Ohio minister combines yoga with Christian faith at church
In the middle COLUMBUS — of the sanctuary at First Congregational United Church of Christ were three yoga mats, with the women using them vigorously swinging their arms back and forth.
The scene is part of the Rev. Nicole Havelka’s Advent yoga series. Following the themes of the weeks of Advent — the period right before Christmas — this class was on joy.
Havelka, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, never intended to teach yoga, but she has recently embarked on a 300hour, advanced yoga teacher training course in downtown Columbus and plans to hold more classes in the new year.
She incorporates yoga into her faith and ministry and is exploring ways to do more of it.
“Doing joy today is our theme,” Havelka announced to the class assembled in the sanctuary. “We’re playing. It’ll be playful today.” And play they did. “Small children have such an amazing ability to be present in the moment, which we lose as adults,” Havelka told Rachael Gardner Purdy and Virginia Geddes as they stood ready on their mats. “Living in that pressure and awareness of things kids don’t have ... this is maybe an hour of being childlike.”
The women listened to Christmas music as they swayed back and forth, felt the four corners of their feet, swung their arms back and forth and “shook it out.”
“The music makes you feel swirly, doesn’t it?” Havelka said.
Havelka, a church consultant, would like one day to combine her two passions: yoga and working with church organizational structures and staff members.
She has already influenced the board of the Ohio Conference of the United Church of Christ to use breathing and mindfulness exercises before meetings.
“It was always a spiritual practice to me; it wasn’t primarily a physical practice,” Havelka said of yoga. “Yoga is what has probably stabilized me more than anything because your mat’s always there.”
In her 13 years of working with the church, Havelka has mostly kept the two worlds separate.
More recently, she said, she has felt called to share her love of yoga and is contemplating writing a book about what yoga has taught her about church.
“This class ... was sort of a step in that direction,” Havelka said. “I wanted to advance my teaching and I just wanted to explore what that would look like and if it would engage other people.”
The Rev. Emily Corzine, associate minister at First Congregational, is hoping Havelka will teach a Lentthemed yoga class in the new year.
“She brings her whole self as she feels called to lead as a minister,” Corzine said. “Nicole approached us about how we might deepen our connections in our journey.”
When Havelka teaches the classes, she doesn’t call them Christian yoga. She doesn’t want to lap one tradition over the other, she said.
“I am bringing both traditions together in a way I hope enhances both of them,” she said.
Geddes felt like Havelka did that.
“I really like the marrying of the Christian values of Advent with yoga principles,” said Geddes, of Victorian Village.
People have made the classes part of their routine, said Corzine, who has attended them herself.
“It’s just to engage our bodies and our minds and our souls in a new way,” she said. “She helps deepen our understanding of where our body is in space.”