years, I’ve experienced firsthand how yoga offers an embodied approach to spiritual formation and growth. 

Since 2016, I’ve trained yoga teachers to approach yoga not just as physical movement, but as a Christian spiritual discipline that embodies prayer and fosters stillness, silence, simplicity, meditation on Scripture, self-examination, and confession.

I firmly believe that a teacher must first be a student. We must receive from God before we can faithfully pour into others. That’s why we designed our Yoga Teacher Training with soul care and spiritual formation at its core. 

Our Yoga Teacher Training is a unique blend of yoga instruction and soul care, a kind of seminary meets studio experience. In addition to our embodied approach to spiritual disciplines, our training includes spiritual direction and community, two essential practices that foster spiritual growth:

1. Spiritual direction: One of the ways we do this is by weaving spiritual direction into our yoga teacher training. This gives our students a space to pause, reflect, and listen for God’s guidance. We are not focused solely on their development as yoga teachers, but on nurturing them as beloved children of God, seeking a deeper relationship with Christ. Through spiritual direction, students learn to discern God’s movement in their lives and develop greater awareness of His presence in their everyday.
2. Community: We also emphasize the importance of community in spiritual formation by fostering connection through weekend live teaching sessions, small group meetings, and training buddy programs. Spiritual growth rarely happens in isolation, and our training fosters a supportive environment where students can share their journey, celebrate growth, and walk alongside one another. This intentional community reflects the historic Christian belief that transformation happens best in relationships rooted in love, mutual support, and a shared commitment to Christ.

We recognize that spiritual formation is not something we drift into but a journey we walk with intention, humility, and grace. We believe that yoga offers an embodied approach to spiritual growth. 

When practiced with Christ at the center, it becomes a way to embody our prayers and engage in the spiritual disciplines of stillness, meditation, and prayer, while also guiding us into rhythms of awareness, surrender, and transformation.

Our hope is that by teaching yoga as an embodied approach to spiritual formation, our students will grow to reflect the character of Christ and embody His love while being equipped to share the gift of yoga as a meaningful tool for spiritual growth in the lives of others.