The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards

by William J Broad

  The natural history of the human orgasm is a subject on which science has shed some light. Over the decades, teams of investigators have measured its length and discerned a well-defined experience that can vary considerably in duration and character. The usual range falls between a few seconds and twenty-two seconds. Masters and Johnson discovered that, in rare instances, certain women could experience orgasms that lasted a minute or more. They coined a fancy term for the situation, calling it status orgasmus. The status implied a continuous state rather than brief interlude. The scientists found that women experiencing such episodes appeared to move with extreme rapidity between successive orgasmic peaks, as indicated by repeated contractions of their vaginal walls. The measurements of one woman showed her undergoing more than two dozen rapid contractions.

  Not surprisingly, the nervous system turned out to orchestrate the arousals. The most important shift featured the change from parasympathetic to sympathetic dominance. The parasympathetic—the rest and digest part—began the activity by promoting a state of relaxed engorgement and erection. In this phase, the reproductive organs of both males and females filled with blood. Then the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system would kick in, pumping adrenaline and throwing the body into a rising frenzy of tension, breathing, and pounding activity, as well as soaring heart rates and blood pressure. The sympathetic peak came at climax.

  In exploring this world, science found a remarkable class of women who can think themselves into states of sexual ecstasy—a phenomenon known clinically as spontaneous orgasm and popularly as thinking off. At Rutgers University, scientists looked at ten women who claimed such abilities. Each was examined separately. In the laboratory, the scientists would have each woman lie down on a hospital bed full of decorative pillows, measure her excitement, and compare her response to readings generated when she stimulated her genitals manually.

  The results were unambiguous. The scientists found that both conditions produced significant rises in blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation (all due to sympathetic arousal) as well as tolerance for pain—what turns out to be a signature of orgasm. Some of the women, the scientists noted, “showed vigorous muscular movement” during their nongenital arousals while others “appeared to be lying still.” The overall findings, the team wrote in a 1992 paper, called for “a reassessment of the nature of orgasm.”

  Significantly, yoga played a central role in developing some of these talents. One of the women was a yogini who was happy to demonstrate her abilities for the sake of science. She said she could focus on her spinal column and rapidly throw its energies into action. “Just tell me which chakra you’d like to measure,” she told the scientist in charge. “I can orgasm up and down all the energy centers. I don’t know how much time you’ve got, but I won’t have any problem keeping things going all afternoon.”

  At first glance, the idea of experiencing sexual bliss over the course of hours, days, or a lifetime seems absurd. If regular orgasms involve the fleeting loss of contact with reality (what is sometimes known as la petite mort, “the little death”), then a rapturous experience that went on continuously would seem to leave its beneficiaries cut off from the world and permanently adrift. How would you eat, play soccer, or run a meeting? The idea of existing in both worlds simultaneously seems like a logical contradiction.

  The objective may appear somewhat less dubious if you take into account the long intermingling of mysticism and sexuality. Across ages and cultures, the aims of the two have proved to be remarkably similar, if not identical. Both encourage states of single-mindedness. Eastern religions such as Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism all teach the mutuality of spirituality and sexuality. Christian ascetics also evoked the union. They often spoke of the soul, or “the bride,” as seeking assimilation with the beloved.

  Any visitor to Rome who has gazed on Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa sees a moving portrayal of this kind of spiritual euphoria. The saint’s head is thrown back, her lips parted in what looks like erotic anticipation. You can almost hear her moan.

  Not that living in two worlds is easy. In India, individuals caught up in ecstatic trances often have devotees who help with the basics of survival. Ramakrishna (1836–1886), one of modern Hinduism’s great saints, kept assistants on hand to tell him when he had eaten enough. The saint could also forget to breathe. At night, devotees would stand watch and wake him if necessary.

  In yoga, the path to continuous bliss is known as kundalini, although no one would fault a casual observer for thinking otherwise. The word tops my list of yoga’s most confusing terms. First, kundalini refers to both a common variety of yoga as well as one of the discipline’s most esoteric experiences (which the style targets). Advanced yogis tell me that perhaps 1 percent or fewer of all practitioners undergo kundalini arousal. But its audience is much larger. Public discussions of the phenomenon evoke all kinds of allure—knowledge, power, mystery, excitement, danger, ecstasy, and more— even while cloaking the blissful state in misapprehensions and euphemisms. My college dictionary does a fair job on the fundamentals while avoiding any hint of its underlying sexual nature: “In yogic tradition, spiritual energy that lies dormant at the base of the spine until it is activated and channeled upward to the brain to produce enlightenment.”

  The Sanskrit definition of kundalini is “coiled” or “she who is coiled,” as in a coiled snake. That is the iconic representation. The serpent lies sleeping at the base of the spine and its uncoiling or awakening and movement up the spine is said to mark the beginning of enlightenment. The symbolism may seem odd. But the snake has a long history as a representation of rebirth because of its ability to shed its skin. In Hindu religious life, snakes enjoy high status and are often worshiped as gods and goddesses. So the traditional image of kundalini makes sense in terms of its cultural origins. The rising snake marks a new beginning. Of course, serpents have very different associations for readers of the Bible. It is no surprise that, in recent years, some evangelicals have assailed kundalini as the work of the devil.

  The sinuous depiction is rooted, at least partly, in sensation. Ramakrishna said he sometimes felt the mystic current rising “like a snake” up his spine, the movement going “in a zigzag way.”

  The awakening of kundalini is also said to result in fiery sensations, its path through the body described as burning hot. In his treatise on yoga, Eliade, the historian of religion, cited ancient texts referring to kundalini as a “great fire” and a “blazing fire.” It has, in short, been portrayed repeatedly as a kind of living flame. The etymology of the word reinforces that image. Its Sanskrit root, the verb kund, means “to heat or burn.”

  Tantric authorities describe the mystic fire as divine in origin and feminine in character, calling her a sleeping goddess that the accomplished yogi seeks to awaken. Her names included Shakti and Isvari, the goddess of supreme reality. The cosmic female element is said to surge up the spine to the top of the head and unite there with her male counterpart, Shiva, their communion producing a state of transcendent bliss.

  Old accounts tend to be vague in describing the physical basis of kundalini. Modern depictions are no better. The definitions include mystic energy, enhanced flows of prana, the vital energy behind spiritual growth, and the mothering force that guides human development.

  Yogani, an American Tantric who writes under a pseudonym and often makes references to modern science, rejects such portrayals as cover stories. His 2004 book sums up his perspective in a blunt chapter title: “Kundalini—A Code Word for Sex.” He calls the mystic experience “a flowering of orgasm, an expansion of orgasm into endless full bloom in the whole body.”

  The main investigators of kundalini in the world of science turn out to have been not sexologists or biologists but psychologists and psychiatrists. The group is fairly small and typically works on the fringes of the therapeutic world. Moreover, it has achieved nothing like accord on whether the hotwiring of the human body is good or bad, healthy or pathol
ogical. Instead, the experts typically clash.

  Remarkably, one of the first investigators—if not the first—was no less a figure than Carl Jung (1875–1961), the Swiss psychiatrist. He came upon a case of kundalini arousal early in his career and developed a deep interest. Around 1918, a woman of twenty-five came to his attention whose symptoms included a wave of physical turmoil that rose from her perineum, to her uterus, to her bladder, and eventually to the crown of her head.

  He was baffled—and she delighted. “It’s going splendidly!” the woman said of their analytic sessions. “It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand my dreams. I always have the craziest symptoms, but something is happening all the time.” To Jung’s astonishment, he realized belatedly that the woman found the physical and psychological chaos to be enjoyable.

  Jung lectured repeatedly on kundalini over the years and in 1932 gave four talks in Zurich on its psychology. He endorsed its academic study but warned people away from its practice. One of his sternest admonitions came in 1938, two decades after taking in his kundalini patient.

  Jung called the experience a “deliberately induced psychotic state, which in certain unstable individuals might easily lead to a real psychosis.” The term is one of the darkest of psychiatry. It bespeaks serious breaks with reality marked by delusions, hallucinations, and other crippling failures of consciousness.

  Kundalini, Jung concluded, “strikes at the very roots of human existence and can let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person ever dreamed.”

  The analytic tone changed dramatically in the 1970s as waves of Indian gurus swept the United States and many yogis and spiritual seekers began to undergo kundalini arousal. Lee Sannella (1916–2010) gave one of the earliest and most upbeat assessments. A graduate of the Yale medical school, the San Francisco psychiatrist led early seminars at the Esalen Institute, the icon of the human potential movement that explored drugs and sex, religion and philosophy.

  For Sannella, the question was whether the mystic fire led to genius or madness, or some ambiguous mix of the two. His 1976 book Kundalini: Psychosis or Transcendence? told of thirteen people who had undergone arousal. They included an actress, a psychologist, a librarian, a professor, a writer, two artists, two housewives, a healer, a secretary, a psychiatrist, and a scientist. His portraits were anonymous.

  Sannella said his survey indicated that kundalini represented no jump off the cliff but rather “a rebirth process as natural as physical birth. It seems pathological only because the symptoms are not understood in relation to the outcome: an enlightened human being.”

  Scholar that he was, Sannella did mention Jung, who by that time had become a counterculture hero because of his embrace of the mystic East. But Sannella downplayed the warnings. He devoted one sentence to Jung’s conclusion that kundalini could lead to madness.

  Sannella’s case studies tended to follow the same script—initial difficulties followed by slow recoveries so that the awakenings ended on a happy note, with the individual feeling a deep sense of personal renewal. But the evidence suggests that he engaged in a considerable degree of interpretative spin. For instance, his portrayal of the Reverend John Scudder, an Illinois psychic healer, reads nothing like the minister’s own account.

  Scudder told of his body filling with heat, light, and energy. His blood seemed to boil. His organs felt like they were on fire. Waves of energy pounded his head. His heart beat so violently that alarmed friends could hear it thumping loudly in his chest, and their church later that day announced that he had suffered a heart attack. Sleep eluded him. Weeks of agony left him fearing for his life and his sanity, even as he judged himself able to read minds and see with clairvoyant vision. Then, quite suddenly, the horror ended and he felt thoroughly clean in a way he had never felt before.

  Afterward, Scudder told anyone who would listen that the experience was to be avoided at all costs. “I was led to believe that the opening of the kundalini was a great and glorious occult experience,” he recalled. “What I went through was absolute hell. If there is a hell, it could not be any worse than what I endured.”

  By the 1980s, aggressive gurus and practices had bestowed upon the San Francisco region many hundreds of kundalites, as students of the inner fire are known. Sannella alone came across nearly one thousand cases and helped found a counseling service known as the Kundalini Crisis Clinic. The Spiritual Emergency Network—later renamed the Spiritual Emergence Network for a more positive spin—did no counseling but ran a hotline. Between 1986 and 1987, it answered more than five hundred calls. An analysis showed the typical caller to be a woman, age forty, who had questions about kundalini.

  Today, scores of websites around the globe offer advice, most hailing the fiery experience as a sure path to spiritual uplift. But some tell of terrors, of strange illnesses and life upheavals, of desperate visits to doctors who find it hard to imagine what is going on, much less what kinds of treatments to recommend. A few tell of heart attacks and even death.

  Bob Boyd of Greensboro, North Carolina, founded a website known as Kundalini Survival and Support. There he told of his own arousal as a young man and the nightmare of being unable to extinguish the mystic fire. The blinding rushes, he wrote, “literally crippled me mentally in terms of what academic achievements and future accomplishments I may have had.” People around the world, Boyd said, “rue the day they walked into the kundalini ring of fire.”

  Such warnings get little play while popular portrayals tend to gain wide audiences. Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the runaway bestseller Eat, Pray, Love, paints an alluring picture of her own experience at an Indian ashram. “I suddenly understood the workings of the universe completely,” she gushes in her book. “I left my body, I left the room, I left the planet, and I stepped through time.” Back on earth, she discovered that kundalini left her “randier than a sailor on a three-day shore leave.”

  A few entrepreneurs have seized on the raw eroticism as a way to turn a profit, moving from the austerities of yoga to the garishness of commercialism. Their products focus not on full-blown kundalini but on an assortment of lesser arousals that seem to have little to do with mysticism or healing. It’s mostly about hedonism. Not surprisingly, California—home of distinction in the pursuit of drugs, sex, and other diversions—started the trend and became a hotspot.

  A pioneer was More University. Founded in 1977, it flourished in the dry hills east of San Francisco, offering doctoral degrees in such subjects as sensuality. It had no library and no campus other than people’s homes, yet a doctoral degree cost about fifty thousand dollars. What hundreds of students did learn was how to lengthen their orgasms. Graduates of the university reported one experiment in which a woman kept going for eleven hours. California, facing growing federal pressure to shut down diploma mills, eventually withdrew More’s certification.

  But the knowledge spread. A principal medium was how-to books, several by More alumni.

  Patricia Taylor graduated from Barnard College in Manhattan and received a master’s degree in business administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She worked on Wall Street before transferring to San Francisco, where she studied Tantra. In 1988, her life changed when a More alum brought her into a state of ecstasy that lasted about twenty minutes. “I was breathing fire out of my hands and feet,” she told me. “Then I went into the light.”

  After studying at More, she refocused her life on teaching how to achieve long orgasms, calling them “a portal to the divine.” In 2002, she authored Expanded Orgasm. Her website, www.expandedlovemaking.com, offers books, advice, and courses, including intensives for partners.

  Taylor told me she has been happily married for two decades. Her longest orgasm? Two or three hours, she replied. She added that it was hard to say exactly because it was easy to lose track of time.

  Science is turning a new generation of imaging machines on these uncommon states in an effort to learn more about their characteristics and better
understand the human sexual experience.

  A pioneer is Barry Komisaruk, one of the first scientists to look into the neurophysiology of orgasm. The Rutgers professor worked with two female colleagues to publish the think-off study in 1992, and over the years has sought to map the neural aspects of sexuality, writing more than one hundred papers. His long interest resulted in an understated book, The Science of Orgasm, published in 2006 by Johns Hopkins University Press. By then, Komisaruk was not only doing research and teaching but was named associate dean of the graduate school.

  Relatively late in his career, Komisaruk began using a new means of investigation that went far beyond the EEG in revealing how orgasms light up the brain. The technique, known as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or functional MRI, showed changes in cerebral blood flow and thus neural activity. By the 1990s, functional MRI had come to dominate the world of brain mapping because of its easy operation, wide availability, and clear data. Its pictures showed the overall brain in grayish tones and areas of heightened activity lit up in oranges and yellows.

  From his laboratory in New Jersey, Komisaruk began using the machine in the late 1990s to better understand the workings of neurophysiology and orgasm. By 2003, still fascinated by the think-off women of more than a decade earlier, he began a new round of experimentation meant to explore what functional MRI might reveal about their spontaneous orgasms as well as fundamental aspects of human sexuality.

  Much good science gets done by eliminating the jumble of confusing variables that surround most aspects of nature. That is what Dostálek and the Russians did in examining the physiological repercussions of a single yoga pose. Komisaruk was attracted to the think-off women for the same reason. Spontaneous orgasms seemed to represent the human climactic experience shorn of the confusing variables of sensory input and muscular contraction. For brain imaging, that meant the sensory and motor cortex would stay grayish, as would most other regions of the brain normally involved in the human interaction with the external world. In theory, the functional MRI would show the purely limbic parts of the experience. Of course, women having orgasms without touching themselves might eventually shudder with pleasure, as the 1992 study had shown. But the commotion might start relatively late in the arousal. In theory, the new line of experimentation promised to produce what Komisaruk called a “cleaner picture” of orgasm and an opportunity to better understand its nature.