The Science of Yoga

on the science of yoga. But they all seem to have different pieces of the puzzle. And I suspect there are many more out there waiting to be uncovered, examined, and shaped into a comprehensive body of knowledge.
    If I could snap my fingers and make it happen, I would establish a Yoga Education Society that took on the job of pulling all the information together and making it publicly available. YES could become not only a central repository but an impartial voice that summarized the information, giving practitioners a good place to go for reliable assessments. YES could also act as a force to counteract the growing waves of commercial spin and help raise the visibility of yoga benefits that seem to get relatively little attention, such as the discipline’s promise as an antidepressant, a sex therapy, and a stimulus to creativity.
    If I have been hard on yoga commercialization, it is because the trend raises fundamental questions that seldom get addressed. Today, as always, yoga has no social mechanism that sifts through the numerous claims to ascertain the truth, and the commercial blitz with its dynamic goals and competitive agenda seems to make that weakness all the more glaring. Imagine if Big Pharma had no Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies looking over its shoulder. The marketing of fake diseases and bogus cures—already a multibillion-dollar embarrassment despite all the bureaucratic scrutiny—would be much worse.
    Yoga seems to be moving toward that kind of predatory behavior as it grows into a bustling industry. Of course, commercial ventures can also perform wonderful acts of public service. Witness the free event with all the yogis in Central Park. But what they do best is promote their own interests and welfare.
    To me, the great hope of improvement centers on expansions of scientific research and the rise of the kinds of thoughtful individuals profiled in this book. They are busy combining yoga and science, leaving behind the ambivalence of recent decades and looking ahead. The group represents a vanguard of forward thinkers with serious degrees, serious interests, and—perhaps most important—the serious credibility required to raise the discipline’s standing. They are changing both what yoga is and our understanding of what it can do.
    The decades between the founding of Gune’s ashram and the publication of Light on Yoga bore witness to a radical shift of perspective. Yoga, instead of looking to gurus and antiquity for guidance, looked to science. But that bond weakened over the years. As a result, yoga’s primal attitudes often reasserted themselves.
    Today, it seems that the relationship between science and yoga is ripe for revitalization. I take heart not only from the new generation of scientific yogis but from the declarations of respected authorities such as the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader. In his book The Universe in a Single Atom , he writes that “spirituality must be tempered by the insights and discoveries of science.” Remarkably, he even states that if science found particular tenets of Buddhism to be false, “then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.”
    Another encouraging sign is that government authorities in the United States and elsewhere have started to fund the science of yoga, mainly as a means of evaluating the discipline’s potential for disease prevention and treatment. The goal is to document the true benefits. In Bethesda, Maryland, the National Institutes of Health, the world’s premier organization for health-care research, is spending money and raising standards. It began funding yoga research in 1998 and has now paid for dozens of studies, including investigations of yoga’s ability to treat arthritis, insomnia, diabetes, depression, fatigue, and chronic pain. Many of these studies appeared since I began my inquiry in 2006, suggesting that the pace of scientific research is quickening. The wave tends to be high quality, helping raise yoga’s social credibility.
    These public investments are starting to pay off in terms of treatments and insights, as suggested by some of the most interesting reports in this book. The Institutes funded the hypertension study in Pennsylvania, the cardiovascular study in Virginia, the telomere study in California, the aerobics study in New York, the neurotransmitter study in Boston, the right-brain study in Philadelphia, and the musician study in Massachusetts,