"Yoga: Putting Perfume on a Dirty (Downward- Facing) Dog?"

Published in the Osho Times magazine, Asia print edition, May 2001

 

     Yoga is enjoying a surge of interest right now. The cover of the current issue of Time magazine shows supermodel Christy Turlington in Kukkutasana (Rooster Pose). In the feature article, “The Science of Yoga,” author Richard Corliss reports that “Oprah Winfrey, arbiter of moral and literary betterment for millions of American women, devoted a whole show to the benefits of yoga earlier this month…” When I began practicing yoga it was a fringe activity seen as the domain of hippies and dropouts. Now suddenly there is a stampede at the door; in February, while I was studying yoga and meditation in Pune, India, we reached a new enrollment record here at the Yoga Center of Columbia (Maryland).

     Why are people coming in droves to Yoga classes? The reasons given by my new students include a desire to relieve stress, to gain greater flexibility and strength, to avoid invasive surgery, to heal back problems, to find peace of mind, to learn how to relax. And, according to the testimonials aired on “Oprah!” from everyday yogis and yoginis, the evidence is abundant that yoga delivers: “I lost weight; I quit smoking; I conquered my fear of flying; I can sleep again; it saved my marriage; it improved my daughter’s grades and attitude.”

     Evidence may be the wrong word, since the Time magazine article cites the scientific community’s skepticism towards claims of Yoga’s health benefits, given the lack of double-blind research studies to validate them. Americans need to not only feel and experience the benefits, they must know WHY it works. Yet the stampede is growing: “…Americans rush from their high-pressure jobs and tune in to the authoritatively mellow voice of an instructor…. These Type A strivers want to become Type B seekers, to lose their blues in an asana (pose), to graduate from distress to de-stress. Fifteen million Americans include some form of yoga in their fitness regimen- twice as many as did five years ago,” writes Corliss. The half-spoken hope is that yoga is America’s answer to stress, and thereby to soaring medical costs. “We know that a high percentage of the maladies that people suffer from have at least some component of stress in them, if they’re not overtly caused by stress,” says Dr. Timothy McCall, an internist and author of Examining Your Doctor: A Patient’s Guide to Avoiding Harmful Medical Care. Health, wrote Plato, is the consummated love affair among the organs of the body. Stress, on the other hand- although normally triggered by external stimuli- is actually the experience of disharmony among the internal systems of the body: hunger is denied in order to attain a trim figure; anger is squashed for the sake of customer service; sexual desire is suppressed in the name of marital fidelity. 

     While yoga can induce harmony among the many organs and systems of the body/mind complex, the problem lies with unconscious memories, buried traumas, painful experiences and/or repressed emotions which are not so easily exorcised. Yoga can effectively wring out the workday’s tensions, but it can also be misused to repress deeper, more persistent and recalcitrant emotional issues such as depression or inappropriate expressions of anger or hurt. The key to healthy yoga is healthy self-esteem; unfortunately yoga is sometimes employed to yoke an unruly emotional nature instead of finding a constructive way to give the emotions full, unbridled expression. Occasionally a new Kundalini Yoga student will experience emotional upheaval during or after a class, and will blame Kundalini Yoga, when in fact what has occurred is the uncorking of some repressed emotional material. The yoga has simply stripped away the covering on something that needs to be expressed. This is what I believe Osho means when he says one must ‘let the gorilla out.’ Osho further states that, in describing the second stage of Dynamic Meditation, “this will be difficult, because we have suppressed the body so much that a suppressed pattern of life has become natural to us.”

One aspect of contrast between the yoga approach and what I encountered at Osho is control versus un-control, controlled breathing versus chaotic breathing. B.K.S. Iyengar prescribes that prananyama be taught only after the student has practiced the asanas for several years, and when pranayama  is  taught every detail must be carefully controlled. Breath, in yoga, is always controlled, always follows a certain rhythm, a prescribed pattern. When I teach breath awareness to beginners I describe how the breath pattern is affected by one’s feelings, thoughts and by one’s energy level; further, that just as the breath normally follows one’s feeling-state it can work in the opposite way, i.e., that if one can regulate the breath one can regulate the emotions. That is, if you are scattered or upset or stressed the breath pattern will likewise be irregular, shallow, chaotic; and that the most effective method to alleviate stress is to create a smooth, regular, slow breath pattern.

     The problem with this is that the body collects and stores every stressful, painful, fearful or traumatic experience in the body as chronic tension, as inappropriate contraction of voluntary muscles. While yoga does wring out many tensions in the body, and while controlled breathing does in fact relieve stress and induce calm, very often there is a deeper layer of tension that does not respond to these systematic and gradual methods. For these, it is my experience that cathartic, chaotic methods are far more effective. This was my experience with the Osho dynamic meditation, and even more so with the Breath: Open to Feeling course I took at the Ashram.

     Without my experience at Osho I doubt I would have done today’s practice this way: feeling quite agitated and anxious from all the demands of the day I lay on the studio floor, listening to Pearl Jam with eyes bags covering my eyes. Unable to relax, what with a masonry jackhammer drilling upstairs above the studio, I leaped up and began dancing and jumping madly, out of control, to my favorite song. I rolled on the floor, I bumped into the walls, and I jumped up and touched the ceiling until I collapsed, out of breath. And relaxed! The yoga solution would have been to do slow regular breathing and Sun Salutations, or head stand. Yoga works wonders for the body and mind and spirit, yet many times emotions require something more dramatic, some cathartic release. It is only with deep relaxation, after complete catharsis, that the experience is one of bliss rather than of controlling emotions. Otherwise it is like putting perfume on a dirty dog!

     To me, yoga too often is fixated on asana, fixated on form. Patanjali states that the aim of Yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind; he makes scant mention of asana practice. In Light on Yoga, the ‘bible’ of Hatha Yoga, BKS Iyengar quotes: “Consciousness and joy am I, and bliss is where I am found.” After spending ten days attending asana classes with Prashant and Gita Iyengar at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute (before ‘tranferring’ to the Osho Ashram), this appears to be no more than lip service to some lofty transcendent aim. The impression I got was that, in the Iyengar system, the road of Hatha Yoga is arduous and infinite, that one never arrives at postures perfect enough to warrant joy.

     At the Osho International Ashram my first impression was the opposite: how, I thought, can anyone achieve anything substantial when there are so many different techniques to sample? The plethora of activities, from Dynamic Mediation to Vipassana to Sufi whirling to dancing to tennis to swimming and much, much more, suggests a dilettante’s wet dream: meditation- lite, with no calories; meditation resort; Club Med, even! Later I realized one positive result of this multitude of offerings was that it made it difficult to fixate on any one technique, and instead focused attention on each method’s shared purpose: silence, Witnessing, the cessation of the modifications of the mind! “When you are silent, whenever you are being the Witness, you are the Buddha.” My very first full day at the Osho Ashram ended, at the conclusion of the Osho White Robe Brotherhood, with a palpable feeling of having arrived; for the first time in years I experienced the silence and awe, the feeling of seeing afresh with a quiet mind.

  1) Familiar as you seem to be with Patanjali, do you feel, as Osho does, that the main body of what he was on about has been lost, reduced to exercises that make the body feel good and give a certain degree of calming but that’s it?

     Without a doubt the main intent of yoga practice, as described by Patanjali, is lost on the vast majority of yoga practitioners. This is not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, practicing yoga for any reason, even if for the politically incorrect reason of achieving a ‘yoga butt’, is better than not practicing.  Yoga has a way of delivering its message eventually, given diligent practice. Also, yoga is a perfectly valid way to enhance health and well-being, to relieve stress or for therapeutic purposes. Lastly, since the ultimate aim of yoga is almost always understood only after a substantial period of practice, any reason that gets a person to establish a practice will suffice.

     So what is the purpose of yoga, according to Patanjali? To quote Mikel Burley*, “Hatha yoga…is a branch of Indian soteriology; that is, a technical system whose purpose is to achieve ‘freedom’ ‘release’, or ‘salvation’ for its practitioners….(via) the realization of one’s true identity as the Self, the Self being the paramatman (the highest or supreme Self) who, according to yoga philosophy, is identical to Brahman (the Absolute).” The purpose of yoga is to experience one’s true identity, to experience the silence and stillness of mind, body and heart which leads to the dis-identification with the individual, merely personal self and the re-identification with the universal Self. (*Hatha-Yoga: Its Context, Theory and Practice)

  2) Do you think there is indeed a danger, again as is Osho’s observation, that people who follow the direction of the path of will can develop a spiritual ego? For example, of your colleagues, people who have been doing yoga for years, do you see this in them?

     Hatha Yoga suits the Western mentality because it is a path of will. Our history has been written by individuals who have exerted personal will over circumstance, over Nature, over enemies, by those whose personal vision has prevailed over all obstacles. Passivity, ‘going with the flow,’ submitting to Fate- these modes of operating are antithetical to our ‘can-do’ attitude. Is spiritual ego an inherent danger of yoga? I do not think so. Is spiritual egoism common among yoga practitioners I know? Yes, probably in the same proportion as in any other field. Is it less prevalent among those in the Osho orbit? My experience is too limited to generalize with any certitude, but my impression is that it is indeed less prevalent. If you follow Osho’s suggestion of practicing laughter, especially towards oneself, of not taking anything too seriously, then spiritual arrogance cannot take firm root.

 

  3) When you look back at your time at the Meditation Resort, are you struck by the light-heartedness, the joy and loving and laughter? I somehow don’t associate those qualities with yoga, and see that as something of a minus about the whole discipline. While I don’t doubt yoga practitioners’ sincerity, it does seem awful serious.

     My memories of the Osho Ashram center on the joyousness, definitely. Everything about the Osho Ashram felt bright and affirmative and celebratory. In comparison to my experiences in yoga, Osho puts far more emphasis on emotional expression- on laughing and crying, on joyous dancing and singing as well as on expressing anger. Hatha Yoga, being a solitary pursuit, too often ignores the emotional body and emotional relationships. However, this is not true of all yoga systems. Thinking back on why I was so drawn to the Osho Ashram in Pune, this quote from the I Ching comes to mind: “Followers readily join a movement associated with Joyousness.”

-Joseph Roberson

 

companion article/ interview by Maneesha James 2001

Yoga + Osho Active Meditations

Towards a Supreme Science?

~Maneesha James

 

Yoga sprang into popularity as part of the New Age movement over what? – some thirty years ago? But, unlike other movements that became just another fad, Yoga has proved its staying power and managed to survive entry into the new millennium. In fact, as an increase in adherents attests, it’s more than surviving; it’s positively thriving.

Recently it has been spotlighted, both by the Oprah Winfrey show and as the cover story on a Time magazine -- the lithe and lovely Christy Turlington sporting a taut tum while perched in her rooster pose (something I’m too chicken to try!)

In spite of the skepticism of the scientific community, practitioners swear by it for maintaining and restoring health, for keeping bodies trim and flexible and minds becalmed.

All of which is good as far as it goes. But, according to Osho, Yoga doesn’t go far enough. And that’s not just an off-the-cuff observation. He has literally spoken volumes (something in the region of twelve in Yoga: The Alpha and Omega) on Yoga and its originator, Patanjali, and made numerous references to Yoga in many of his books.

 

At any given time, among the numerous visitors at the Meditation Resort there are always Yoga adherents (or ex-adherents). “I promised my Yoga teacher I’d keep my practice up while I was away,” confesses one, looking a little embarrassed, “and you know, since I’ve been here I haven’t even thought about it.”

We asked three enthusiasts -- all of them visiting the resort for the first time – for their take on Yoga in the light of their experience of the active meditative methods.

 

                                                                   *

Joseph Roberson is co-director of the Yoga Center of Columbia in Maryland; he is also a professional photographer and father of three boys. What does he feel explains Yoga’s popularity?

 

“The more complex life becomes, with more stimuli, more options, more information to process and more to be responsible for,  the more people are ‘in their heads.’ Yoga gives them a way to meet their body again, to connect with the body and to relieve stress.

“Yoga also develops concentration -- which people want, because they feel they are scattered in their everyday lives. The slow pace of Yoga and the focussing on your breath slows down the mind and emotions. It teaches people how to “gear down” their system.

“For myself, part of the attraction of Yoga arose out of control issues- a need to control my body and my emotions. The lesson I had learnt in life was: Express emotions and you are out of control and you can be hurt.

“Through Yoga I achieved that control to a certain extent. But now I’d like to be not strategizing and controlling so much…because those tendencies have taken over my life. Now I want to be balanced, relaxed…enjoying more.”

 

Another reason Yoga has taken hold in America, volunteers Robert, a marketing expert and a Yoga instructor, “is because it’s about doing, and Americans are great doers! And it’s what’s known, it’s what’s been introduced.”

 

Thirty-three year old Amanda Hucks --  a lively, outgoing Londoner – says she was “looking for something to make me feel better about myself. At the time I got into Yoga I was in the second year of psychotherapy training. Because it was so mindy I wanted to do something that would bring me back to my body.

“As for what attracts people generally – people are looking for something to calm them down, to give them a focus in life. They are working out in gyms, doing aerobics and so on, but Yoga is closer to meditation. It gives you a glimpse…and people don’t know where else to go to for that.”

Initially she found it very helpful, Amanda continues. “It took me to a quiet place and, because I am fit and pretty flexible anyway, the positions were easy to do. The teachers would use nice music and, because it was Iyengar Yoga, the stretches were slow, not like with Hatha Yoga.

“But I began to find it very constrictive. Being in class was like being back at school! You are told to do things without any explanation about why, what the benefits are.

“There is no appreciation of the individual – of their particular body, its needs, what it’s capable of, its limitations, or of where you are at as a person. You’ve got to fit into the method. That’s just the opposite of the Osho approach which provides a choice of so many different techniques because it’s understood that we are all unique.”

 

When he first entered the meditation resort choice was Joseph’s first overwhelming observation too.

 

“It was like a smorgasbord! In fact I thought how is it possible to make any progress on one path if you are jumping from Whirling to Vipassana to Kundalini to dancing to tennis to swimming and much, much more? It suggests a dilettante’s wet dream: meditation- lite, with no calories. A meditation resort…Club Med, even!

“Later I realized that this multitude of offerings makes it difficult to fixate on technique at all. Instead, the focus is on the purpose shared by the various yoga and meditation techniques: silence, Witnessing, ‘the cessation of the modifications of the mind’!

“After the evening meditation recently I was walking more slowly than I usually do. I was not intentionally doing the ‘Vipassana walk’ [a formalized way of walking slowly, with hands over the heart, eyes lowered, bringing awareness to the motion of the feet as they walk], but just keenly aware of walking, of watching the crowd disperse and feeling the night air. There was no form, no technique, and no goal to what was happening. And it was beautiful, that spontaneous experience of just Being.

“To me Iyengar Yoga is too obsessed with asana, with achieving the perfect form. This pursuit of perfect form is like chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow- one never arrives.

“I had, and still have, a need to be working on emotions, not postures.

While yoga can induce harmony among the many organs and systems of the body/mind complex, the problem lies with unconscious memories, buried traumas, painful experiences and/or repressed emotions, which are not so easily exorcised.

    “Yoga, when inappropriately used, can repress deeper, more persistent and recalcitrant emotional issues such as depression or inappropriate expressions of anger or hurt. Yoga is sometimes employed to yoke an unruly emotional nature instead of finding a constructive way to give the emotions full, unbridled expression.

    “Occasionally a new Kundalini Yoga student will experience emotional upheaval during or after a class, and will blame Kundalini Yoga, when in fact what has occurred is the uncorking of some repressed emotional material. The yoga has simply stripped away the covering on something that needs to be expressed.

   “When I teach breath awareness to beginners I describe how the breath pattern is affected by one’s feelings, thoughts and by one’s energy level. And that just as the breath normally follows one’s feeling-state, it can work in the opposite way, i.e., that if one can regulate the breath one can regulate the emotions.

    “The problem with this is that the body collects and stores every stressful, painful, fearful or traumatic experience in the body as chronic tension, as inappropriate contraction of voluntary muscles. So while controlled breathing does in fact relieve stress and induce calm, very often there is a deeper layer of tension that does not respond to these systematic and gradual methods. For these, it is my experience that cathartic, chaotic methods are far more effective.” 

 

Joseph returned to the USA before this article was completed. He wrote describing how, one evening, “agitated and anxious from the demands of the day” he self-prescribed a new cure, inspired by his time at the resort….

 

    “I lay on the studio floor with eye bags covering my eyes. Unable to relax- what with the additional stress from a masonry jackhammer drilling upstairs above the studio- I leaped up and began dancing and jumping madly, out of control. I rolled on the floor, bumped into the walls, and jumped up and touched the ceiling. Finally I collapsed, out of breath- and relaxed!

   “The Yoga prescription would have been to do some Sun Salutations, or head stand, and maybe controlled breathing. Yoga works wonders for the body and mind and spirit, yet many times emotions require something more dramatic, some cathartic release. It is only with deep relaxation, after complete catharsis, that the experience is one of bliss rather than of controlling emotions. Otherwise it is like putting perfume on a dirty dog!”

 

 Robert agrees. “Controlled breathing has a place,” he points out, “but only when you’ve first cleared out and released what’s there. Otherwise, you’re like a pressure cooker!”

 

Amanda brought up yet another aspect of Yoga: rather than dissolving one’s ego, she found that the practice tends to feed it.

 

“I felt a spirit of competitiveness and ambition around how many different positions you can do. So if you can’t do a posture and if you don’t you feel there is something wrong with you.”

By contrast, Joseph says, “Here I get the feeling that each person is respected as being responsible for themselves; they have the choice as to what they want to do for their inner growth. That’s empowering. On some level, Yoga is always about improving – more, better, different! It’s like: you never arrive!

“I’ve had limited exposure to those in the Osho orbit but my impression is that spiritual egoism is less prevalent. If you go along with Osho’s suggestion of practicing laughter, especially about oneself, of not taking anything too seriously, then spiritual arrogance can’t take root.”

 

 Osho has talked about how the headstand, if practiced for more than three minutes, can damage even destroy, the delicate structures in the brain.

Robert says that was his experience.

 

“The headstand is dangerous. Shivananda Yoga in particular, which is what I practiced, is about bringing energy to the head. It is seen as ‘the way to enlightenment.’

“But my own experience was that energy got even more stuck in my head than it was! I already had a problem with too much energy in the head -- like many people do! -- and it got progressively worse. I had spent a month in a Yoga retreat, and every day or even twice a day we ‘d do headstand for maybe two to fifteen minutes. I got ringing in my ears, my eyes were bloodshot; the insomnia I was suffering from became worse.”

 

  Robert later switched to Bikram Yoga, which he enjoyed because it was so active.

 

“In spite of that, when I began Dynamic Meditation at the resort I has so much frozen energy in my back and shoulders and pain in my neck that it was difficult to even hold my arms above my head in the third stage of jumping. That took me by surprise; I felt like such a wimp!

“Over months of Dynamic, Kundalini and various courses, that frozen energy was released, so there was a real release of energy blocks, a real transformation.”

  

But there are other health benefits to the active meditations too, Robert discovered.

 

“Sometimes I would go to Dynamic with the start of a head cold and it would be gone afterwards. It was blocked energy manifesting as sickness and Dynamic cleared the energy and so cleared the symptoms!”

 

Robert went on to talk about how he appreciates the eclecticism and scientific foundation of Dynamic.

 

“The rapid, chaotic breathing takes you past your defences, your armouring and potentially brings you in contact, for the next stage, with your emotional stuff, as well as interrupting the flow of thought. That last point is another reason why it could work for the modern man, to help him come out of his obsessive thinking.

“The jumping, in the third stage, has a kind of aerobic element to it. In addition, while keeping awareness on the sex center, the jumping and mantra-shouting move the energy out of the head – which is the opposite from what certain inverted Yoga practices do, which can be so destructive.

“Dynamic is done with your eyes closed so you are harnessing energy; whereas with practices that require you to have your eyes open, you are still leaking energy. In Bikram Yoga it’s said that if you close your eyes you stay caught up in thoughts. But you avoid that in Dynamic when you do it totally because you’re releasing all the energy in the mind.

“The fourth stage of standing still reminds me of Chi Kung, while the dancing and celebration of the last stage …well, nothing like that exists in any system. It’s the element that keeps meditation light-hearted, and that’s important. Yoga practitioners do tend to get a little serious about what they’re doing, especially if their practice is belief-based or associated with a guru.”

 

So how does he see Osho’s suggestion that to make it the supreme science, Yoga should be practiced alongside the active meditation methods?

 

 “I think the active methods could go over very well in gyms, martial arts dojos and yoga colleges -- if those people don’t feel that their own practice is threatened. If people can find an hour’s space where they can get some relief of stress, I see Dynamic as more effective for that than Yoga.”

 

There are so many different forms of yoga and meditation. As Osho says, if one teacher or style does not suit you don’t waste time and energy blaming the teacher or bashing yoga or meditation in general. Just move on. Keep moving until you find the approach that feels right, that makes sense to you. Yoga addresses physical health and vitality well, while the Osho meditations work more directly with the emotions. For me, yoga and Osho make a great combination, offering more than either does separately. I am very happy to have ‘found’ Osho while I was in Pune!