The Science of Yoga

rigorous as that of physical therapists. Yoga retreats foster art and innovation, conflict resolution and serious negotiating. Meanwhile, the International Association of Yoga Centenarians is lobbying for an extensive program of research on new ways of improving the quality of life among the extremely old. Its president, Sting, recently embarked on a world tour to build political support for the initiative.
    In short, I see the discipline as having arrived at a turning point. It has reached not only a critical mass of practitioners but a critical juncture in its development.
    Yoga can grow upor remain an infant—a dangerous infant with a thing for handguns. Traditionalists may find it loathsome. But growing up in this case means that yoga has to come into closer alignment with science, accelerating the process begun by Gune, Iyengar, and the other pioneers. The timeless image is a mirage. Yoga has changed many times over the centuries and needs to change again.
    The stakes are enormous—and not just for the millions of practitioners who expect a safe experience. The really gargantuan issue is helping the discipline realize its potential.
    I caught a glimpse of the future that Friday night at Kripalu when Amy Weintraub said, “It really saved my life.” Her testimony still rings in my ears, giving me hope for better ways of fighting the blues.
    In antiquity, 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