The Science of Yoga by William Broad

Yes, I'm back, briefly.  I'm going to be moving soon, and I'm just insanely busy and overwhelmed right now, so I haven't been reading or blogging very much.  Hopefully in a few weeks my life will start to smooth out again.

I read this book because my friend Kristin was reading this over Easter weekend while we were at a science fiction convention.  I was curious, and asked her about it, but she had only just begun it herself so she didn't have much to report yet.  However she told me that the author had written an article that had come out a few months earlier about the potential risks of performing yoga, and that it had the yoga community up in arms.  I enjoy a good drama, so I thought I'd track down the book.

Let me first talk about my relationship with yoga.  I am a former yoga student, which means that I am a bit of a skeptic.  (A skeptic in that I tried it, and decided not to continue)  I took yoga for a while, and never much enjoyed it--a good yoga class was one I didn't mind too much.  It was never pleasant.  However I did see some physical benefits from the practice, so I kept going.  I kept going, that is, until I had a health problem arise, and I realized that yoga was making things worse.  This is not yoga's fault--my health problem, which wasn't diagnosed until a couple of months later, was a chronic illness, not a yoga injury.  But my joints were on such a hair-trigger that the extra stresses yoga put on them was making things worse, so I stopped going.  My then-instructor expressed doubt about this, as she is one of those people who believes that no matter what is wrong with you, yoga can help.  She is not alone in this belief.  My health problem is now pretty well under control with medication, but I didn't go back.  I tried out a different class that a friend was taking, but it was well out of my way, and when they switched from the ability to drop-in to requiring that you commit to be there, I gave that up, too.  I still occasionally do a little yoga on my own at home, mostly just to work on flexibility and occasional stiffness and aches.  I'm not exactly anti-yoga, but I'm not really a believer, either.  And perhaps because of that, a lot of yoga believers really bug the fuck out of me, frankly.

So I was interested in separating the mythology from actual fact.  There is so much stuff floating around in the yoga world, things people repeat to each other, claims made about what it does or can do for you, and who knows if it's truth or wishful thinking?  Broad seems to have done a thorough job of sorting through the studies, and of winnowing out the ones that were sloppy.  Some of what he found was very interesting.

There seem to be a couple of common misconceptions often repeated when talking about yoga.  One is that yogic breathing increases the oxygen levels in your body.  This is wrong, in fact it increases the carbon dioxide levels, resulting in a slightly heady feeling.  Another common misconception is that yoga can help you lose weight.  This is also untrue, as yoga actually slows your metabolism down.  One yogi noted that the reason advanced yogis are thin is not because they do yoga, but because they tend to eat less.  (I also suspect it's somewhat self-selecting: yoga is easier for thinner people, and people who reach advanced levels tend to be thin already)  Finally, the idea that yoga can get you into shape: this is somewhat true, depending on how you define "in shape:" it can improve strength, balance, and flexibility.  But it doesn't do much to increase cardiovascular fitness.

Yoga does have many other benefits, though.  Strength, balance, and flexibility are very good things to cultivate.  It appears to be able to help you keep strong bones and a healthy back.  It may be able to help lower blood pressure.  It can improve your mood, your self-image, you happiness, and perhaps your sex life.  On the other hand, there is the chapter on health risks which made so many people in the yoga community unhappy.  People can be seriously hurt doing yoga.  People can die from injuries sustained doing yoga.  Deaths aren't common, but they shouldn't be ignored, either.  And injuries are pretty common.  Many, many people are doing yoga, perhaps pushing themselves too hard, or allowing a teacher to push them too hard.  Not all yoga teachers are good at it, or responsible, or knowledgeable, and the standards for teacher training aren't regulated and vary widely.  Some poses pose greater health risks than others, and should be undertaken only very carefully, or avoided altogether.

This doesn't mean that no one should do yoga, but it does mean that we can't all bask in the trust that yoga is GOOD for you, and nothing bad can happen to you when you're doing it.  Every teacher should make it crystal clear to every student that they can stop or ease off at any time, or skip something that they're uncomfortable with.  This isn't boot camp, and the student should be the one in the driver's seat of their own practice.  This is something that I personally had trouble with when I started yoga: the social discomfort from doing what was right for me instead of what the teacher wanted me to do.  It was awkward, and I sometimes felt a bit of (mostly self-inflicted) pressure to go along with whatever I was being directed to do, and not stand out or expose my physical weaknesses to everyone else.  This is another reason why I prefer doing yoga on my own.  Which doesn't have much to do with what Broad wrote, just a personal tangent.  Anyway--

Kristin noted that she thought the book faltered in the last couple of chapters, that Broad was possibly reaching a bit to fill out the book.  I completely agree.  The chapter on sex totally lost me, in that I was reading along, following him all right, and then suddenly I was lost and had no idea what he was talking about or how he got there.  He went from discussions about how yoga might stimulate hormones, increasing the sex drive and sexual performance, and then he went off on a tangent about Kundalini and rapid breathing exercises and entering a highly chaotic and sexually charged state, and the rest of the chapter continued in that vein.  Which, it seems to me, has little or nothing to do with yoga the way most people practice it.

The following chapter, Muse, was even worse, and Broad was definitely reaching there.  His central thesis seemed to be that some people in the arts, like actors, musicians, and writers, do yoga, and many of them are unusually sexually active, which he somehow interpreted to mean that Yoga = Increased Creativity.  He lost me again, I think he was trying to tie it in again with Kundalini.  Broad himself said: "What all this means for yoga is unclear."  And he's right -- whatever point he was trying to make, he failed.  How the fact that Ernest Hemingway drank too much and had lots of sex is supposed to mean that doing yoga increases your creativity was completely opaque to me.  

Actually the third to the last chapter, on healing, was also a bit weak.  The science of yoga therapy - using yoga in a knowledgeable and carefully directed way to address physical problems - is in its infancy.  It's fine that he writes about a particular physician and yoga practitioner who uses yoga therapeutically.  However it's also clear that this fellow's treatments are non-standard, and no one who isn't on his patient list is going to be able to get the benefit of his knowledge.  It's still being explored, and there isn't a common body of knowledge that can be used to help the general popluation.  And, as Broad notes, to call oneself a "yoga therapist" is even less standardized than being a yoga teacher.  There is no oversight at all of people who claim to be able to help patients with their health problems.  That is a very scary and dangerous thing.  I think that, in time, yoga may become accepted as standard treatments for some health problems, but it's just way too early and way too unscientific to be talking about healing people with yoga.

Nevertheless, I am glad I read the book.  I found the chapter on the injuries and physical risks to be the most interesting part, which is probably why that was the chapter that was excerpted in January and made so many yoga practitioners angry.  Overall, reading the book actually made me more inclined to do yoga than I had been before.  I do not enjoy it, but I was sufficiently convinced that a somewhat more regular practice is probably worthwhile.

I'm so fed up with the big publishers and their shills

As many of you may be aware, the Department of Justice have filed suit against Apple and five of the six largest publishers in the US (the one not included in the lawsuit is Random House) for collusion and illegal price fixing.  This is a very good thing for readers and for writers (under the new price arrangements, customers pay more and authors make less).  It is not so good for the five publishers and Apple, of course, but the suit is entirely deserved. 

What I find weird in the screaming I'm seeing from people in the industry is that they're mostly either arguing that price fixing is good for readers (which is so stupid I'm not even going to address it) or that the ends justify the means, and the only way to save reading in America was to stop Amazon from selling certain ebooks at discounted prices.  This lawsuit isn't really about Amazon, it's about publisher wrongdoing.  But it's interesting how many of them want to make it about Amazon.

I never buy ebooks from Amazon, because my device isn't a Kindle and it's too much trouble to figure out how to buy from Amazon and convert to a usable format for me.  But these industry professionals almost make me want to buy more from Amazon, merely to support the company that has the old guard running scared.