The Science of Yoga

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 therapistsat 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.

VI
DIVINE SEX
    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