The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards

by William J Broad

  But if some findings uplift, others contradict the onslaught of bold claims and proffered cures.

  Take body weight—a topic of enormous sensitivity for anyone trying to look good. For decades, teachers of yoga have hailed the discipline as a great way to shed pounds. But it turns out that yoga works so well at reducing the body’s metabolic rate that—all things being equal—people who take up the practice will burn fewer calories, prompting them to gain weight and deposit new layers of fat. And for better or worse, scientists have found that the individuals most skilled at lowering their metabolisms are women. Of course, other aspects of yoga do fight pounds successfully. The discipline builds body awareness and its calming influence can help reduce stress eating. Most yoga teachers are lithe, not lumpy. But when yoga succeeds at weight control, the scientific evidence suggests that it does so in spite of—not because of—its basic impact on the human metabolism.

  That’s one of yoga’s dirty little secrets. It turns out there are plenty of others, some quite significant.

  Yoga has produced waves of injuries. Take strokes, which arise when clogged vessels divert blood from the brain. Doctors have found that certain poses can result in brain damage that turns practitioners into cripples with drooping eyelids and unresponsive limbs.

  Darker still, some authorities warn of madness. As Carl Jung put it, advanced yoga can “let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person ever dreamed.” Many yoga books cite Jung approvingly but always seem to miss that quote. Even so, it represented his considered opinion after two decades of study and reflection.

  Overall, the risks and benefits turned out to be far greater than anything I ever imagined. Yoga can kill and maim—or save your life and make you feel like a god. That’s quite a range. In comparison, it makes most other sports and exercises seem like child’s play.

  My research has prompted me to change my own routine. I have deemphasized or dropped certain poses, added others, and in general now handle yoga with much greater care. I hope you benefit, too.

  I see this book as similar to informed consent—the information that the subjects of medical experiments and novel treatments are given to make sure they understand the stakes, pro and con.

  To me, the benefits unquestionably outweigh the risks. The discipline on balance does more good than harm. Still, yoga makes sense only if done intelligently so as to limit the degree of personal danger. I’m convinced that even modest precautions will avert waves of pain, remorse, grief, and disability.

  The heroes of this book are the hundreds of scientists and physicians who toiled inconspicuously over the decades to uncover the truth despite the obstcenter1es of scarce funding and institutional apathy. Their early inquiries not only began the process of illuminating yoga but, as it turns out, produced a remarkable side effect. They helped transform the nature of the discipline.

  Yoga at the start was an obscure cult steeped in magic and eroticism. At the end, it fixated on health and fitness.

  To my surprise, it turned out that science played an important role in the modernization. As investigators began to show how the ostensible wonders of yoga had natural explanations, the discipline worked hard to reinvent itself. A new generation of gurus downplayed the rapturous and the miraculous for a focus on material well-being. In essence, they turned yoga on its head by elevating the physical over the spiritual, helping create the secular discipline now practiced around the globe.

  The first chapter details this upheaval. The tale is important not only for revealing the origins of the health agenda but for introducing main characters and themes. For instance, it turns out that a number of yoga miracles—if demonstrably untrue—nonetheless involve major alterations of physiology that can produce a wealth of real benefits. They can lift moods. They can fight heart disease. The newest research indicates that they may even slow the body’s biological clock.

  Not that science has all the answers.

  To the contrary, the investigation of the discipline began in response to an astonishing spectcenter1e nearly two centuries ago that still poses a number of fundamental questions today.

  The science of yoga does more than reveal secrets. It can also shed light on real mysteries.

  I

  HEALTH

  Ranjit Singh was an ugly little man who liked to surround himself with beautiful women. In childhood, smallpox had taken his left eye and pitted his face. He was unlettered. But Singh built an empire through force of character, uniting the warring tribes of western India. He became maharajah of the Punjab and amassed great wealth, including the Koh-i-Noor, at the time the world’s largest diamond. He could be generous. Though a Sikh, he gave a Hindu temple a ton of gold. Singh was a military genius and a humane despot. Most of all, he knew men.

  In 1837, Singh learned that a wandering yogi had approached the court to propose live burial as a demonstration of his spiritual powers. The king agreed to sponsor the entombment but undertook a number of precautions. The holy man would be interred in a small building near the palace. In preparation, Singh had three of its four doorways sealed with bricks and mortar, turning the open structure into something resembling a jail—or, less optimistically, a crypt.

  Military officers, as well as European doctors, watched as the yogi arranged himself into a sitting posture. It was most likely a Full Lotus, with legs crisscrossed and feet atop the thighs. One observer likened the pose to that of “a Hindoo idol.” Attendants then wrapped the yogi in white linen and placed him inside a wooden box. It rested in a shallow pit below the building’s floor. No dirt was applied because the yogi had expressed concern about ants attacking his body. The maharajah’s men did, however, secure the box with lock and key. They then padlocked the door at the building’s entrance and erected a mud wall to seal off the improvised cell from the outside world.

  The building was judged to have no hole that could admit air, and no passageway through which food could pass. Sentries kept watch day and night. A senior officer of the court came by periodically to check on security and report back to the maharajah.

  The interment lasted forty days and forty nights—a period that, from biblical times, has stood for completeness and unbroken cycles. Then the king rode up on an elephant, dismounted before his assembled court, and surveyed the results.

  The linen bag looked mildewed, as if it had lain undisturbed for a long time. The yogi’s legs and arms proved to be cold, stiff, and shriveled, his skin pale. No pulse could be detected.

  Then his eyes opened.

  The yogi’s body convulsed violently. His nostrils flared. A faint heartbeat could now be heard. After a few minutes, his eyes dilated. His color returned.

  Seeing the king nearby, the yogi asked in a low, barely audible voice, “Do you believe me now?”

  Yoga in centuries past was a mystic wonderland in which the practices differed from our own in ways that ranged from the mundane to the almost unimaginable. Take instruction. It was done in private rather than in classes. More important, relatively few women did yoga. That was understandable given the chauvinistic leanings of old societies. The most radical difference centered on the lifestyles of the men.

  Yogis were often vagabonds who engaged in ritual sex or showmen who contorted their bodies to win alms—even while dedicating their lives to high spirituality. The Punjab yogi was no exception. Chroniclers report that he always did his burial feats “for good compensation,” as one put it. After surviving his forty-day interment, he was presented with a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, pieces of silk, and shawls of a kind “usually conferred by the Princes of India on persons of distinction.”

  Yogis were as much gypsies as circus performers. They read palms, interpreted dreams, and sold charms. The more pious often sat naked—their beards uncut and hair matted—and smeared themselves with ashes from funeral pyres to emphasize the body’s temporality.

  The Kanphata yogis, a large sect, had reputations as child snatchers. To obtain new members, they would adopt orph
ans and, when the opportunity arose, buy or steal children. Understandably, good families dreaded their presence. At times, bands of yogis would prey on trade caravans and descend on merchants to extort food and money. When hired as guards, violent orders formed what we would now call protection rackets.

  Some yogis smoked ganja and ate opium. Some carried begging bowls. A few were surely saints. But British officialdom as well as educated Indians came to resent the holy men as not only potentially dangerous but as economic drains on society. A British census summed up the condescension tartly by putting yogis under the heading “miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants.”

  No small part of the disrepute centered on sex. Spiritually, the objective of the yogi was to achieve a blissful state of consciousness in which the male and female aspects of the universe merged into a realization of oneness. That union (the word “yoga” means union) resulted in enlightenment. But a main path was sexual ecstasy—a veiled part of the agenda that modern research has recently uncovered. David Gordon White, one of the field’s preeminent scholars, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted in a 2006 book that the ancient yogis sought a divine state of consciousness “homologous to the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm.”

  The path to the ecstatic union was known as Tantra. Hugely popular, it rejected the caste system, pulled in converts by the cartload, and gave rise to religious authorities who wrote thousands of texts and commentaries. It reveled in magic, sorcery, divination, ritual worship (especially of goddesses), cultic rites of passage, and sacred sexuality.

  In the West, Tantra is best known as an originator of sexual rites. And rites there were—enough to raise protests from the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy of the day. The main charge was that Tantrics indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.

  So too the Punjab yogi, a good Tantric. As his reputation rose, his behavior became so bad that the maharajah considered throwing him out of the kingdom. But the yogi left of his own accord. He did so with spirits high, eloping to the mountains with a young married woman.

  Over the centuries, Tantra underwent various degradations that reached their nadir with the Aghori—a cannibal sect that ate the flesh of human corpses, drank urine and liquor from human skulls, lived in cremation grounds and dunghills, and reviled all social convention, supposedly to court public disapproval as tests of humility. The primal ascetics also practiced ritual cruelty and seasonal orgies. Scholars of religion tend to avoid the gory details but do mention such things as an Aghori predilection for incest. In any event, the worst behaviors associated with Tantra were so extreme that the overall practice came to be condemned as a threat to society.

  Another way that old yoga differed from our own was its formulation of Hatha—or postural yoga. The principles were laid out in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. The holy book of the fifteenth century represents the discipline’s earliest extant text.

  The book lavished attention on body parts that have nothing in common with the modern focus, including the penis, vagina, scrotum, and anus. Over and over, it recommended sitting postures meant to exert pressure on the perineum—the area between the anus and genitals that is sensitive to erotic stimulation. “Press the perineum with the heel of the foot,” the text advised. “It opens the doors of liberation.”

  Today, the term of art for a yoga posture is asana. But the word in Sanskrit actually means “seat”—harkening back more than a millennium to the days when postural yoga referred to nothing more complicated than sitting in a relaxed position for meditation. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika put bold new emphasis on sitting postures and stimulating acts. It said nothing of standing poses or the kinds of fluid movements so popular in contemporary yoga classes.

  The book also told how to extend the duration of lovemaking—and focused its advice on males, reflecting yoga’s ancient bias. It called for “a female partner” but conceded that a willing consort was something “not everyone can obtain.”

  One instruction claimed that a particular technique would produce such steely control in sexual relations that the yogi would release no semen even if “embraced by a passionate woman.” The goal was to slowly raise the levels of excitement, the couple approaching but never quite reaching orgasm, their ecstasy going on and on, the two becoming one, transcending all opposites.

  If such depictions of Hatha yoga strike the modern reader as bizarre, it is because contemporary books and teachers seldom refer to the origins of the practice. But in truth, Hatha is a branch of Tantra. It was developed as a way to speed the Tantric agenda, to make enlightenment happen by the precise application of willpower and the redirection of libidinal energy rather than by some nebulous mix of piety and contemplation. The Sanskrit root of Hatha is hath—“to treat with violence,” as in binding someone to a post, according to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary, by an Oxford professor. So, too, Hatha means violence or force. The discipline arose in a carefully structured campaign of vigorous activity meant to promote the quick attainment of enlightenment through ecstasy.

  So it is that a number of scholars translate Hatha yoga as “violent union.” Other specialists render it as “union from violence or force” to put the emphasis on the illumination rather than its means of attainment. In either case, such definitions seldom—if ever—show up in the popular literature. The New Age approach is to embrace the poetry of Sanskrit and divide Hatha into ha and tha, for sun and moon. That interpretation casts the word itself as an esoteric uniting of opposites and typically omits any reference to force or violence.

  A final way that old yoga differed from our own was its emphasis on the miraculous. For ages, the sacred literature of India had portrayed yogis as able to fly, levitate, stop their hearts, suspend their breathing, vanish, walk through walls, project themselves into other bodies, touch the moon, survive live burial, make themselves invisible, die at will, walk on water, and—like Jesus of Nazareth—bring the dead back to life. They were hailed as miracle workers. Their unusual abilities had a name—siddhis. The Sanskrit word means success or perfection and is a yogic term of art for the otherworldly powers. Patanjali, the Indian sage who laid out the fundamentals of mystic yoga some sixteen centuries ago, devoted an entire chapter of his aphorisms to the otherworldly feats, including such talents as reading minds and predicting the future.

  Astonishing claims filled the pages of Hatha Yoga Pradipika. It said practitioners could neutralize poisons, destroy all diseases, annihilate old age, obviate evil, and achieve immortality—not to mention doing away with constipation, wrinkles, and gray hair.

  Yogi warriors made miraculous claims to enhance their battlefield image, according to William Pinch, a scholar at Wesleyan University. Yoga, he said, conferred a reputation of invincible power. “There was a clear tactical advantage of believing, and having your enemy believe, that you were immortal.”

  The basic accomplishment that bestowed the gift of the miraculous on the lowly practitioner was the attainment of samadhi—the state of transcendent bliss in which the yogi became one with the universe. The adept did so after learning how to move all the currents of prana, the body’s energy, up the spine into the head. At that point, according to Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the yogi became “as if dead.”

  Some yogis entered the euphoric state for the purposes of spiritual enlightenment. Others—like the Punjab yogi, true to the diversity of the Tantric brotherhood—did so for entertainment and profit.

  The dramatic success of the live burial astonished many people—and not just at the court of Ranjit Singh. Books describing the feat were published in Vienna, London, and New York. The educated world marveled at the accomplishment and wondered at its explanation. Claude M. Wade, the British liaison to the maharajah’s court and an eyewitness to the yogi’s exhumation, cautioned his peers that it would be “presumptuous to deny to the Hindoos the possible discovery or attainment of an art which has hitherto escaped the researches of European science.”

  At the time
of the burial, N. C. Paul was entering medical school in Calcutta (today known as Kolkata) and, as a new scientist, paid close attention. After all, the spectcenter1e appeared to defy the laws of nature. His curiosity led him to write a book—A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy.

  It featured the live burial and, as it turned out, marked the birth of a new science.

  Who was Paul? No scholar or book gave him more than a passing reference. I knew little until I went to Calcutta, a city crackling with energy despite the monsoon heat.

  Blaring horns and bad traffic greeted my cab ride to his medical school—a place I expected to bear the tidy imprint of its British founders. Instead, it was bedlam. Stray dogs, sick people, and students roamed a warren of broken buildings and fallen trees. Walls bore faded posters. I grew apprehensive as I neared the library, increasingly uneasy but still eager to learn about the world’s first scientist who sought to free yoga from its mythic past.

  I climbed a circular stairway past loose wires, cobwebs, and pieces of shattered concrete. The library had a high ceiling and dark wood that bespoke past elegance. But decay had set in. Cabinets with glass doors held row upon row of old books—the dust inside so thick that it obscured the titles. With a start, I realized that the cases had become mausoleums. Overhead, gauzy spider webs hung down like props in a horror movie. The smiling librarian in her colorful sari seemed slightly embarrassed—but not too much. It turned out that she, like everyone else, knew nothing of Paul and little of the school’s early days. The Bengal Medical College had been founded in 1835 as the first school of European medicine in Asia, its red brick and white trim meant to symbolize a new era.

  In a panic, I sped across town to the National Library, a colonial relic on a lush campus. For days I pored through old books and reports. Nothing. Not a trace. Some records were so fragile that they fell apart in my hands. Worms had eaten their way through many books, leaving trails of missing letters and words. I made little piles of debris at my desk. Book after book. Nothing.