I did not want to join yoga class. I hated those soft-spoken, beatific instructors. I worried that the people in the class could fold up like origami and I’d fold up a bread stick. I understood the need for stretchy clothes but not for total anatomical disclosure. But my hip joints hurt and so did my shoulders, and my upper back hurt even more than my lower back and my brain would. not. shut. up. I asked my doctor about medication and he said he didn’t like the side effects and was pretty sure I wouldn’t either.
So I signed up for Gentle Mind and Body Yoga, the pre-K of yoga classes. I think the principle is that you get into some pose that has cosmic implications and then hold the pose until you are enlightened or bored silly. I like the bridge pose where you lie flat on your back and put a rubber block under your butt. I don’t much like the warrior pose where you stand with one leg bent, foot pointing forward, and the other leg straight, foot pointing sideways, arms out straight at your sides, hands turned up or down or both, I can’t get that part straight, and when I do all that I don’t have the mental reserves to keep breathing. The less said about the pose called downward dog, the better. I purely hate the eagle pose where you wind your arms around each other and then wrap your legs around each other and stand on one foot; I drop like a sprayed mosquito. The teacher is forgiving: “yogi’s choice,” she says, meaning that I’m now a yogi and I can do what I want. She says we’re not trying to get anywhere, and I deeply appreciate not trying to get anywhere.
I enjoy a stretchy pose where you sit with a knee crossed over a leg and the opposite arm wrapped around the knee but the point is, says the teacher, to wring the toxins out of your internal organs. I’m not going to wring out my internal organs. Sometimes she wants us to lower our shoulders and raise our chests to open up our hearts – a phrase that gives me cardiac-surgical creeps. The best is the sponge or corpse pose which is what it sounds like. I’m fully competent at being a sponge, except you’re supposed to breathe in all the way up your left side and breathe out on your right because this activates your left and right brains. I just breathe on both sides. Then we sit on some folded-up locally-sourced blankets that smell like unwashed humanity, with legs crossed and the teacher says this is called sukhasana which means easy seat, but it’s no such thing so I stretch my legs out in front of me, yogi’s choice. We end in sukhasana with our hands in prayer and say to each other Namaste, which is apparently Sanskrit for the godhead in me salutes the godhead in you, but which my brain hears as Basta, which is Italian for stop it, enough. I’m a polite student but noncompliant.
I’m ok with all this, even the pretend science which I’m free to ignore or better yet, to subject to Person of LWON Michelle’s stellar Bullshit Prevention Protocol (BPP) which in these days of blatant disinformation if you haven’t read, clipped out, and taped to your computer screen, you may as well join an ant colony.
Some bullshit you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out whether twisting my body wrings the toxins out of my internal organs or whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain. But it’s true that after yoga, climbing steps doesn’t hurt, waiting for Greek carryout promised 15 minutes ago isn’t irritating, and on the drive home my brain doesn’t do anything except drive. Am I an N of 1? Does yoga work? I’d answer this but working through the full BPP takes time.
So I took two shortcuts. One, I searched for yoga and efficacy in PubMed and skimmed the titles of review articles. No answer, or rather, too many answers: yoga for cancer, chronic low back pain, diabetes, cystitis, sleep disorders, hypertension, schizophrenia, depression, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, and that was just on the first page.
The other shortcut was no better. I searched the website of the National Academies Press, the publications of the National Academies, the independent scientists who undertake studies for the government. Again, yoga showed up in studies on, among others, pain management, alternative medicine, improving bus operators’ health and teens’ sleep habits, obesity, fitness, Gulf War syndrome, astronaut care, and PTSD.
My personal rule for any one thing that affects so many different diseases and functions is that it affects none of them and completely fails the BPP. Or else it affects something huge and general like mood or immune function or both, that in turn affects everything else.
In general, what with lots of kinds of yogas, lots of different diseases, lots of different kinds of studies, and difficult-to-quantify entities like mood or immune function, I’m giving up. I haven’t a clue whether yoga helps at all, let alone how. You’re on your own here. For myself, I’ll keep going, not because it’s not bullshit but because I like occasionally painless stairs and quiet brains. Besides, I’m finally getting competent at the infant version of the Sun Salute and I’ve learned never to look at the other people in the class. But I have no plans to advance to Beginning Yoga.
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photo: via Wellcome Images, Creative Commons license
Ann, the applicable BPP koan is “Can the yogi be wrong about the yogi?”
Yogi’s choice, Michelle, so anything the yogi wants to be right is right.
Ann, you have such a wonderful way with words! You made my day, your thoughts are so true. I loved it.
But Mary, you were the one who told me to take yoga. You said it shut your brain up and that’s why I signed up. And really, I’m glad I did, so thank you. Meanwhile, Michelle, being the civic-minded person that she is, has commodified the Bullshit Prevention Protocol and you can now buy stickers and slap them on all surrounding bullshit. Also onesies for babies. https://www.redbubble.com/people/nijhuism/shop
Love this column. Have never loved yoga.
Thank you, Ella! I actually do love yoga, I just don’t believe a word of it.
There is talk in yoga about letting go of things that don’t serve you, which I have also found helpful — and sometimes those things that don’t serve me are chats about how my twists wring out my internal organs of toxins. However, I have found that my lower back feels better after doing those spinal twists than when I skip them. So I’ll keep doing them. 🙂
Ahh, yes, but isn’t “yogi’s choice” just code for suspending the BPP during class? a good yoga class always makes me feel taller. I like that feeling, so I go.
Anne: See Michelle’s comment below and my answer: fast version, you’re right.
You might this history of yoga in the western world interesting
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/06/01/411202468/those-yoga-poses-may-not-be-ancient-after-all-and-maybe-thats-ok
This is awesome. Thank you for the confirmation that “easy seat” is anything but. I’m a 15-year recidivist yogi with a yoga instructor daughter and I know I feel better when I yog, but I don’t know why that doesn’t make me do it more regularly. Has there been a column about why it’s so hard to do things that are not only good for one but also feel good? (Off to wring and twist some organs for a second; or/and fall down a bit.)
William Broad (a senior science writer at New York Times and an enthusiastic but clear-eyed yogi) did a lot of useful BPP heavy lifting in his book “The Science of Yoga.” Highly recommended!
Oh thank you, Robert! I’m a fan of Wm. Broad and I’ll look up that book.
I didn’t even know that anyone believed Yoga did anything for disease or whatever until I read this. I think that Yoga helps with strength and flexibility is without question. It’s the hardest workout, for example, in p90x with clear results.
Great article. The problem with yoga in the Western world is that there are countless approaches. The trick is to find the style that resonates with you. Same for meditation. No one way is right, contrary to what some of schools of thought espouse. And they’ll all contradict each other (for example, hips squared in Vira 1, nope, let the hips angle open in Vira 1; think of nothing when you meditate, nope, think of a white light when you meditate, etc)
The science is there for how yoga and meditation can be beneficial for the mind and body. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and faux mysticism being taught and you have to take it upon yourself to find the truth. Granted, it’s a lot of work for something that’s supposed to be strengthening and relaxing. We forget that yoga was a fading science practiced by ascetics in India before the first group of hippies went over in the early 1970’s and discovered Ashtanga and Iyengar. The West’s great gift to yoga is our reinventing and studio repackaging of it.
Broad’s book is an honest and unflinching look at the good and bad of modern yoga…like all repetitive physical movement, injury is bound to occur if attention is not paid to alignment, bio-feedback, and sufficient recovery time. It’s the practitioner, not necessarily the practice, that causes injury. Combine vague and inaccurate teaching with our society’s “go get ’em” attitude, and you have a recipe for injury.
I often try to avoid expressing my thoughts over anonymous medium like comments on blog; unless I have something positive to say. So, this is a deviation for me.
Good part: Very well expressed someone experiencing yoga for first time and the humor was fantastic.
Part I didn’t like: Just like proper journalism, science writing requires lot more research and effort compared to a letter to an editor. I am disappointed how no facts were checked because it takes lot more work. You didn’t even take an effort to understand the meaning of “sukhasana”. Even wikipedia gives three meanings/translations of the phrase. Neither did you explain what “Yogi’s choice” means/implies.
“Some bullshit you don’t need a protocol to detect, so I didn’t even try to find out … whether breathing through my left nostril stimulates my right brain.” Umm … took me five minutes to find this link (http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/03/about-85-of-people-only-breathe-out-of-one-nostril-at-a-time/) that refers to some 1994 study regarding nostril breathing and impact on brain. Sure, this internet article could be total junk, but it does show that you should have brought out your protocol. From a science perspective, bullshit is not cultural subjective or limited to someone’s personal experience.
Oh … regarding that BPP, it may need re-tuning when it applies to science writing. A single device that calculates, connects with people miles away, improves safety, keeps you updated on latest news around the world, lets you bank and more while sitting on a toilet seat might fail the BPP … but such a device is a reality.
In short, I disagree that this piece passes as science writing. I have nothing against this piece … all it could have taken was a proper categorization and/or titling of the article. I didn’t learn anything on the health claims about yoga … as I was promised by the title of NPR version of this essay (“A Skeptic Fact-Checks Yoga’s Health Claims And Goes With The Om”) from a science writer. I am assuming your essays are not parody on “science writing”. Perhaps, it was NPR who screwed it up…I don’t know. Anyways, thanks for contributing to “blatant disinformation”.
You might find interesting Swami Vivekenanda’s “Raja Yoga” for a look beyond yoga as exercise. Aimed at Westerners, this eloquent book is a democratic, scientific presentation of the path of Yoga from a genuine Realized Soul.