The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (33 page)

We lay on our backs in Savasana as the instructor dimmed the lights.

Yoga classes—with their bending, sweating, heavy breathing, and various states of undress—have acquired a certain reputation.
Sex and the City
cast the issue in graphic terms. Samantha in one episode gets so hot and bothered that she puts the make on a nearby guy. Rebuffed, she tries another and wins his enthusiastic nod, after which they hurry out of the room.

The show invented a term to describe the union of yoga and orgasm—
yogasm.
An ad campaign quizzed readers on the definition. One: a yo-yo trick. Two: sex with Yogi Berra. Three: what Samantha has with a guy from her yoga class.

The word entered the zeitgeist. In 2009,
The New Yorker
ran a cartoon showing a woman reading in bed next to her husband. “Not tonight, hon,” the woman said. “I had a yogasm in class.”

Vikas Dhikav was interested in whether yoga could not only arouse individuals but improve the sex lives of couples. In New Delhi, the young doctor assembled a medical team and more than one hundred male and female subjects. Dhikav and his colleagues published two papers in 2010. The results went far beyond the hints contained in decades of physiological research—not to mention the cartoons and videos, scandals and lawsuits, tales and testimonials. The clinical evidence argued that yoga did in fact have a talent for promoting intimacy.

The medical team asked the men and women to report on their sex lives before and after practicing yoga for three months. The poses of the routine differed slightly from the usual composition. The scientists chose postures for what they called their potential to improve “muscle tone, gonads, endocrines, digestion, joint movements, and mood.” Although the team made no reference to the arousal studies discussed in this book, the pose selections turned out to include a number that those reports had identified as sexually
stimulating. The poses included the Bow, the Wheel, the Plow, and the Locust (all from Udupa’s study), the Cobra (from the Russian study), and Agni Sara (from Dostálek’s study). Other poses included the Triangle and the Seated Forward Bend. The pranayamas included Kapalbhati, the fast breathing we did at the Bikram studio. In usual fashion, the subjects ended their sessions with the Corpse and relaxation.

The results sang. The novice yogis told of improvements in all categories of sexual experience under investigation—including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction. The men, age forty on average, reported enhanced abilities to maintain an erection during intercourse and increases in their degree of hardness. They also expressed greater confidence.

The women told of newfound excitement. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to fifty-five. As a group, they reported improvements across all measured categories, including several indicators of heightened pleasure as well as emotional closeness with lovers. The scientists also found that women at different life stages differed in what they considered the best results. Women over forty-five reported that the biggest gains centered on enhanced arousal. In contrast, the younger women reported that the largest improvements had to do with the quality of their orgasms.

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 pathological. 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.