The Science of Yoga

but likes to travel to Miami Beach in the winter, Tuscany in the spring, and back to the Berkshires for the summer and fall. She also teaches yoga, and uses it to inspire her painting students. Her website, www.yogapaint.com , advertises her classes and philosophy. “Let go of fear and blocks to creativity,” it counsels. Novick’s book, The Painting Path , outlines gentle yoga exercises and uplifting thoughts that culminate in art projects, including ones in pastels, watercolor, batik, collage, and oil painting.
    Mia Olson, a flautist, was teaching at the Berklee College of Music in Boston when she fell in love with yoga. She signed up for a teacher training course at Kripalu and began sharing yoga tips with her Berklee peers. Soon, she offered a class, Musician’s Yoga, and was quickly asked to open another section. “The students,” she recalled, “were craving this connection with mind and body.”
    The inspirational power of yoga seems to arise—at least in part—from nothing more complicated than the release of psychological tension and the quieting of the mind. Over the ages, many artists have looked to quiet for insight, exhibiting what Emily Dickinson called an “appetite for silence.” The quietude let them see things differently.
    That yoga can produce this state seems beyond doubt. In metabolic terms, the quieting depends on physiological cooling and the kind of relaxation response that Benson documented. Experience shows, however, that the path can be rocky.
    Most yoga teachers, and many practitioners, know how a seemingly dull routine can erupt in sudden displays of upheaval. Mel Robin, in one of his books, called it not unusual for a beginning student toward the end of class to break down into “muffled sobs and copious tears.” He suggested that yoga’s lessening of tension can result in bursts of long-suppressed emotion.
    Over the decades, severalkinds of popular psychotherapy have sought to use physical leverage as a way of releasing and neutralizing toxic emotions. The methods include Rolfing, Neo-Reichian massage, Holotropic Breathwork, and Somatic Psychology. All seek to undo body tension as a way of breaking through mental blockages.
    A few studies have shown that yoga can unlock the unconscious and liberate not only long-buried emotions but other feelings and thoughts, images and memories. While the general phenomenon is well known, the creative implications are seldom explored.
    Elmer Green, a psychologist who studied Swami Rama, proved to be an exception. At the Menninger Foundation in Kansas, he and his wife, Alyce, examined the roots of creative reverie in college students. The scientists trained the students in biofeedback as well as the methods of Swami Rama, including rhythmic breathing and progressive muscle relaxation of the kind done in Savasana. The main part of the experiment focused on college juniors and seniors from Washburn University in nearby Topeka. The students did their calming routines in a dimly lit room and then sat back in a reclining chair while the scientists measured their brain waves and tape-recorded their answers to questions. On their own, the students also practiced the relaxation methods on school days for about an hour, and came back to the laboratory once every two weeks for the recording and interview sessions. In all, twenty-six students took part in the study.
    The scientists reported that the exercises promoted “a deeply internalized state” that resulted in a range of insights and beneficial moods.
    One student told of how he had gathered material for a paper but then got worried and tense after the flu interrupted his studies and left him feeling like he had lost focus and momentum. The problem, he reported, felt “insurmountable.” Then a session left him very relaxed and his mind drifted through all the material. Suddenly, “everything just seemed to fall together.”
    The Greens proposed that the benefits spoke to a universal mechanism. If the students had been mature scientists, they argued, their insights might have centered on mathematical or chemical problems. Instead, the students found that the relaxation led to better relationships, greater concentration, more confidence, enhanced skills at organizing materials, and, in general, improvements in handling life challenges. Artists, the Greens concluded,have no monopoly on imaginative solutions. The problems of living are “also amenable to insight, intuition, and