The Science of Yoga

the geniuses of India forged a radically new kind of relationship between humans and their bodies. We are now on the cusp of learning how to apply their discoveries in startling new ways, of bestowing on the world new gifts of healing and emotional renewal, health and vitality, personal energy and creative inspiration. Think of Loren Fishman holding up his healed arm. Think of Amy Weintraub doing Breath of Joy. Physicians talk about breakthroughs in personalized medicine and pharmacogenetics—of using information from a person’s genetic map to tailor medicine to his or her own particular needs. But yoga can already do that. It can turn our bodies into customized pharmaceutical plants that churn out tailored hormones and nerve impulses that heal, cure, raise moods, lower cholesterol, induce sleep, and do a million other things. Moreover, yoga can do it at an extremely low cost with little or no risk of side effects. It has the potential to usher in a genuine new age, not one of wishful thinking.
    Western science tends to view the body as a fixed thing with unchanging components and functions. But yoga starts from a different premise. It sees a lump of clay. The body in this view is awaiting the application of skilled hands.
    A conviction of some Hindus and spiritual yogis is that we live in the Kali Yuga—a dark time in which people are distant from God and civilization has fallen into decline. They venerate the past. With all due respect, I see the best times for yoga as lying ahead. We can turn the fledgling discipline into a better shaper of clay.
    If yoga played for keeps, if it achieved a new kind of maturity, the discipline could become aforce in addressing the global crisis in health care, which in the United States now consumes more than $2 trillion a year. It could become the basis for an inexpensive new world of health care and disease prevention, of healing and disciplined well-being. It might be a game changer. Michelle Obama is working hard to achieve those kinds of benefits for young people.
    But to have a hope of exerting greater influence on the organization of global health care, yoga must come into closer alignment with science—with clinical trials and professional accreditation, with governmental authorities and their detailed evaluations, probably even with insurance companies and their dreaded red tape. Yoga could become a major force. Or it could stay on the sidelines, a marginal pursuit, lost in myths, looking to the past, prone to guru worship, fracturing into ever more lineages, increasingly isolated as the world moves on.
    Realizing even a small fraction of yoga’s potential is going to require work—hard work.
    We need to make advances along two complementary lines of inquiry that, as this book demonstrates, have coexisted since the start of the scientific investigation of the practice: We must better understand what yoga can do and better understand what yoga can be. The latter issue goes to Robin’s “better yoga.”
    Let’s call the postural discipline that yogis started practicing in medieval times Yoga 1.0. The modern variety that formed early in the twentieth century under the influence of science might be called Yoga 2.0. Now Yoga 2.5 or even 3.0 seems to be in the works, judging from the advent of many vigorous styles and the wide efforts of yoga professionals to make their discipline safer. In the future, Yoga 4.0 may yet emerge, quite different from anything we can now imagine.
    A first step in yoga’s wider development centers on addressing the threat that practitioners face right now—the lack of reliable information about the discipline’s pros and cons. Increasingly, it seems like the din of competing styles, the rise of new commercial ventures, and the inchoate nature of Yoga 3.0 are adding to the confusion. I have tried my best to clarify the situation with this book (and its suggestions for further reading and detailed notes). But there’s still a long way to go—and a lot more that can be done—to help make trustworthy information more widely available.
    One problem is the diffuse nature of the existing science. It seems fairly unique in havingbeen done in so many places over such a long period of time. In my travels, I was impressed at how experts had assembled troves of books and papers. The Ponds in Canada, Sat Bir Khalsa in Boston, Mel Robin in Pennsylvania, Gune’s ashram south of Bombay, and PubMed in Bethesda have all assembled much good information