Syman - The subtle body : the story of yoga in America

THE SUBTLE BODY

THE STORY OF YOGA IN AMERICA

STEFANIE SYMAN

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX
NEW YORK

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2010 by Stefanie Syman

All rights reserved

Distributed in Canada by D&M Publishers, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2010

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Syman, Stefanie.

The subtle body : the story of yoga in America / Stefanie Syman.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-374-23676-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Yoga. 2. United StatesReligion. 3. LeisureEconomic aspectsUnited States. 4. Big BusinessUnited States. I. Title.

B132.Y6S96 2010

204'.360973dc22

2010002358

Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott

www.fsgbooks.com

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

TO ALL OF MY TEACHERS

THE SUBTLE BODY

The day after Easter, thousands of families gathered on the White House grounds for the annual Easter Egg Roll.

The event was as choreographed as any other presidential ceremony. Secret Service men mingled in the crowd; television reporters stood in pools of artificial light, describing the days goings-on; and anyone who was admitted abided by the usual prohibitions (no duffel bags, no food or drink of any kind, no aerosols, no real or simulated weapons, etc.).

At 10:25 a.m., the first family appeared on the White House balcony, emerging from the inner sanctum like regal miniatures in a cuckoo clock.

President Obama made a few remarks and then ceded the microphone to the First Lady, the days hostess.

Welcome, everybody. I dont have much to say, she demurred. Our goal today is just to have fun. We want to focus on activity, healthy eating. Weve got yoga, weve got dancing, weve got storytelling, weve got Easter-egg decorating.

The yoga sessions had started at dawn. Wearing winter jackets, sweatpants or jeans, and sneakers, childrenfrom toddlers to teenshad taken their places on brightly colored yoga mats in bunches of fifty. The teachers had come from studios as far as Sacramento and as near as D.C.s downtown to walk each set through a half-hour sequence of Hatha Yoga poses.

With the White House in the background, the kids attempted airplane pose (Vrabhadrsana III), teetering on one foot, one arm touching the ground, the other reaching into the sky, while trying to keep their back leg parallel to the lawn, which was lumpier than you might have wished if you had been doing the balancing.

They learned crow pose (Bakasana)you balance on your forearms, knees tucked into your armpits, rear lifted in the air; mountain pose (Tsana)you stand feet planted into the ground, heels touching, arms at your side; and a few other postures. Then the instructors planted their hands on the ground, pressed their heels into the grass, with about three feet in between, forming a tunnel of downward dogs, and the kids crawled through.

The scene, as presented in news stories and on the official White House blog, was wholesome and productive. Yoga, it was tacitly agreed, was a great form of exercise that, like basketball, soccer, or dance, might help stem the tide of childhood obesity.

Everyone was fairly sure that this was the first time yoga had been practiced on the White House lawn, save the run-through the day before. (A reporter on Sunday press-pool duty had glimpsed several instructors stretching and doing both handstands and headstands not far from the south driveway.)

There certainly was no better proof that Americans had assimilated this spiritual discipline. We had turned a technique for God realization that had, at various points in time, enjoined its adherents to reduce their diet to rice, milk, and a few vegetables, fix their minds on a set of, to us, incomprehensible syllables, and self-administer daily enemas (without the benefit of equipment), to name just a few of its prerequisites, into an activity suitable for children. Though yoga has no coherent tradition in India, being preserved instead by thousands of gurus and hundreds of lineages, each of which makes a unique claim to authenticity, we had managed to turn it into a singular thing: a way to stay healthy and relaxed. How that happened, and what it all means, is the subject of this book.

But a few things are worth noting here.

The yoga on display that April day had been extracted and distilled, like some homeopathic remedy, from centuries-old Hindu, Hatha Yoga scriptures. These taught the spiritual aspirant how to conquer death and, more to the point, how to reach states of bliss so engulfing and powerful they were beyond description. The best the texts could do was to state what these lacked, which was any sense of suffering or time or boundedness.

Hatha Yoga scriptures are far more precise about how you transit from one state to the other, how you turn mere human flesh into a vehicle for the divine.

Put simply, to do this, you need to gain control of the subtle body.

Now the term the subtle body, or skma-arra, like the word yoga itself, has several related but distinct meanings.

In Hatha Yoga, the subtle body describes a network of channels (nadis) and wheel-like vortices (chakras). These are invisible to the naked eye and even the microscope; the subtle body is distinct from the gross or physical body, though manipulating one necessarily affects the other.

The purpose of practicing Hatha Yoga, including the postures as well as internal cleansing practices and breathing exercises, is to raise Kundalini, a powerful energy, which is typically lodged in the bottom chakra at the base of your spine, to the crown of your head, the top chakra.

Youd be hard-pressed to see the connection between this Hatha Yoga and the yoga those youngsters learned on the White House lawn.

But many of those aspects of yogathe ecstatic, the transcendent, the overtly Hindu, the possibly subversive, and even the seemingly bizarrethat you couldnt see on the White House grounds that day and that you wont find in most yoga classes persist, right here in America.

Like some sort of collective id, theyre half-buried. You can find them at the Burning Man festival in Nevadas Black Rock Desert or at solstice celebrations in the high mountains of New Mexico or deep in its forests. There yoga is a sacred ritual that directly, overtly, and insistently relates sex to God, bodies to transcendence. Its not so much a way to stay healthy as it is a method for disrupting ordinary waking consciousness in order to see a deeper, divinized reality. At places such as the Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes, yoga is one way to blow your mind.

Usually thousands come to the annual, weeklong Fourth of July Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes. This year, they came by plane, by car, and by foot to the Parque Venado in the Santa Fe National Forest. Most wore their hair dreadlocked or shaven clean off. Clothes, when they were wearing them at all, were tie-dyed and loose. Delicate, hennaed patterns of flowers and leaves snaked up one womans torso and circled her bare breasts. Many had pierced navels and noses and eyebrows. A few of the men wore Native American shawls and feathers.