If I could snap my fingers and make it happen, I would establish a Yoga Education Society that took on the job of pulling all the information together and making it publicly available. YES could become not only a central repository but an impartial voice that summarized the information, giving practitioners a good place to go for reliable assessments. YES could also act as a force to counteract the growing waves of commercial spin and help raise the visibility of yoga benefits that seem to get relatively little attention, such as the discipline’s promise as an antidepressant, a sex therapy, and a stimulus to creativity.
If I have been hard on yoga commercialization, it is because the trend raises fundamental questions that seldom get addressed. Today, as always, yoga has no social mechanism that sifts through the numerous claims to ascertain the truth, and the commercial blitz with its dynamic goals and competitive agenda seems to make that weakness all the more glaring. Imagine if Big Pharma had no Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies looking over its shoulder. The marketing of fake diseases and bogus cures—already a multibillion-dollar embarrassment despite all the bureaucratic scrutiny—would be much worse.
Yoga seems to be moving toward that kind of predatory behavior as it grows into a bustling industry. Of course, commercial ventures can also perform wonderful acts of public service. Witness the free event with all the yogis in Central Park. But what they do best is promote their own interests and welfare.
To me, the great hope of improvement centers on expansions of scientific research and the rise of the kinds of thoughtful individuals profiled in this book. They are busy combining yoga and science, leaving behind the ambivalence of recent decades and looking ahead. The group represents a vanguard of forward thinkers with serious degrees, serious interests, and—perhaps most important—the serious credibility required to raise the discipline’s standing. They are changing both what yoga is and our understanding of what it can do.
The decades between the founding of Gune’s ashram and the publication of Light on Yoga bore witness to a radical shift of perspective. Yoga, instead of looking to gurus and antiquity for guidance, looked to science. But that bond weakened over the years. As a result, yoga’s primal attitudes often reasserted themselves.
Today, it seems that the relationship between science and yoga is ripe for revitalization. I take heart not only from the new generation of scientific yogis but from the declarations of respected authorities such as the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. In his book The Universe in a Single Atom, he writes that “spirituality must be tempered by the insights and discoveries of science.” Remarkably, he even states that if science found particular tenets of Buddhism to be false, “then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
Another encouraging sign is that government authorities in the United States and elsewhere have started to fund the science of yoga, mainly as a means of evaluating the discipline’s potential for disease prevention and treatment. The goal is to document the true benefits. In Bethesda, Maryland, the National Institutes of Health, the world’s premier organization for health-care research, is spending money and raising standards. It began funding yoga research in 1998 and has now paid for dozens of studies, including investigations of yoga’s ability to treat arthritis, insomnia, diabetes, depression, fatigue, and chronic pain. Many of these studies appeared since I began my inquiry in 2006, suggesting that the pace of scientific research is quickening. The wave tends to be high quality, helping raise yoga’s social credibility.
These public investments are starting to pay off in terms of treatments and insights, as suggested by some of the most interesting reports in this book. The Institutes funded the hypertension study in Pennsylvania, the cardiovascular study in Virginia, the telomere study in California, the aerobics study in New York, the neurotransmitter study in Boston, the right-brain study in Philadelphia, and the musician study in Massachusetts, among other projects. Such inquiries are revealing true paths to a better future.
In 2011, the Institutes began a new cycle of studies, despite increasingly tight budgets. They include yoga for cancer survivors, for adults who suffer persistent depression, and for elderly women at risk of cardiovascular disease.
Opponents of federal research love to disparage yoga investigations as extravagant wastes of taxpayer money. In 2005, Human Events, a conservative journal, ridiculed yoga studies as symptomatic of the “bloated bureaucracy syndrome.” Such criticism is likely to grow in the years ahead as political battles heat up in Washington over how to reduce the federal budget deficit.
It follows that the public funding of yoga research, without concerted advocacy, is unlikely to see significant increases anytime soon. Wherever you live—in the United States or elsewhere—it seems like a good time to write your representatives or take other steps to bring the merits of yoga studies to the attention of public officials. In 2011, the amount of money that the National Institutes of Health spent on yoga research amounted to about $7 million. That’s too small to qualify as even a drop in Washington’s bucket. It’s nearly invisible. A much larger investment seems wise, given that yoga’s demonstrated skills at disease prevention might result in savings of billions of dollars in traditional health-care costs. The outlay is highly leveraged, as actuaries like to say.
As a society, we are learning that extended old age can mean extended pain and debilitation, with worn-out organs and crippling dementias turning the twilight years into tragedies. Yoga seems to hold out the promise of increasing not only our life spans but our health spans. It may be part of the answer to enhancing not just the quantity of life but its quality, to helping us remain healthy for a longer period of time, to making our last years more vital and productive. That promise seems like a wonderful topic for a serious program of research.
The stakes go far beyond practicalities. One of the most interesting frontiers has little or nothing to do with expediency and everything to do with simple understanding.
What if Paul had been able to do a few brain scans and other measurements while the Punjab yogi sat in his deathlike trance? What new science might have emerged? Is disanimate bliss a human birthright? Is the euphoric trance safe? Can it spiral into madness? Does it make you a better person? Can it improve how we treat one another?
Science fiction with its portrayals of long space fights that feature coffinlike freezers and frozen astronauts may be passé. Perhaps human hibernation—as Paul described it more than a century and a half ago—is the right way to go. Maybe future astronauts will slip into a Full Lotus when voyaging between the stars.
We have yet to address scientifically—much less begin to unravel—such questions. At a minimum, a deeper understanding of yoga has humanitarian implications ranging from practical therapies for people caught in kundalini’s coils to psychoanalytic insights of a kind that Jung would have cherished.
The public evidence suggests that yoga’s rather profound ability to slow the human metabolism can function like a match to ignite a sexual blaze. Often, the resulting state is feverish and the yogi animated (if not meditating or immobilized in the Punjab yogi’s kind of catalepsy). As noted in chapter 6, I call this reversal the yoga paradox. It has received no explicit attention to my knowledge from either yoga professionals or the world of biomedicine. Corby’s team at Stanford saw glimmers of the transformation. The main symptom is a radical change of homeostasis—the body’s metabolic equilibrium—from cool to hot. One of my hopes for this book is that it will prompt the scientific community to carefully study this and other aspects of yogic hypersexuality.
The science of yoga has only just begun. In my judgment, the topic has such depth and resonance that the voyage of discovery will go on for centuries, perhaps millennia. What started with Paul and studies of respiratory physiology will spread to investigations ever more central to life and living, to questions of insight and ecstasy, of being and consciousness. Ultimately, the social understanding that follows in the wake of
scientific discovery will address issues of human evolution and what we decide to become as a species.
Even so, as I mentioned in the prologue, it’s important to remember that science has no monopoly on the truth.
As a science journalist, I have devoted my career to writing about science and trying to illuminate its findings and methods. Science is incredibly tough in practice despite its often gentle and glamorous image. By nature, it seeks to limit the role of faith, to make as few assumptions as possible, and to subject the information it gathers as well as its own tentative findings to withering doubt. A synonym for “science” is “organized skepticism.” The process can be intellectually brutal. The constructive side is that science, done right, also works to suspend judgment, to collect and test and verify before coming to firm conclusions. In theory, it can see without prejudice. That makes it a rare thing in the world of human institutions.
But science—even at its best, even with its remarkable powers of discrimination and discovery—is nonetheless extraordinarily crude. It ignores much about reality to zero in on those aspects of nature that it can quantify and comprehend. What gets set aside can be considerable—the wonders of the Sistine Chapel, among other achievements. Science, for all its triumphs over the last four centuries, sometimes fails to see the obvious. It is blind to the individuality of a snowflake and the convulsions of the stock market, not to mention ethics. No equation is going to outdo Shakespeare.
My book The Orcenter1e devoted its last chapter to sketching out the limitations of scientific knowledge. The arguments are philosophic in nature but come down to the great difficulty that science faces in trying to provide a comprehensive worldview.
What I know with certainty is that science cannot address, much less answer, many of the most interesting questions in life. It’s one finger of a hand, as a wise man once said. I treasure the scientific method for its insights and discoveries, as well as for the wealth of comforts and social advances it has given us. But I question the value of scientism—the belief that science has authority over all other interpretations of life, including the philosophic and spiritual, moral and humanistic.
So while the science of yoga may be demonstrably true—while its findings may be revelatory and may show popular declarations to be false or misleading—the field by nature fails utterly at producing a complete story. Many of yoga’s truths surely go beyond the truths of science.
Yoga may see further, and its advanced practitioners, for all I know, may frolic in fields of consciousness and spirituality of which science knows nothing. Or maybe it’s all delusional nonsense. I have no idea.
But even if the otherworldly view has merit, this book and the long studies of the scientific community show the bottom line. The transcendental bliss starts with the firing of neurons and neurotransmitters, with surges of hormones and brain waves.
It’s the science of yoga.
Further Reading
Here are some recommended books on the science and history of yoga, as well as a few selections from related fields. The list makes no claim of being comprehensive but simply offers entree to a growing literature that draws on demonstrable fact and reasonable inference to illuminate yoga.
Michael J. Alter. Science of Flexibility, 3rd ed. Champaign, IL.: Human Kinetics, 2004. The inside story on extreme bending.
Loren Fishman and Carol Ardman. Relief Is in the Stretch: End Back Pain Through Yoga. New York: Norton, 2005. A guide and rationale.
Loren Fishman and Ellen Saltonstall. Yoga for Arthritis. New York: Norton, 2008. A strategy and how it works.
Judith Hanson Lasater. Yogabody: Anatomy, Kinesiology, and Asana. Berkeley: Rodmell Press, 2009. A tour of the inner body for better practice and teaching.
William D. McArdle, Frank I. Katch, and Victor L. Katch. Exercise Physiology: Nutrition, Energy, and Human Performance, 7th ed. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009. A bible of sports science that features hundreds of informative graphics.
Timothy McCall. Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing. New York: Bantam, 2007. A thoughtful guide rooted in science and personal observation.
Mel Robin. A Physiological Handbook for Teachers of Yogasana. Tucson: Fenestra Books, 2002. A classic—only 629 pages long.
——.A Handbook for Yogasana Teachers: The Incorporation of Neuroscience, Physiology, and Anatomy into the Practice. Tucson: Wheatmark, 2009. The updated classic—only 1,106 pages!
Robert M. Sapolsky. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, 3rd ed. New York: Henry Holt, 2004. A lucid examination of how prolonged stress can result in major afflictions.
Richard M. Schwartzstein and Michael J. Parker. Respiratory Physiology: A Clinical Approach. Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2005. The scientific basics from physicians at the Harvard Medical School.
Mark Singleton. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. How Hindu nationalism and early health fads helped create modern yoga.
Hugh B. Urban. Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Light on the world of yoga eroticism.
Amy Weintraub. Yoga for Depression: A Compassionate Guide to Relieve Suffering Through Yoga. New York: Broadway Books, 2004. Beautifully written advice on mood lifting and how it works.
David Gordon White. Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. High scholarship on early sexual rites and centuries of misrepresentations.
Notes
Chronology
xxv earliest known precursors of yoga: Thomas McEvilley, “An Archaeology of Yoga,” Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 1 (Spring 1981), pp. 44–77; Gregory L. Possehl, The Indus Civilization (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2003), pp. 141–45. See also Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 353–358. Note that recent scholarship has cast doubt on this traditional interpretation. See, for instance, Geoffrey Samuel, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 2–8, and David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. 48–59.
xxv citation as a founding document: Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 26–27. The date for the Yoga Sutras comes from White, Sinister Yogis, p. xii.
xxv Erotic sculptures of the Lakshmana temple: David Gordon White, Kiss of the Yogini: “Tantric Sex” in its South Asian Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 98, 144–46.
xxv Gorakhnath, a Hindu ascetic: David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 90–101.
xxvi describes a magic rite: Gudrun Bühnemann, “The Six Rites of Magic,” in David Gordon White, ed., Tantra in Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 448.
xxvi The Yoni Tantra: Indra Sinha, Tantra: The Cult of Ecstasy (London: Hamlyn, 2000), pp. 135, 140–42.
xxix begins spending public funds: Gordon Edlin and Eric Golanty, Health & Wellness, 9th ed. (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 2007), p. 434.
Prologue
1 illustrating its parking tickets: Laura Crimaldi and Ira Kantor, “Cambridge ‘Yoga’ Parking Tickets Have Drivers in a Twist,” Boston Herald, www.boston herald.com, September 21, 2010.
2 made it part of Let’s Move: Anonymous, “Take Action Kids: 5 Simple Steps to Success,” www.letsmove.gov/sites/letsmove.gov/files/pdfs/TAKE_ACTION _KIDS.pdf.
2 On the White House lawn: Kaitlin Quistgaard, “Yoga Diary: Posing at the White House,” Yoga Journal lifestyle blog, April 6, 2010, blogs.yogajour nal.com/yogadiary/2010/04/posing-at-the-white-house.html; Anonymous, “White House Yoga,” New Image Photography, newimagephotography.com/blog/?p=1034.
2 did a tricky balancing pose: Anonymous, “Yoga at the White Hous
e, An Easter Tradition! 2011 Pics,” www.yogadork.com/news/yoga-at-the-white-house-an-easter-tradition-2011-pics.
2 puts the current number of practitioners: Anonymous, “Yogamonth Media Kit 2010,” Yoga Health Foundation, Venice, California, p. 11.
2 a gathering of thousands: Lizette Alvarez, “STRETCH; Yoga, Brought to You By . . . ,” New York Times, June 27, 2010, Section MB, p. 7.
3 yoga industrial complex: John Friend—founder of the Anusara style and the company, Anusara, Inc.—is considered an exemplar of the commercialization trend. For a profile, see Mimi Swartz, “The Yoga Mogul,” New York Times Magazine, July 25, 2010, Section MM, p. 38.
3 charged small studios: Nora Isaacs, “Hot, sweaty and scandalous,” Salon.com, April 4, 2003.
3 thousands of patents: Suketa Mehta, “A Big Stretch,” New York Times, May 7, 2007, Section A, p. 27.
3 According to marketing studies: Ronald D. Michman and Edward M. Mazze, The Affluent Consumer: Marketing and Selling the Luxury Lifestyle (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006), p. 124.
3 citing high incomes: Anonymous, “The Growth of Yoga: Audience,” Yoga Journal, 2008, www.yogajournal.com/advertise/pdf/YJ_audience_08.pdf.
4 “cut with all kinds”: Bryant Urstadt, “Lust for Lulu: How the Yoga Brand LuLulemon Turned Fitness into a Spectator Sport,” New York, August 3, 2009, p. 30.
The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards Page 28
