The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (32 page)

A few scientists glimpsed
a different world. Their examinations of advanced yogis suggested that deep relaxation, rather than an end in itself, could represent a calm stage on the road to a remarkable kind of continuous arousal. Their subjects displayed clear signs of autonomic stimulation while lost in blissful trances. The studies were relatively few in number. But they were ample enough to suggest that, at least in some comparatively rare cases, the kind of fleeting arousals that Dostálek had documented could endure.

James C. Corby, a psychiatrist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, did the most thorough study of this hidden world. His team looked at twenty members of a Tantric sect known as Ananda Marga, or “path of bliss.” The group, founded in India, treads a steep path. In addition to doing asanas, pranayama, and many austerities, the initiates meditate for long periods. The scientists recruited equal numbers of trainees and experts. On average, the expert Tantrics, all from the San Francisco area, meditated for more than three and a half hours a day and had done so for years. In their study, the Stanford team noted that practitioners often reported feeling rushes and bursts of energy during their meditations. The scientists also recruited ten inexperienced individuals to act as a control group.

Each subject sat alone in a dimly lit room during the monitoring sessions, which lasted an hour. The scientists had all the participants—whether controls, trainees, or experts—perform the same routine. The participant would spend twenty minutes relaxing, twenty minutes paying attention to their breathing, and twenty minutes meditating. The controls used two-syllable mantras they made up, while members of Ananda Marga used their personal mantras.

Corby and his team studied not only the brain waves of the participants but their heartbeats, breathing rates, and skin conductance. The latter was an important sign of emotional arousal and, in some cases, sexual excitement. Scientists have long known that sweat causes the electrical conductivity of the skin to rise, and have long viewed it as an indication of sympathetic arousal. In the early days of conductivity studies, scientists monitored the skin response as a way to probe the unconscious. So, too, scientists developed lie detectors as a way to measure skin conductivity for clues as
to whether a person was relaxed and telling the truth or clammy and deceitful.

The Stanford team found that the Tantric experts and trainees displayed solid evidence of autonomic arousal. The signs included fast heartbeats and significant rises in skin conductance. The control group, on the other hand, showed signs of overall relaxation.

In one case, a woman Tantric sent the measurements flying off the charts when she experienced what she later described as “near samadhi”—the ecstatic state of enlightenment. While meditating, her skin conductance soared and she began to breathe fast and her heart rate shot up to more than one hundred and twenty beats per minute—equal to that of frenzied lovers. Abruptly, she stopped breathing altogether and her heartbeat slowed as well. Finally, after more than a minute and a half in which her chest remained virtually motionless, she began to breathe normally.

“We were extremely fortunate,” Corby’s team wrote, to observe the woman’s experience.

Corby and his colleagues said nothing about sexual arousal. They used phrases such as “physiological activation” and “autonomic arousal.” But their paper—published in the
Archives of General Psychiatry
, part of the cautious world of the American Medical Association, based in Chicago—strongly implied the sexual basis for their findings given that the study’s subjects were Tantrics.

To the best of my knowledge, this paper represents the closest that the scientific community ever came to identifying what I have come to think of as the yoga paradox—the sharp reversal in advanced yogis from physiological cooling to arousal, from states of hypometabolism to hypermetabolism. The paradox has nothing to do with the kind of false metabolic rise that Payne advertised and everything to do with one of yoga’s biggest secrets.

Unfortunately, Corby’s paper sank like a stone. The paper cited some of Benson’s research and appeared while
The Relaxation Response
was still popular and well on its way to selling millions of copies. For many years, the relaxation paradigm continued to dominate the scientific concept of how yoga worked. The alternative perspective that stressed rare states of continuous arousal—for a variety of reasons—stayed in the shadows.

As Udupa looked into
hormones, Dostálek into brain waves, and Corby into skin conductivity, other scientists were examining a rather curious but poorly understood parallel between yoga and sex—heavy breathing. Dostálek got a glimpse of the similarity when his Bhastrika subjects felt “elation and even exhilaration.” So did Corby when his Tantric meditator soared toward samadhi. But brain waves and skin conductivity were just two of many ways to explore the repercussions of rapid breathing. Indeed, its basic study required no specialized equipment at all. The most fundamental method was just to sit quietly and watch.

In
Human Sexual Response
, Masters and Johnson describe fast breathing as an integral part of male and female behavior leading up to sexual climax. The scientists reported rates of more than forty breaths per minute at the height of strong orgasms. Compared to normal rates of relaxed breathing, that is roughly three times as fast.

The pace of heavy breathing during sex may seem rapid but it is nothing compared to aggressive Bhastrika. Yoga teachers tell beginners to start at one breath per second and work their way up to two breaths per second—or one hundred and twenty breaths per minute. Advanced students are encouraged to take up to four breaths per second. If done without pause, that equals two hundred and forty breaths per minute—a rate five or six times faster than lovers.

As we saw in chapters 3 and 4, heavy breathing can pose significant risks of injury and even death. But if done in moderation, it can be quite benign. Mild hyperventilation does no permanent damage to the brain or the nervous system but simply contributes to the sense of euphoria that makes both sex and yoga so enjoyable.

Over the decades, scientists worked hard to explore sexual hyperventilation, usually in the interest of understanding Western sex rather than Eastern asceticism. Still, the overlap was great enough so that some investigators argued that the insights applied to both.

More recently, a body of emerging research has revealed that fast breathing can not only lower the flow of oxygen to the brain, as we saw in chapter 3, but sharply reduce activity specifically in its outer layers. The findings grow mainly out of the technology of brain scanning. It lets scientists peer deep—going far below the superficial regions that researchers had explored with
the electroencephalograph—to compare the levels of inner and outer activity.

The scanning unveiled a primal experience that amplified the body’s surges of pleasurable hormones and brain waves.

In biology, the outer brain is known as the cortex. The term confuses many nonspecialists because it has nothing to do with a core. It’s about edges and coverings. The term derives from the Latin word for “bark,” as in the bark of a tree. The cortex plays important roles in memory, attention, calculation, awareness, thought, empathy, abstract reasoning, language, and sensations, as we saw with the parietal lobe. Right now it is interpreting these words. It also appears to be the seat of consciousness. The area known as the prefrontal cortex (“pre” because it is the most forward part of the brain, way out front, right behind the forehead) is well developed only in primates, especially humans. It controls such higher functions as planning, decision making, and setting priorities.

Deeper down is the older, more primitive brain. Here lie raw appetite and unfettered passion. The deep structures of the primal brain include the neuroendocrine system, made up of the pineal body, the pituitary gland, and the hypothalamus, with its vigilance area and its control of the autonomic nervous system. Another cluster makes up the limbic system. It wraps around the brain stem and supports such functions as emotion, motivation, homeostasis, and short-term memory.

The limbic system also controls sex. The amygdala, a limbic body made of two lobes about the size of almonds (its name comes from the Greek word for “almond”), plays major roles in emotion, including aggression and pleasure. As for sexuality, it has the brain’s highest density of receptors for sex hormones, including testosterone. Scientists have shown that the stimulation of the amygdala results in a wide variety of sexual activities, including erection, ejaculation, ovulation, and the rhythmic movements of copulation. The stimulus can be purely hormonal. Dutch scientists recently studied middle-aged women whose amygdalas had undergone decline and found that small doses of testosterone could restore the organs to youthful vigor.

As the scans let scientists peer deep, they began to see that fast breathing had different repercussions on different parts of the brain. The limbic system experienced no activity drops like those of the cortex. It moved to its own
beat. Sex and hyperventilation could deprive the cerebral cortex of blood and oxygen, diminishing the higher functions of the brain, even as its inner regions kept going strong. It was like a late night in the suburbs. The residents turned out the lights upstairs while continuing to party in the basement.

In Germany, Torsten Passie, a psychiatrist at the medical school of the University of Hannover, drew on the limbic findings to propose a theory of sex hyperventilation. The decrease in cortical management, he wrote, resulted in a “more primitive mode of brain functioning” marked by heightened emotions, declines in self-control, and a deepening sexual trance.

All of which led to an intriguing question. Could fast breathing from yoga or anything else produce a sexual high in and of itself? The question went to knotty issues of causation. Was fast breathing solely a result of sexual stimulation, or could it also work as an initiator?

In Vancouver, Lori A. Brotto and other sex researchers at the University of British Columbia began looking for answers. The scientists recruited twenty-five women—all heterosexual and sexually experienced—and measured their responses to an erotic film. The reactions were noted twice, once after hyperventilation and on a different day without the benefit of fast breathing. The women took thirty deep breaths per minute for two minutes. By the standards of Bhastrika and other kinds of rapid yogic breathing, the routine was fairly mild. Even so, the researchers judged that the breathing produced a state of sympathetic dominance that lasted at least seven minutes.

Their report, published in 2002, showed that the women watching the film experienced a significant rise in the amplitude of their vaginal pulses, suggesting that viewing the amorous film did in fact produce genital arousal. As a group, the amplitude doubled.

That led to an investigation of whether the breathing technique could have practical applications. Brotto and her colleagues recruited sixty women with sexual arousal disorder, or SAD, and a control group of forty-two women with healthy sex lives. Again, the volunteers were all heterosexual and sexually experienced. The women saw two erotic films in a row. One group hyperventilated before the first film, and then had a resting period before viewing the second. The procedure with the second group was reversed, so fast breathing took place before the second film.

The results suggested that
even short periods of fast breathing could improve arousal. As before, the healthy women responded more vigorously to the erotic film if they hyperventilated in advance. But so did the SAD women. Their histories included the absence of or diminished ability to respond to physical stimulation of the genitals as well as to visual and auditory cues that normally result in aroused feelings. In many respects, these women were difficult cases. Yet their levels of excitement were almost as high as those of their peers.

In short, the evidence suggested that hyperventilation could promote arousal not only in healthy women but among those with diminished libidos.

Fast breathing fanned the flames.

My first visit to a Bikram studio drove home the primal nature of yoga breathing. I had done yoga for decades. But now, in my new frame of mind, I realized that most classes were structured—by accident or design—to echo one of the most basic of all human experiences.

It was a full house that night, the mirrored room packed with men and women, most in great shape and apparently enthusiasts who practiced a lot. A man up front kept a big jug of water next to him. He clearly understood better than I how hot yoga could produce torrents of sweat and the urgent need for liquid refreshment (a situation not unknown in adult relations). No one seemed overweight. The group in general looked fit and attractive.

Bikram classes follow a routine of twenty-six poses that start and end with pranayama. Our first breathing exercise was slow and calming—good for warming up and helping beginners feel at home. By definition, it was hypoventilation that gently pressed the parasympathetic brake, relaxing body and mind. I felt warm and calm and aware, ready for anything.

The postures began easy and grew more challenging, as was usual for a yoga class. The bending and stretching got deeper and more pronounced, the tensions rising slowly. Sexologists describe growing muscular strain as an integral part of the human sexual response. The contractions start gently in the arousal phase and develop into tensions and flexions that are quite pronounced in the plateau phase—the time of extreme activity just before climax. So, too, we performed the hardest poses toward the session
’s end, pushing ourselves, stretching and straining, bathed in sweat.

The final breathing exercise was very fast. It was Kapalbhati, the relatively mild form of Bhastrika. To me, it was good old hyperventilation and sympathetic arousal, with the usual buzz and, after we finished, a sense of calm elation. Sexologists call it the resolution phase.