The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (39 page)

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.

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.

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 House, 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.