Is Yoga Kosher?

From TabletMag.com:

A few years ago, freshly moved to Los Angeles, I started practicing yoga. I was feeling anxious and worried, and if I were still a New Yorker, I’d have gone on anti-depressants. But I’m a big believer in doing what the Romans do, and, as it turned out, yoga helped a lot. Now, in class, as I take my first bow—a stretch upward, followed by an open-armed dive to my toes—I am no longer thinking about survival. Instead, with room to breathe and think, I instead wonder about the implications of bowing, of doing yoga in the first place. Yoga, with its meditation, with its mysterious secrets and ties to Hinduism and Buddhism, isn’t just a physiological practice; it’s a spiritual one. And I am a Modern Orthodox Jew. By practicing yoga, I’m now forced to wonder, am I practicing a religion outside my own? Am I sinning before God?

When I first took up yoga, this question never occurred to me. I was dealing with a difficult time, but I had also abandoned my religious upbringing. I was at peace with a secular life that included some high-holiday observance and crippling guilt when I didn’t observe Passover. Now, married to a man who converted so that we could be together, I find myself running an Orthodox home. (You know the old joke: don’t date a non-Jew unless you want to end up really religious.) I’m surprisingly happy in my lifestyle, but I’m also realizing that a true immersion in yogic practice may very well be a violation of my Jewish one.

Oy! The Lubavitcher rebbe said that all forms of yoga (in addition to transcendental meditation) are not kosher.

Oy! Why does this have to come up now? I quite enjoy going to Chabad. Oy!

Beth comments: “Do you follow the Lubavitcher rebbe? I’m pretty sure lusting after shiksas isn’t kosher either.”

Beth, in your morally degraded state, you do not understand that for me shiksas are purely a form of exercise. Practice, as it were, for the real thing that awaits me on the Great Day.

Many shiksas argue these days that they are just archetypal principles, but any third-grader in Hebrew school will tell you that they are idols. Veneration and offerings are unacceptable. I avoid shiksas where the shiksa is too into the mythos. It’s hard to escape the impression that if you take some shiksas too seriously then it could be avodah zarah. So I avoid feeling anything when I am with them. Feeling anything except in a certain lower chakra, which is quite depraved anyway, so what’s the harm?

I practice with shiksas for the exercise and only for the exercise.