The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (35 page)

A farm in southern Ontario became the headquarters from which Pond, his wife, and their friends spread the word. In 1986, they held the first of what would become decades of annual conferences under a big tent. They called their
group the Institute for Consciousness Research. The small Canadian charity with the esoteric agenda became a magnet for hundreds of people. It sold kundalini books, built an extensive library, put out a newsletter, and sought to show that the mystic fire could result in artists and writers, saints and innovators. Over the years, it examined such figures as Brahms, Emerson, Gandhi, Victor Hugo, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Rudolf Steiner, Saint Hildegard, and Saint John of the Cross. The published results were typically rich in endnotes.

Pond underwent his own transformation. He became more open to people. So did his writing. As a scientist, he had specialized in papers that were extremely dry. Now he found pleasure in poetry—something he had previously avoided and engaged in only when forced to do so in school. The muse compelled him to write.

Life holds few mysteries greater than those concerning the wellsprings of creativity. Thinkers down through the ages have developed many theories about what keeps the springs flowing and what causes them to dry up. Freud proposed one of the most enduring when he suggested that the sublimation of sexual energy fosters the artistic temperament and the creative impulse. But he denied that he, or psychoanalysis, could provide much else by way of explanation. “Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud remarked in a study of Dostoyevsky, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”

Despite the durability of the question, a fair body of evidence—much of it anecdotal, some of it middling, parts of it robust—has emerged over the decades to suggest that yoga can play a role in stirring the wellsprings. And kundalini is only part of the story.

The evidence has accumulated even though the issue is scientifically challenging. Creativity, after all, is rooted in human subjectivity, and even the best investigators can have a hard time finding ways to explore the ephemeral nature of inspiration. By definition, the research is much more difficult to do
properly than measuring hormones and muscle tension, brain waves and blood pressure.

A complicating factor is that the overall issue of yogic creativity tends to be poorly known. It has received little public attention compared to more popular aspects of the discipline. The low profile and lack of buzz mean that scientists face serious challenges in trying to obtain funding to pursue the unfamiliar lines of research.

Even so, the topic is potentially quite important. Artists and creative thinkers have reputations as rebels. But throughout history, they have starred not only in the annals of invention but in the social upheavals that frequently result in periods of civil progress. If yoga contributes to the advance of artistry, it seems like the discipline might act as a cultural force of some consequence.

This chapter explores that possibility and the extent to which science in its current state of development can illuminate the topic.

The potential links between yoga and creativity often lie hidden in plain sight. For instance, Carl Jung relied on the calming effects of yoga during one of the most tumultuous and inspired periods of his life, doing so long before he issued his warning about the dangers of kundalini.

The Swiss psychiatrist (1875–1961) and founder of analytical psychology turned to the discipline relatively early in his career as he struggled with two crises. The first was personal. In his thirties, as part of his inquiries, Jung engaged in a furious battle to pry open his own mind, so much so that he would often shudder with hallucinations and cling to nearby objects to keep from falling apart. Ultimately, his “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it, resulted in a secret journal bound in red leather that, when published in 2009, was hailed as the genesis of the Jungian method.

The other crisis was World War I. It raged beyond the psychoanalyst and his home in neutral Switzerland, shattering the old European order. Jung perceived an enigmatic link between the inner and outer conflicts. And, in the interest of science, he used that relationship to push himself to what he considered the edge of madness. “I was frequently so wrought up,” Jung recalled, “that I had to do certain yoga exercises to hold my emotions in check.” He did so sparingly. “I would do these exercises only until I had calmed
myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious.”

Another example of the ostensible interaction between yoga and creativity centers on Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), a conductor renowned for his exuberance, intuition, and a style that shunned the traditional baton for hand motions. He is often remembered for his starring role with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Disney film
Fantasia.

Early in his career, Stokowski became a confirmed health enthusiast, throwing himself into a disciplined regimen of yoga, meditation, and strict limits on what he ate and drank. He was said to be able to relax completely at will and, on six hours of sleep, handle workdays running up to eighteen hours. Before each concert, he would meditate to clear his mind.

Stokowski was also a famous womanizer. When, in the 1930s, he and Greta Garbo (1905–1990) found they could, so to speak, make beautiful music together, they traveled to Italy and, in the ancient town of Ravello, rented a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. There he taught her yoga. The actress, in turn, adopted the discipline wholeheartedly, studying with such teachers as Devi—famous as the first yoga teacher to the stars.

Garbo became such a devoted fan that she not only spread the word among friends and acquaintances but even played the teacher. Gayelord Hauser, a health guru of the day who advised the actress on dietary matters, recounted how Garbo taught him to do the Headstand. He found it rejuvenating. But Hauser also learned that it could damage the neck. Ultimately, he recommended avoiding the pose in favor of relaxing on a slanted board that lowered the head and raised the feet.

The world of classical music provided another possible example of how yoga can foster the creative impulse. Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) was a prominent violinist and conductor. Born in New York City, he performed hundreds of times for Allied troops during World War II and, as the soldiers liberated the German concentration camps, for the inmates who managed to survive. Many were little more than skeletons. In 1947, in a courageous act of reconciliation, he traveled to Berlin and became the first Jewish musician to perform in Germany following the Holocaust.

During this period, the exhaustions of conflict as well as the unstructured nature of his early training conspired to cause Menuhin great physical and artistic hardship. By the early 1950s, he was complaining of aches and pains, of
tension and deep fatigue, of the impossibility of getting any rest. His art suffered.

Then, in 1952, while visiting India, he met Iyengar. The yogi taught him how to relax in Savasana, the Corpse pose. The musician immediately fell into a deep sleep. The ensuing yoga lessons gave Menuhin feelings of deep refreshment, as well as better control of his violin. Menuhin became a huge fan. In 1954, he gave Iyengar an Omega watch engraved on the back: “To my best violin teacher.” Soon, the musician was introducing Iyengar to audiences in Britain, France, and Switzerland. It was Menuhin who put the unknown yogi on the world stage.

In 1965, when
Light on Yoga
came out, Menuhin wrote a foreword of considerable grace and passion. The star of classical music praised the discipline as giving a new perspective “on our own body, our first instrument,” teaching individuals how to draw out the “maximum resonance and harmony.” And Menuhin, a witness to war, recommended yoga as a path to virtue.

“What is the alternative?” he asked. “Thwarted, warped people condemning the order of things, cripples criticizing the upright, autocrats slumped in expectant coronary attitudes, the tragic spectcenter1e of people working out their own imbalance and frustration on others.” By nature, Menuhin concluded, yoga cultivated a respect for life, truth, and patience. He saw its civilizing qualities as implicit “in the drawing of a quiet breath, in calmness of mind and firmness of will.”

More recently, the rock star Sting (who plays not only guitar but the lute) has praised yoga. He told an interviewer that it can produce a state of inner calm in which music comes to him as if from another dimension. “I don’t think you write songs. They come through you,” he said. “Yoga is just a different route to that same process.”

What inspires such artists as Sting and Menuhin, Stokowski and Garbo, Jung and many other innovative minds, is impossible to know, as is precisely how yoga may have influenced their careers. Still, the question is worth asking given the discipline’s deep resonance not only with celebrated artists but a variety of modern practitioners as well.

A cottage industry has sprung up in recent years that employs yoga as a means of inspiration. Yoga as muse gets promoted in workshops, books, retreats, travel tours, classes,
and magazine articles, as well as by coaches and consultants. It is a little-known but increasingly common testament to yoga as a path to artistry.

“Yoga won’t make writing easy,” says Jeff Davis, a teacher, “because, well, writing is difficult. But yoga is helping thousands of writers to facilitate and design their own creative process—rather than to be at the whim of random flashes of inspiration, moods, or energy peaks.”

Linda Novick is a painter who calls the Berkshires home 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, several
kinds 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 creativity.”