The Science of Yoga

afternoon, he held a yoga session at his Upper West Side office. He called it a three-ring circus and invited me to visit.
    The office was slightly chaotic amid the transition from regular hours to yoga therapeutics. Patients came and went. A portly man hobbled around on crutches, his leg in a large cast. A young man sat on the floor, rubbing a bad ankle. “Undefeated in the Playoffs,” read the back of his bright red T-shirt. A big cardboard box overflowed with colorful yoga mats. The receptionist folded up a room divider and the area suddenly became large enough for a small class.
    Patients drifted in, put down mats, and began stretching. Maybe six or seven showed up, from their twenties to their sixties. There were also two yoga teachers, both women. One was a regular assistant. The other had recently met Fishman at a meeting in Los Angeles on yoga therapy and wanted to observe him in action.
    Fishman came in, bouncy and engaging, immediately the ringmaster. He chatted and led warm-ups, wearing bright yellow gym shorts and a gray muscle shirt. Nothing about him appeared to be sixty-six.
    When the visiting teacher volunteered that she had recently had surgery for a bunion—the painful curvature and swelling of the big toe—he showed us a simple treatment. It consisted of stretching both toes toward each other and then back to their normal straightforward positions; back and forth, back and forth, stretched and relaxed.
    Everyone tried it. Hesaid the exercise worked to strengthen a specific muscle, the abductor hallucis. On the sole of his own foot, he showed us its location and confidently predicted that pumping it for twenty to thirty seconds each day would prevent bunions and might reduce or undo them. Fishman said he developed the method four years ago after discovering a bunion forming on his own foot. It went away. He predicted that the yoga teacher would never need surgery on her other foot if she did the exercise. Fishman added that, for a study, he was tracking about twenty patients with bunions who regularly did the stretch. “It seems to be working,” he remarked.
    Fishman divided the class into groups. In the smallest, his assistant worked with a petite woman who had multiple sclerosis. This degenerative disease of the central nervous system leaves its victims weak, numb, poorly coordinated, and prone to vision, speech, and bladder problems. Fishman wrote a book on the disease with Eric L. Small, a Los Angeles yogi who at the time of their collaboration had fought multiple sclerosis for more than a half century and had long found relief in yoga. Their recommended routine had nothing to do with fostering cures and everything to do with promoting a better quality of life—trying to reduce handicap and disability, increase safety, lessen fatigue, strengthen muscles, increase range of motion and coordination, improve balance, raise confidence, and promote inner calm.
    Teacher and patient began the session in a standing position. The workout was warm, informal, and quite different from the traditional rounds of yoga postures.
    The yogini, Rama Nina Patella, had the patient start by holding on to the top of a file cabinet and bending down, stretching her arms and back in a fashion similar to what would happen in Downward Facing Dog. It didn’t work. The left side of the patient’s body was beginning to atrophy, and her left hand had a hard time gripping the file cabinet. So Patella had her try again. Only this time the patient held onto Patella’s hips, and Patella clutched her arms. It worked. The patient was able to stretch down, long and slow. “Take your thighs back. Stretch this arm out as much as you can,” Patella said of the weakened side. “Keep breathing. Reach with this arm, the arm that’s kind of unwilling. Stretch that arm. That’s good.”
    After a minute or two in that pose, the patient stood back up, beaming.

    Mountain, Tadasana
    Patella had her do the Mountainpose, or Tadasana. From the outside, the pose seems simple and inconsequential. The student just stands there. But done right, it actually involves the subtle rearrangement and realignment of the whole body from head to heels, with muscles tensing and pulling and unbending the bones, the neck straight, the shoulders broad, the breath relaxed.
    “Press your feet into the floor and lift your chest,” Patella said. “You want a feeling in your feet like the roots of a tree growing into the earth and, from that rooted