The Science of Yoga

each concert, he would meditate to clear his mind.
    Stokowski was also a famous womanizer. When, in the 1930s, he and Greta Garbo (1905–1990) found they could, so to speak, make beautiful music together, they traveled to Italy and, in the ancient town of Ravello, rented a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. There he taught her yoga. The actress, in turn, adopted the discipline wholeheartedly, studying with such teachers as Devi—famous as the first yoga teacher to the stars.
    Garbo became such a devoted fan that she not only spread the word among friends and acquaintances but even played the teacher. Gayelord Hauser, a health guru of the day who advised the actress on dietary matters, recounted how Garbo taught him to do the Headstand. He found it rejuvenating. But Hauser also learned that it could damage the neck. Ultimately, he recommended avoiding the pose in favor of relaxing on a slanted board that lowered the head and raised the feet.
    The world of classical music provided another possible example of how yoga can foster the creative impulse. Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) was a prominent violinist and conductor. Born in New York City, he performed hundreds of times for Allied troops during World War II and, as the soldiers liberated the German concentration camps, for the inmates who managed to survive. Many were little more than skeletons. In 1947, in a courageous act of reconciliation, he traveled to Berlin and became the first Jewish musician to perform in Germany following the Holocaust.
    During this period, the exhaustions of conflict as well as the unstructured nature of his early training conspired to cause Menuhin great physical and artistic hardship. By the early 1950s, he was complaining of aches and pains, oftension and deep fatigue, of the impossibility of getting any rest. His art suffered.
    Then, in 1952, while visiting India, he met Iyengar. The yogi taught him how to relax in Savasana, the Corpse pose. The musician immediately fell into a deep sleep. The ensuing yoga lessons gave Menuhin feelings of deep refreshment, as well as better control of his violin. Menuhin became a huge fan. In 1954, he gave Iyengar an Omega watch engraved on the back: “To my best violin teacher.” Soon, the musician was introducing Iyengar to audiences in Britain, France, and Switzerland. It was Menuhin who put the unknown yogi on the world stage.
    In 1965, when Light on Yoga came out, Menuhin wrote a foreword of considerable grace and passion. The star of classical music praised the discipline as giving a new perspective “on our own body, our first instrument,” teaching individuals how to draw out the “maximum resonance and harmony.” And Menuhin, a witness to war, recommended yoga as a path to virtue.
    “What is the alternative?” he asked. “Thwarted, warped people condemning the order of things, cripples criticizing the upright, autocrats slumped in expectant coronary attitudes, the tragic spectacle of people working out their own imbalance and frustration on others.” By nature, Menuhin concluded, yoga cultivated a respect for life, truth, and patience. He saw its civilizing qualities as implicit “in the drawing of a quiet breath, in calmness of mind and firmness of will.”
    More recently, the rock star Sting (who plays not only guitar but the lute) has praised yoga. He told an interviewer that it can produce a state of inner calm in which music comes to him as if from another dimension. “I don’t think you write songs. They come through you,” he said. “Yoga is just a different route to that same process.”
    What inspires such artists as Sting and Menuhin, Stokowski and Garbo, Jung and many other innovative minds, is impossible to know, as is precisely how yoga may have influenced their careers. Still, the question is worth asking given the discipline’s deep resonance not only with celebrated artists but a variety of modern practitioners as well.
    A cottage industry has sprung up in recent years that employs yoga as a means of inspiration. Yoga as muse gets promoted in workshops, books, retreats, travel tours, classes,and magazine articles, as well as by coaches and consultants. It is a little-known but increasingly common testament to yoga as a path to artistry.
    “Yoga won’t make writing easy,” says Jeff Davis, a teacher, “because, well, writing is difficult. But yoga is helping thousands of writers to facilitate and design their own creative process—rather than to be at the