The Science of Yoga

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—beganthe 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