The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (29 page)

In 1987, when Payne got his doctorate, the school was fairly new and had yet to receive much scrutiny. On his résumé, he declared that he “earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in fitness education with an emphasis in Hatha Yoga from Pacific Western University.” The school might have had no foreign language requirement or classroom challenges, but its message was relentlessly upbeat: “Look within yourself,” the school told prospective students. “Exert yourself with dynamic will power through positive thinking and persistence and you will stretch your talents and imagination and achieve new heights of learning while attaining professional and personal success.”

Payne did just that. He became a whirlwind. Armed with his new credentials, he gave lectures, wrote books, made instructional videos, appeared on radio and television shows, and, in 1989, helped found the International Association of Yoga Therapists. As its founding president, and later its director and chairman, he enjoyed a new world of global influence. The group began its journal in 1990, and Payne worked hard in his new job to drum up new readers and memberships.

Bigger things beckoned, and in 1999 Payne entered the burgeoning field of popular yoga
books.
Yoga for Dummies
featured his Ph.D. prominently on the cover, along with that of his coauthor, Georg Feuerstein. As a team, Payne covered yoga’s modern aspects while Feuerstein, an Indologist, handled its ancient ones. The twin credentials lent the book an air of authority and set it apart from competitors, although its biographical materials gave no indication of where Payne received his doctorate or in what field. The book identified him as chairman of the International Association of Yoga Therapists and a yoga teacher with a thriving practice who “responds to his clients’ specific health challenges,” implying that he was a credentialed healer. At a minimum, many readers probably assumed that his doctorate—ostensibly a proof of high academic standing—meant that the book reflected the best understanding of modern science.

The truth lay elsewhere.

The chapter on yoga breathing distinguished itself for its repeated praise of supplemental oxygen as a secret of yoga’s powers. Deep inhalation, it declared, “loads your blood with oxygen.” Three pages later,
Yoga for Dummies
enlarged on the error. Pranayama, it said, “allows you to take in more oxygen food for the 50 trillion cells in your body.” That, of course, not only described a false oxygen rise but made the claim sound more authentic by linking it to the striking body-cell figure.

Two pages later, the book goofed again. After reminding the reader that yogic breathing “brings more oxygen into your system,”
Dummies
raised a red flag. “Don’t be surprised,” it warned, “if you feel a little light-headed or even dizzy.” That explanation, of course, went to the repercussions not of adding oxygen but of blowing off carbon dioxide, which can result in blackouts. It was another missed opportunity for understanding.

The trend culminated with the description of a breathing exercise that, the book assured, would “treat your body with oodles of oxygen.” All the body’s cells, it emphasized, “will be humming with energy and your brain will be very grateful to you for the extra boost.”

Payne’s book also managed to misrepresent one of the most fundamental ways in which yoga affects the human body. As we have seen, scientific investigators, starting in the nineteenth century, established that a defining characteristic of yoga—perhaps
the
defining characteristic—is how it can
slow
the body, the mind, and
the overall metabolism to foster tranquility. Paul focused on hibernation, Behanan on the “retardation of mental functions,” Bagchi and his colleagues on the “extreme slowing” of respiration and heart rates, Bera and his colleagues at Gune’s ashram on lowered metabolism, many scientists on the body’s parasympathetic brake, and Benson on wide physiological drops that led to hypometabolism. Yes, a few breathing styles—such as Bhastrika and Kapalbhati—can excite. But overall, they are the exception, not the rule. As the team of Indian scientists in Bangalore reported, the regular practice of yoga causes the resting metabolic rate to fall.

This physiological fact of life has an obvious social proof. Yoga has won a global following not because of some ostensible ability to zip people up but by its demonstrated power to slow them down. It has proved extraordinarily effective at undoing urban stress and the tensions of modern life. The reason yoga studios are so ubiquitous in big cities is because they are a great antidote to big cities.

Payne, citing no evidence, declared that the physical truth lay precisely in the opposite direction. Yoga breathing, he stated, “steps up your metabolism.” He felt so confident about the claim that later in the book he generalized the energizing effect to the discipline as a whole. Practicing yoga, he asserted, will “boost your metabolism” and “helps you step up a flagging metabolism.”

His misinformation helped pave the way for credulous authors to come, including Tara Stiles, the former model who authored
Slim Calm Sexy Yoga.
He gave the myth new energy.

Dummies
took the muddled thinking about physiology and, like Stiles, applied it to a sensitive issue of personal appearance. The metabolic rise, Payne assured his readers, could aid their realization of one of the obsessive goals of modern life—maintaining a slim figure. The heightened metabolic state, he declared, was “the best manager of weight increase.” His claim was remarkable. By implication, the word “best” put yoga above dieting, exercise, walking, general fitness, and wise nutrition as a means of burning calories and controlling weight. And, lest readers forget, he reiterated the slimming claim. Yoga postures, he said, “keep the rolls off your midriff.” The discipline,
Dummies
stressed, “helps you shed surplus pounds.”

That said, the pseudoscience of Payne on oxygen and metabolism comprised only a small
part of his book. Most of his advice lay in standard postures and tips, anecdotes and encouragement. Photo after photo showed him—athletic and good-looking—going through the poses and helping students. Interestingly, he devoted the majority of the book to what he called “Health Maintenance and Restoration” but made few direct claims for healing.

It sold. Starting in 1999,
Yoga for Dummies
went through at least fourteen printings—far more than most yoga books. It became a standard reference for beginners. And, almost magically over the years, the point size of the font on the cover that announced Payne’s Ph.D. grew larger.

In 2000, he traveled to Davos, Switzerland, and the World Economic Forum. He was, as a Samata news release put it, the first yoga teacher to address the group—a gathering of more than two thousand world leaders. The notables included Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, Bill Gates and the novelist Umberto Eco. Sunday morning at Davos is usually reserved for relaxation and sports. Many participants ski the nearby slopes. But not that Sunday—not with its driving snow, high winds, and zero visibility. Payne found his session packed.

He had arrived.

Around this time, Payne met a medical doctor with whom he formed a close relationship. The doctor, Richard Usatine, had practiced at the Venice Family Clinic and gone on to help run the program in family medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine—one of the world’s top medical schools, located just a few miles from Payne’s yoga center. The two met after Usatine walked away from a car accident but suffered serious back pain. He tried the usual treatments but got no relief. Soon he was referred to Payne and began a yoga routine that quickly ended his anguish.

The men bonded over backs, healing, and a deep belief in the body’s hidden powers of recuperation. The two began discussing how to give medical students a sense of yoga’s benefits and soon founded an elective course. A medical-school first in the United States, the UCLA class gave an overview of yoga and yoga therapy. The popular course became a regular part of the school’s elective curriculum.

Encouraged, Payne and Usatine joined forces to author
Yoga Rx
, published in 2002. It
taught how yoga could treat everything from heartburn to asthma to back pain. In bold type, its cover featured not only Usatine’s M.D. but Payne’s Ph.D. The former ad executive was moving not only ahead but up.

Significantly,
Yoga Rx
was more closely aligned to the science than
Yoga for Dummies.
The book, as it proclaimed from the start, reflected Usatine’s medical expertise “on every page.” In particular, it made none of Payne’s false claims about pumping up the metabolism and burning more calories as a method of weight control, even though it devoted a long section to fighting obesity. The account was plain but honest.

As Payne moved ahead on his blur of projects, he managed to stay more closely aligned with the science. His encounter with a knowledgeable coauthor seemed to produce something of a midcourse correction.

His new moderation showed in a spinoff. In 2005, he released
Larry Payne’s Yoga Rx Therapy: Weight Management for People with Curves
, a video disc. The program had little depth. And it made the customary omission of saying nothing about how yoga tended to lower the metabolic rate and, all else being equal, threatened to saddle the student with added pounds. But Payne, looking sincere, speaking with ease and confidence, made no wild claims and statements at odds with the known science. Instead, he voiced simple truths and encouragement.

“Real weight management is about making sensible lifestyle changes, including exercise,” Payne said. He added that regular yoga built self-discipline. “You wouldn’t think that doing yoga would keep you from opening the refrigerator door. But it does.” He smiled.

Unlikely as it seems, the professional lives of Fishman and Payne have intersected and drawn close over the years. It is, one might argue, a kind of healing.

Fishman joined the Advisory Council of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, where he works with Payne in an effort to improve the profession’s standards as well as its methods of practice and teaching. They go to conferences together, chat, and socialize.

Fishman told me he liked Payne. “He’s good, knowledgeable, and serious—and a nice guy on top of it,” Fishman said.

So, too, Payne kept up his science trajectory. In 2005, he helped found and became the director of the first program in the United States for the certification of yoga therapists
at a university—Loyola Marymount, in Los Angeles, a Catholic school that overlooks the Pacific. The program has turned out dozens of therapists—mostly women—and sits on the Council of Schools that the association established as a way to promote standardized training.

Payne told me that his recent emphasis on science grew out of the community’s rising interest over the years as well as his own. As for his Ph.D., he defended the degree as a substantive credential that he used in good faith and said he was unaware of anything improper about the school. “I honestly knew nothing about any shady stuff.”

It seems clear that, early on, Payne was as much a victim of pseudoscience as a perpetrator. He did not create the blur of misinformation but simply immersed himself in it and proceeded to send it toward a large audience. He was credulous rather than duplicitous. That is not to say his missteps were inevitable. Iyengar and some other famous yogis managed to avoid the fog. But Payne failed to do so and became one of its prominent casualties.

Fishman knows all about hazards that lie beyond the strictures of modern medicine. He says he works with Payne, the association, and yoga therapists out of a desire to help them become more scientific.

“Yoga is in danger,” he told me in his Manhattan office. “It can tip either way—toward science or religion, toward people who are seeking to know the truth or toward people who like hierarchies.” Most yoga therapists get their information from a guru, he remarked. “That’s what they believe and trust.”

But science now has the means to determine what really works in yoga therapy and why, Fishman argued. Its methods can reduce false diagnoses and risky treatments. Its respect for the facts, he added, can help turn the fledgling discipline into a real profession.

I
n 1970, when I attempted my first Headstand, the topic of sex was typically relegated to the back room. My yoga books and those of my friends made few if any references to sexual aspects of the discipline.
The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga
never mentioned Tantra, sexual arousal, or finding a willing “female partner,” as
Hatha Yoga Pradipika
put it so charmingly. My first teacher made some passing remarks about sex. But I could never figure out exactly what he was talking about and left it at that for what turned out to be decades.

I began this book on the same note. Sex seemed sort of irrelevant. Oh, I figured it was out there somewhere and might produce a good chapter. But for the longest time I had no idea what would materialize and kept getting annoyed every time I dug into the scientific literature.

The studies were few in number and appeared to be contradictory and downbeat. One said yoga reduced the circulating levels of an important class of sex hormones. Intuitively, that seemed wrong. From personal experience, it seemed obvious that yoga stirred a number of hormones, some most likely sexual in nature.

But the scientific evidence seemed to point elsewhere. I did the easy thing and put the topic aside.

What eventually turned me around was the testimony of advanced yogis. I was amazed to find a new generation speaking with great candor about their autoerotic highs and how yoga by nature sought to recast the body for the purpose of sexual pleasure. In interviews, some spoke frankly of their bliss and endeavors to make the rapture permanent. An attractive yogini jokingly called her blinding ecstasies the best sex she never had. Some addressed the issue with what seemed like great reverence, saying yoga could turn the sexual experience into the holiest of sacraments.