Nashville, USA - Twenty men and women bent over the yoga mats scattered on the synagogue's floor.
"Now, lift your leg up in the air, extend your right arm and reach around and grab your left foot," said Jewish Yoga instructor Jimmy Lewis.
"The blessing is not in the final pose," he said as some struggled to connect one limb to another. "The blessing is in the practice."
Yoga is an ancient spiritual practice with roots in Hinduism that is designed to connect body, mind and spirit — in sometimes unusually contorted poses.
But a growing number of churches and synagogues are offering yoga as a way to connect with their own faith.
"We're trying to bring yoga a little bit more alive through Judaism, and Judaism alive through yoga," said Rabbi Alexis Berk of The Temple in West Nashville, who co-taught this weekend's "Yoga Shabbaton" class.
Yoga opens to faith
The Jewish Yoga class — believed to be the first in Nashville — is the latest in a series of adaptations of Eastern spiritual practices to reflect Western religious faiths. There also is Christian Yoga, as well as Karate for Christ, which puts a Christian spin on the martial art influenced by Buddhism.
Some instructors say that the classes draw people who are more comfortable coming to a yoga or karate class that reflects their faith, while offering the same physical, mental and spiritual benefits.
Karate for Christ instructor Jim Bowen said that the emphasis on meditation — or emptying one's mind — can feel alien to people more used to spirituality that emphasizes filling one's self up with the spirit of God.
"Meditation prepares people to be taught," said Columbia, Tenn.-based Bowen. "But a lot of people are uncomfortable with it, so we tell them to meditate on God."
But such adaptations are not embraced by all.
In 1989, for example, the Vatican singled out yoga in a warning to Catholics of "dangers and errors " from "non-Christian forms of meditation" — a message reiterated in a 2003 report.
"The Hindu concept of absorbing of the human self into the divine self is never possible, not even in the highest states of grace," wrote then-Cardinal Ratzinger — now Pope Benedict XVI.
And in a 2006 Hinduism Today article headlined "Yoga renamed is still Hindu," writer Subhas Tiwari compared Christian and Jewish adaptations of yoga to "colonization," saying "such efforts point to a concerted, long-term plan to deny yoga its origin. This effort to extricate yoga from its Hindu mold and cast it under another name is far from innocent."
Yoga catches on in South
But for local practitioners like Rabbi Berk, the marriage of yoga and Judaism is a natural one.
Yoga's emphasis on meditation and breathing is similar to some schools of Jewish thought that equate God's name with breath, she said.
"There's a notion in yoga that breath moves the life force through the body," Berk said. "The proper name for God in Judaism can't really be pronounced and theologians say the name of God is not pronounceable because it sounds like breath."
In the past three years or so, there's been a huge interest in all types of yoga classes in the Midstate, said longtime Christian Yoga instructor Leighanne Buchanan.
As yoga has shed its New Age reputation and become popular in health clubs and community centers offering a wide variety of very secular-sounding yoga classes — yoga for mothers and babies, yoga-Pilates combinations and yoga for seniors, among others — people have looked for yoga classes tailor-made for their own interests, she said.
"Yoga is definitely more accepted in the South," Buchanan said. "It used to be a big stumbling block because many people thought to go to yoga they would be practicing Hinduism. "
In Buchanan's classes, she sometimes ends with a prayer. She is open about her belief in Jesus. And she is careful to stick to breathing and poses, rather than chanting or using a lot of Sanskrit terms, to make it more benign to those who might worry it's a Hindu practice, she said.
"In my classes, since I'm a Christian, any references to God is to the Christian God, the one and only true God," she said. "That's the main difference between my classes and Hindu classes. I don't pray to other gods during class."
Yoga origins spiritual
Moreover, she said that yoga has never been a religion. "It's a spiritual practice. I think the misconception is that yoga is a religion."
But Chaitram Talele, a Columbia State College economic professor who began teaching yoga in the area in the late 1960s, said he's concerned that people are denying the Hindu origins of yoga.
"People should realize that its origins lie in Hinduism," he said. "If people want to take yoga and blend it with Christianity or Judaism, that's OK, but they should also say that this is a Hindu system that we are borrowing and to be truthful and honest about it."
Vanderbilt Divinity School theology professor John Thatamanil said that religions have a long history of borrowing from one another. Rosary beads have variations in Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, he said. And the idea of nonviolent resistance was borrowed by Mahatma Gandhi and then reborrowed by Christian leaders in the civil rights movement, he said. So yoga variations are not new.
"Religious practices have been floating across religious boundaries for a long, long time," he said.