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A recent Guest Butler called New York Times science reporter William Broad’s The Science of Yoga "the most complete portrait of yoga in our time.”

 

I think it is one of the narrowest.

 

“The Science of Yoga: Risk and Reward" is both informative and maddening. It reveals postural (hatha) yoga’s benefits and dangers — including yogic-induced injuries. According to Broad, scientific studies have demonstrated that yoga can reduce cholesterol and fatigue, lower blood pressure, improve sleep, induce calm and improve your sex life. But yoga will not make you aerobically fit. It slows up your metabolism. And it has also caused strokes. Broad performs an invaluable service by exposing yoga’s hazards, a neglected and important topic.

 

But both fans — and critics — of Broad miss something, and it’s major. In reducing yoga to the performance of physical movements, Broad makes yoga little more than an elegant form of calisthenics. But yoga is much more expansive than Broad recognizes, more interesting and radical. Fundamentally, it’s an integrative, holistic and spiritual approach to health and healing.  

 

According to the “Yoga Sutras,” the authoritative ancient source, yoga is a

state of mind (whole-heartedly focused) rather than an activity (like doing asanas).

 

The “Yoga Sutras” consists of 195 aphorisms; only three refer to asanas. The bulk of the text explains how conscious breathing and skillful use of the senses, meditation and ethical restraint and the refinement of moral sensitivity can foster clarity of perception and wise action. Broad occasionally alludes to wider aspects of yoga — for example, he points out that “slow breathing turns out to have deep mental ramifications with an increase in calm alertness and raw awareness” — but he never delves deeper and he neglects the richness of pranayama, conscious breathing — or any of the other aspects of yoga presented in the Yoga Sutras.

 

Yoga is multidimensional. Like this: You behave with consideration and kindness toward other people. You value the truth. You consider how what you say might affect others. You are content with what you have and try to focus on what is essential in life. You don’t take what doesn’t belong to you.

 

And that’s just a part of yoga.

 

You engage in a practice that cultivates greater self-reflection and self-awareness and you realize that you can’t control the results of your actions.

 

And that’s just a part of yoga.

 

You assume an erect and comfortable position, close your mouth and breathe through your nose, pulling the air to the back of your throat. On each of the next twelve breaths you gently try to lengthen your exhale.

 

And that’s just a part of yoga.

 

You listen to music, attempting to focus on it without distraction. After a while you become absorbed in it and that uplifts your spirit.

 

And that’s just a part of yoga.

 

You mindfully perform a series of carefully executed, deep body stretches, your movement coordinated with your breathing.

 

And that’s just a part of yoga.

 

As you can see — and as the “Yoga Sutras” suggests — yoga has many facets. Eight in fact.

 

The one time Broad does mention the limbs of yoga — which are practices — he calls them “rules.”

 

Broad’s simplistic and distorted view of the yogic path, a crucial defect in a book that aspires to be a “science of yoga,” is accompanied by an ambivalence about science, the method he has chosen to study yoga. “Science — even at its best… ignores much about reality to zero in on those aspects of nature that it can quantify and comprehend,” he says at one point. He also writes: “Deep issues of psychology and ultimately what it means to be human [are] areas that science has always had a hard time investigating.” And yet, despite the fact that science “cannot address, much less answer, many of the most interesting questions in life,” that’s the approach Broad chooses to study yoga.

 

One of the crucial questions that science can’t address is the psychological complexity of human experience and the felt sense of being alive. The inner experience of yoga — such as the clarity and centeredness a person can access while doing a carefully designed program of conscious breathing — cannot be fully comprehended by laboratory studies.

 

 “We must better understand what yoga can do and better understand what yoga can be,” Broad writes. But answers to those questions and to yoga’s problems — its commercialization and shallowness, the tendency toward charismatic gurus and the potential for physical injury — will never be forthcoming from scientific studies alone. We also need detailed personal reports from students and teachers of yoga of their experience of the full spectrum of the yogic path, so we can honor its far-reaching scope and so the flowering of interest in hatha yoga in the West might be a gateway to spiritual as well as physical transformation.

 

And for that, students and teachers of yoga would be infinitely better served by T. K. V. Desikachar’s “The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice. “[To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]