The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (20 page)

Significantly, one of the eleven coauthors of the study was Liz Owen, an Iyengar teacher who ran classes in the Boston suburbs of Cambridge and Arlington. Owen had
no doctoral or medical degrees but knew a lot about using yoga to lift moods. “Relax your body,” her website advised. “Nourish your soul.”

During this same period, Khalsa worked hard on studies meant to see if mood adjustment could have demonstrable benefits for diverse careers and life stages. One centered on musicians. Khalsa did his investigation with teachers from Kripalu and focused the research on a renowned establishment just down the road from the Berkshires yoga center—Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its academy of advanced study for young musicians. The goal was to see if doing yoga could help the beginners overcome stage fright in general and, more specifically, perform better for the demanding audiences that came to Tanglewood for summer concerts.

In 2005, Khalsa and Stephen Cope from Kripalu recruited ten volunteers from Tanglewood’s prestigious fellows program. The five men and five women were aged twenty-one to thirty, the average just over twenty-five. They included singers, as well as those who played the violin and viola, horn and cello. For two months, the ten volunteers underwent Kripalu training. The options included morning and afternoon sessions seven days a week, a weekly evening session, an early-morning meditation session, and vegetarian meals at Kripalu. The investigation also included ten fellows recruited as controls who had no yoga training.

The results, though not earthshaking, were encouraging, as Khalsa and Cope reported in their 2006 paper.

The study had assessed performance anxiety that the musicians felt in practice sessions, group settings, and solos. The yogis showed no difference from the control group in practice and group settings but did demonstrate a striking drop in performance anxiety during solos. That made sense, Khalsa and Cope noted. Research showed that such nervousness was low during practice, moderate in group settings, and high in solo performances. So the mood effects, they reasoned, would show up more during solos.

During my visit with Khalsa, we sat in his Harvard office and pored over the Tanglewood results on his computer. A yoga mat was rolled up under his desk. “There’s no question the kids loved it,” he said. “The control group had hardly any change. But look at the yoga groups. Yoga brings you into the
moment. It brings a feeling of joy or energy with activity, a kind of mindfulness.”

The results were so positive, Khalsa added, that Tanglewood asked for more. He and Kripalu responded with an expanded study. The young musicians who immersed themselves in yoga, meditation, and Kripalu numbered thirty. And it turned out that their two months of summer practice lifted moods even higher.

In 2009, Khalsa and colleagues reported that the yogi musicians, compared to a control group, showed strong evidence of not only less performance anxiety but significantly less anger, depression, and general anxiety and tension. They loved it, like their predecessors.

Moreover, the scientists tracked down the students a year after the summer program and asked if their lives had changed. Most reported that they had continued doing yoga and meditation, and all said the experience had improved their performance skills.

The portrait of yoga that emerges from decades of mood and metabolic studies is of a discipline that succeeds brilliantly at smoothing the ups and downs of emotional life. It uses relaxation, breathing, and postures to bring about an environment of inner bending and stretching. The actions echo, in a way, how yoga pushes the limbs into challenging new configurations. They promote inner flexibility. As Robin observed, a good workout involves repeatedly pressing the accelerator and brake. Ironically, the overall result is a smoother ride.

No studies have examined the most extreme consequences. But the current evidence seems to suggest that yoga can reduce despair and hopelessness to the point of saving lives. You cannot read Weintraub’s book and learn the details of her turbulent past— cannot watch her doing Breath of Joy, her face lit from within—without feeling the positive force of life affirmation.

If science reveals that yoga can excel at emotional uplift, it also shows that the discipline has a downside. It can do great harm.

I
t is no surprise that a field that prides itself on the routine performance of twists, contortions, and dramatic bends of the human body can do a lot of damage. In a similar vein, it makes sense that circus performers—including tumblers and acrobats—also suffer high rates of impairment, and that running, bicycling, and other vigorous sports can result in painful accidents. Even so, yoga injuries are unsettling because of the discipline’s image as a path to exceptional health. Many people turn to yoga as a gentle alternative to exercises that leave them hurt or intimidated. The idea of damage also runs counter to yoga’s reputation for healing and its promotion of superior levels of fitness and well-being. Few practitioners anticipate strokes and dislocations, dead nerves and ruptured lungs.

The good reputation of yoga rests in no small part on the public silence of the gurus. Their virtual ban on the word “injury” made the topic of blinding pain and physical damage almost as unmentionable as Hatha’s origins. Gune made no allusion to injuries in
Yoga Mimansa
or his book
Asanas.
Indra Devi avoided the issue in
Forever Young
, as did Iyengar in
Light on Yoga.
Silence about injury or strong reassurances about yoga safety also prevailed in the how-to books of Swami Sivananda, K. Pattabhi Jois, and Bikram Choudhury. In general, the famous gurus tend to describe yoga as a nearly miraculous agent of renewal. As one, they imply or state explicitly that ages of practice have shown the discipline to be free of hidden danger.

“Real yoga is as safe as mother’s milk,” declared Swami Gitananda (1907–1993), a popular guru who made ten world tours and founded ashrams on multiple continents.

Modern physicians, on the other hand, have taken an almost malicious delight in recounting the self-inflicted wounds of yoga practitioners and warning of danger,
doing so in dozens of reports. Perhaps they are jealous of the admiration accorded to yoga teachers and get a thrill out of challenging yoga’s mystique. Some have gone so far as to condemn yoga as intrinsically unsafe. What takes the edge off some of this criticism—especially during its first appearance—is how it often revealed a lack of deep knowledge about the workings of yoga but nonetheless managed to strike a tone of icy condescension. Even so, the medical professionals lavished attention on yogis who stumbled into their offices and emergency rooms writhing in pain, and wrote up detailed clinical reports on the accidents and injuries.

Like stones cast into a pond, these disclosures produced waves of reaction that in time affected the practice of modern yoga and ultimately helped make it safer—albeit after considerable resistance. Initially, some yogis challenged the reports as biased and mean-spirited. Others, perhaps taken with the mother’s milk argument, tried to ignore the criticism or shrug off the injuries as an inconspicuous cost of doing business.

In recent years, the best teachers have responded to the warnings with new sensitivity (and better insurance policies). They put safety first, caution their students to proceed with care, and reject the one-size-fits-all mentality of early styles and instructors.

To yoga’s credit, a number of knowledgeable practitioners have recently stepped forward to confront the physical threats quite directly in articles, books, bibliographies, and—most recently—detailed surveys of yoga injuries. The activists are generally reformers who seek to raise awareness of the dangers and offer precautions. The surveys, which can be alarming, suggest that yoga’s recent popularity has created a rush of inexperienced teachers. Ironically, it seems that idyllic vacation spots are particularly treacherous.

Robin is one of the reformers. His books feature lengthy addendums that detail some of the ways in which yoga can go wrong. They tell of paralyzed limbs, bulging eyeballs, damaged brains—among other varieties of destruction, some verging on the bizarre. The appendices reflect his careful reading of the medical literature. They portray a hidden world of major trauma as well as minor problems such as sprains and torn muscles, which turn out to be surprisingly common. In his Pennsylvania class, we practiced a number of precautions, especially on how to unburden the neck in the Headstand and Shoulder Stand.

As a group, the
activists tend to be in closer alignment with the findings of science than yoga traditionalists. Just as Robin and his Iyengar colleagues have redesigned the Headstand, some of the reformers have focused on reinventing some of the most dangerous poses or advising students to drop them altogether.

Such reevaluations may go against yoga’s timeless image. But as we have seen, yoga has proved itself quite flexible in adapting to the needs and desires of different ages. Today, the long silence of the gurus has given way to scientific inquiries that are nurturing new strategies for injury prevention. The reform movement is a happy case study in what can happen if yoga and science cooperate, even grudgingly. The inconspicuous wave of reinvention promises to benefit millions of students around the globe and, not insignificantly, to help modern yoga live up to its good reputation.

In my travels, I learned of an experienced yogi who was said to know the inside story on yoga injury. Prominent gurus had supposedly come to him for help in rehabilitation and recovery. One client was reported to have received a hip replacement before reentering the celebrity life. I decided to track him down.

Glenn Black had traveled to India, studied at Iyengar’s school in Pune, and, like the ancient yogis, spent years in solitude. He ran yoga intensives in the jungles of Costa Rica. In New York City, for a decade, he studied with Shmuel Tatz, a Lithuanian who devised a unique method of physical therapy that he dispensed from offices above Carnegie Hall to actors, singers, dancers, musicians, composers, and television stars. Black had settled down in Rhinebeck, New York, on the Hudson River. Honored as a master teacher and anatomist, he often taught yoga at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium. Black had a devoted following drawn to his earthy, no-nonsense style. He also had an elite bodywork clientele that included celebrities. Of late, he was said to have narrowed his client list down to a handful of billionaires.

One day I noticed that Black was scheduled to teach a master class in Manhattan. I hesitated but was told that resolve was more important than skill. I arranged to talk with him afterward.

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, I made my way to Sankalpah (aim, will, determination) Yoga, a third-floor walkup on Fifth Avenue between Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-
Ninth. The room was filled with lean bodies, roughly half of the individuals said to be teachers.

The class was brutal. Black joked, walked around a lot, talked constantly, played jazz on the sound system, watched us like a hawk, and cajoled relentlessly. Beads of sweat turned into rivulets. He was highly demanding yet surprisingly gentle, having us do lots of stretching, limb movements, and pose holding but no inversions and few classical postures. His teaching was nothing like the regimented styles. Instead, he worked us from the inside out. His approach was almost freeform and it seemed as if he was making it up as he went along, switching gears every so often to better challenge the range of aptitudes in the room or to pull us back from what he perceived to be some kind of cliff. In so doing, he conveyed a sense of intelligent vitality.

Through it all, he urged us to concentrate and try to develop our sense of attention and awareness, especially to the risky thresholds of pain. “I make it as hard as possible,” he told us. “It’s up to you to make it easy on yourself.”

Playfully, he rejected any doubts about his style. “Is this yoga?” he asked as we sweated through an extremely unyogalike pose. “It
is
if you’re paying attention.”

Black told us a grim story. In India, he said, a yogi from abroad had come to study at Iyengar’s school and threw himself into a spinal twist. Black said he watched in astonishment as three of the man’s ribs gave way—
pop, pop, pop.

After class, I joined Black and his companion, Evelyn Weber, on a cab ride back to their hotel. They said they were both born in 1949 and were turning sixty. Both looked much younger. “I am certified in nothing,” Black remarked at one point. “I have no degrees. All I have is a ton of experience.”

Discreet and luxurious, Hotel Plaza Athénée was located on the tree-lined Upper East Side at 64th between Park and Madison, with sister hotels in Paris and Bangkok. We went up to their suite. Daylight flooded the rooms. Weber served nuts and tea as we talked of yoga safety. Black sat on a couch, relaxed but serious.

He was amazingly blunt. My encounters with yoga denial and evasion had left me unprepared for such outspokenness and sweeping visions of better safeguards.
It was radical. If Black ran the world, he would have many people—including many celebrities of the yoga circuit—relinquish not just difficult poses but the discipline itself. Students as well as celebrated teachers injured themselves in droves, he argued, because most were completely unprepared for yoga’s rigors.

Black said the vast majority—”99.9 percent”—have underlying physical weaknesses and problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said. “Yoga in general is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class. There’s such a variety and range of possibilities. Everybody has a different problem.”