The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (38 page)

The cottage industry might grow into schools. Maybe cures would emerge for creative paralysis. Creative blocks might go extinct. Perhaps many people would learn how, as Menuhin put it so eloquently, to draw out their “maximum resonance.” Maybe world leaders would take up yoga as an aid to their deliberations, formalizing the kind of reflective calm that Larry Payne introduced at Davos.

Maybe yoga would soar.

R
un the clock forward a century or two. What is yoga like? It seems to me that, based on current trends, two very different outcomes are possible. Both revolve around science, otherwise known as the pursuit of systematized truth.

In one scenario, the fog has thickened as competing groups and corporations vie for market share among the bewildered. The chains offer their styles while spiritual groups offer theirs, with experts from the various camps clashing over differing claims. Immortality is said to be in the offing. The disputes resemble the old disagreements of religion. But factionalism has soared. Whereas yoga in the late twentieth century began to splinter into scores of brands—all claiming unique and often contradictory virtues—now there are hundreds. Yet, for all the activity, yoga makes only a small contribution to global health care because most of the claims go unproven in the court of medical science. The general public sees yoga mainly as a cult that corporations seek to exploit.

In the other scenario, yoga has gone mainstream and plays an important role in society. A comprehensive program of scientific study early in the twenty-first century produced a strong consensus on where yoga fails and where it succeeds. Colleges of yoga science now abound. Yoga doctors are accepted members of the establishment, their natural therapies often considered gentler and more reliable than pills. Yoga classes are taught by certified instructors whose training is as rigorous as that of physical therapists. Yoga retreats foster art and innovation, conflict resolution and serious negotiating. Meanwhile, the International Association of Yoga Centenarians is lobbying for an extensive program of research on new ways of improving the quality of life among the extremely old. Its president, Sting, recently embarked on a world tour to build political support for the initiative.

In short, I see the discipline as having arrived at a turning point. It has reached not only a critical mass of practitioners but a critical juncture in its development.

Yoga can grow up
or remain an infant—a dangerous infant with a thing for handguns. Traditionalists may find it loathsome. But growing up in this case means that yoga has to come into closer alignment with science, accelerating the process begun by Gune, Iyengar, and the other pioneers. The timeless image is a mirage. Yoga has changed many times over the centuries and needs to change again.

The stakes are enormous—and not just for the millions of practitioners who expect a safe experience. The really gargantuan issue is helping the discipline realize its potential.

I caught a glimpse of the future that Friday night at Kripalu when Amy Weintraub said, “It really saved my life.” Her testimony still rings in my ears, giving me hope for better ways of fighting the blues.

In antiquity, the geniuses of India forged a radically new kind of relationship between humans and their bodies. We are now on the cusp of learning how to apply their discoveries in startling new ways, of bestowing on the world new gifts of healing and emotional renewal, health and vitality, personal energy and creative inspiration. Think of Loren Fishman holding up his healed arm. Think of Amy Weintraub doing Breath of Joy. Physicians talk about breakthroughs in personalized medicine and pharmacogenetics—of using information from a person’s genetic map to tailor medicine to his or her own particular needs. But yoga can already do that. It can turn our bodies into customized pharmaceutical plants that churn out tailored hormones and nerve impulses that heal, cure, raise moods, lower cholesterol, induce sleep, and do a million other things. Moreover, yoga can do it at an extremely low cost with little or no risk of side effects. It has the potential to usher in a genuine new age, not one of wishful thinking.

Western science tends to view the body as a fixed thing with unchanging components and functions. But yoga starts from a different premise. It sees a lump of clay. The body in this view is awaiting the application of skilled hands.

A conviction of some Hindus and spiritual yogis is that we live in the Kali Yuga—a dark time in which people are distant from God and civilization has fallen into decline. They venerate the past. With all due respect, I see the best times for yoga as lying ahead. We can turn the fledgling discipline into a better shaper of clay.

If yoga played for keeps, if it achieved a new kind of maturity, the discipline could become a
force in addressing the global crisis in health care, which in the United States now consumes more than $2
trillion
a year. It could become the basis for an inexpensive new world of health care and disease prevention, of healing and disciplined well-being. It might be a game changer. Michelle Obama is working hard to achieve those kinds of benefits for young people.

But to have a hope of exerting greater influence on the organization of global health care, yoga must come into closer alignment with science—with clinical trials and professional accreditation, with governmental authorities and their detailed evaluations, probably even with insurance companies and their dreaded red tape. Yoga could become a major force. Or it could stay on the sidelines, a marginal pursuit, lost in myths, looking to the past, prone to guru worship, fracturing into ever more lineages, increasingly isolated as the world moves on.

Realizing even a small fraction of yoga’s potential is going to require work—hard work.

We need to make advances along two complementary lines of inquiry that, as this book demonstrates, have coexisted since the start of the scientific investigation of the practice: We must better understand what yoga can do and better understand what yoga can be. The latter issue goes to Robin’s “better yoga.”

Let’s call the postural discipline that yogis started practicing in medieval times Yoga 1.0. The modern variety that formed early in the twentieth century under the influence of science might be called Yoga 2.0. Now Yoga 2.5 or even 3.0 seems to be in the works, judging from the advent of many vigorous styles and the wide efforts of yoga professionals to make their discipline safer. In the future, Yoga 4.0 may yet emerge, quite different from anything we can now imagine.

A first step in yoga’s wider development centers on addressing the threat that practitioners face right now—the lack of reliable information about the discipline’s pros and cons. Increasingly, it seems like the din of competing styles, the rise of new commercial ventures, and the inchoate nature of Yoga 3.0 are adding to the confusion. I have tried my best to clarify the situation with this book (and its suggestions for further reading and detailed notes). But there’s still a long way to go—and a lot more that can be done—to help make trustworthy information more widely available.

One problem is the diffuse nature of the existing science. It seems fairly unique in having
been done in so many places over such a long period of time. In my travels, I was impressed at how experts had assembled troves of books and papers. The Ponds in Canada, Sat Bir Khalsa in Boston, Mel Robin in Pennsylvania, Gune’s ashram south of Bombay, and PubMed in Bethesda have all assembled much good information on the science of yoga. But they all seem to have different pieces of the puzzle. And I suspect there are many more out there waiting to be uncovered, examined, and shaped into a comprehensive body of knowledge.

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?