The Science of Yoga

students. The sixty-four-year-old guru offered no denials but claimed he was blackmailed. “Only when they give me no choice!” he exclaimed. “If they say to me, ‘Boss, you must fuck me or I will kill myself,’ then I do it! Think if I don’t! The karma!”
    With new resolve, I dug deep and uncovered a small trove of illuminating reports and investigations. They showed that yoga can in fact result in surges of sex hormones and brain waves, among other signs of sexual arousal. The newest studies add the weight of clinical evidence. Medical scans indicate that advanced yogis can shut their eyes and light up their brains in states of ecstasy indistinguishable from those of sexual climax. Meanwhile, new practitioners report that yoga improves their sex lives. The men and women say the benefits include better arousal, satisfaction, and emotional closeness with partners.
    Little of this information is known publicly, despite yoga’s reembrace of Tantra and the erotic. Most is lost in the labyrinth of modern science.
    I have come to see the lack of understanding as not only a disciplinary weakness but something of a missed opportunity. Yoga practitioners may know from personal experience that the discipline can act as a potent aphrodisiac and revitalize their sex lives. But the professions of medicine, health care, and psychologicalcounseling know little or nothing of such benefits despite their tireless promotion of costly treatments for low libido, arousal disorder, and sexual frustration. The same holds true of popular health guides.
    As a result, sex authorities seldom if ever mention a holistic therapy that is quite natural and—as Fishman put it—free.
    The ignorance goes right to the top. When Abraham Morgentaler wrote his 2008 book, Testosterone for Life: Recharge Your Vitality, Sex Drive, Muscle Mass & Overall Health!, the Harvard professor talked mainly of gels, creams, patches, injections, and pellets—all of which require prescriptions. His book made no mention of yoga, like most guides to hormone therapy.
    The global pharmaceutical complex thrives on sex treatments, with sales booming in recent years. The marketing push is known derisively as Orgasm, Inc., and critics question whether it puts corporate profits above personal health.
    It turns out that science over the decades has slowly uncovered an alternative that draws on the body’s own hidden resources. It has no advertisements, no sales force, no hustle, no giveaways for doctors, and no questions about pressure to take unnecessary and possibly unsafe drugs. If nothing else, it seems worth investigating.
    Katil Udupa was an ambitious physician at the Benares Hindu University, his professional life a blur of activity on the school’s sprawling campus outside the holy city on the Ganges. He was, in many respects, a successor to Paul—a man of Western medicine who became deeply interested in the healing arts of India. He also exhibited some of Gune’s passion for institution building. In 1971, Udupa founded the school’s Institute of Medical Sciences.
    He then proceeded to fall apart. After years of administration and its predictable crises, his outgoing nature started to crumble and Udupa ended up with a variety of nervous ills— chest pains, irritability, diffuse apprehension, emotional instability, and a sense of constant fatigue. The formal diagnosis was cardiac neurosis. We would call it burnout. Whatever the name, he was a nervous wreck.
    Udupa took up yoga and found quick relief that slowly developed into a deep senseof personal renewal. Intrigued, he began to study the medical literature about yoga and to investigate its potential for treating patients—especially those with chronic diseases that appeared to be linked to the kind of stresses and illnesses that he himself had experienced. His studies showed that yoga could dramatically improve a patient’s hormone profile, lowering, for instance, the high levels of adrenaline and other fight-or-flight hormones released in response to stress.
    The body always puts survival ahead of pleasure. A corollary of that principle is that stress can smother the flames of desire, and relaxation can create a situation where smoldering embers get fanned into a blaze.
    Udupa wondered if that kind of relationship held true on the biochemical level as well and, specifically, whether the reductions he was seeing in stress hormones meant that the body’s sex hormones were tending to increase. It was