Sadly, all the gurus I was following back then—from the famous to those in my own community—were either lying or working under the illusion of lies. At worst, they knew they were leading me down a dark road, further from God. Those who knew they were lying may have had powerful motivations: financial gain, the advancement of their status, the fact of having been drawn into darkness themselves.

Many of my yoga gurus, on the other hand, I do believe were caught in the deceit of their own minds. Most of them seemed well-intentioned. They thought they were helping me by sharing the wisdom they had gathered over the years. In their hearts they were supporting me in my quest for spiritual fulfillment and so, as they saw it, doing good in the world. Yet even people of good intention can do great harm when they themselves are misguided.

Whatever their intentions, I must take responsibility for the fact that these teachers and gurus succeeded in drawing me deeper into the New Age. It is 100 percent my fault. I sought them out. I bought their books, attended their classes, paid for their seminars. After much thought, I asked them to be my spiritual guides. I was searching for anyone to follow, all the while holding a hard line against Jesus. I could not hear Him knocking at the door of my heart—so busy was I running in the opposite direction.

John Ramirez, a former Satanist and convert, says that false religion and the New Age entrap the seeker by making her believe that practitioners such as mediums, yogis, spiritualists, and astrologers all belong to the Kingdom of God. They do not. They are themselves caught in the snare of demons masquerading as angels of light.

For me, yoga was an entry point deeper into the New Age—not only through the lessons I learned from my gurus, but through the practice itself. As Sandeep, a former Hindu from India’s Brahmin caste, has put it, “All yoga poses are acts of Shiva worship, and there is no such thing as ‘holy’ or ‘Christian’ yoga.” The basis of yoga, as Sandeep and others describe it, is to turn inward in pursuit of the desires of the self—the exact opposite of “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Matthew 6:33).

Each class drew me deeper into a falsehood. Consider the “om” hummed in unison at the start of class, said to connect us with universal vibrational energy. The chakras we sought to align stood, in the end, for a belief in our own holiness. The postures themselves honor demonic deities, as the yogi tries to imitate, even to become, the image of Shiva, Krishna, and the like. Each time class ended and we bowed over our hands saying namaste, we were perpetuating the false belief that the god in me bows to the god in you. What could be more blasphemous?

In the preface to Hostage to the Devil, which shaped much of the modern depiction of the demonic in books and films, Malachi Martin writes:

In the context of Possession, all disposing factors produce within a person a condition of those two faculties of soul—mind and will—that is most aptly described as an aspiring vacuum. Vacuum, because there is created an absence of clearly defined and humanly acceptable concepts for the mind. Aspiring, because there is a corresponding absence of clearly defined and humanly acceptable goals for the will.

Martin goes on to note that this aspiring vacuum is at work even in what is widely regarded as “harmless” entertainment, such as the Ouija board. (The name “Ouija” combines the French and German words for “yes.”) Participants who engage with the board predispose themselves to agree with whatever is revealed—creating the dangerous vacuum of mind Martin describes.

Christians must remain alert to the moment when a gift from God is twisted into something else. When people worship nature instead of the God who created it, they are misdirected. By all means, walk in the woods with your friends—but do not worship the tree. Keep your focus on God, ask for His gift of discernment, and be wary of the point at which seemingly innocent practices—moving the body, spending time in nature—become a religion unto themselves.

My search to fill the God-shaped hole in my heart is a textbook example of how Satan takes a gift from God—our desire for truth—and twists it to his own purposes. Running from God and the Church and toward the New Age, I put myself in harm’s way again and again, sliding further down.

Looking back, my running about in search of the Lord reminds me of the children’s book Are You My Mother? In the story, a baby bird hatches while his mother is away and sets out to find her, mistaking many of the things he encounters—a cow, a steam shovel—for his mother. In the end the two are reunited. Much the same was true of me: I was earnestly searching, reading meaning into every sign from the universe, while ignoring Jesus, the One I longed for, Who had been standing beside me all along.