In 2003, upon examining the first images, Komisaruk was pleased to see confirmation of the study’s conclusions from a decade earlier. The pleasure centers of the women’s brains lit up more or less identically whether they reached their orgasmic highs by means of physical stimulation or simply thinking off. Different paths led to the same outcome.
The challenge was getting enough volunteers. A good study would require a fair number of subjects—all of them possessing a rare talent largely unknown to the world at large. The recruiting job required a light touch, good connections, and a bit of astute salesmanship. After all, what woman was eager to lie down on a hard table under the glare of fluorescent lights and have her head zapped by a giant donut-shaped magnet while attempting to let go?
It was a difficult proposition at best—difficult, that is, until Nan Wise came along. Nan Wise is an attractive sex therapist and yoga teacher whom Komisaruk got to know when she went back to school at Rutgers after raising two children. Studying yoga and learning how to pay close attention to the energy currents in her body had turned her into a skilled practitioner of thinking off, and she agreed to a functional MRI scan when Komisaruk asked her. “It’s the least sexy thing in the world,” she told me. “But I do it for science.”
By early 2010, Komisaruk and Wise had succeeded in doing preliminary scans on half a dozen volunteers. Head movement turned out to be a significant issue. The orgasms that Wise herself experienced while in the machine had resulted in virtually no head motion and thus very clear images. But other think-off women often thrashed about. In one case, Wise recalled, “it looked like the scanner was going to jump around the room.” As a solution, the scientists devised a head restraint that was bolted onto the machine. It worked. Now the heads of the think-off women held steady even if their bodies became agitated.
Wise decided to pursue the inquiry as part of her doctoral research. What she and Komisaruk envisioned was documenting the steps by which various neural circuits and networks lit up in orgasm. In essence, they wanted to make a brain-scan movie, hoping it would throw light on fundamental riddles. For instance, the research might help scientists learn how to distinguish the parts of the brain that mediate pain and pleasure. The brain in a state of orgasm, Wise told me, looks much the same as when it experiences pain. “We don’t understand very much about what constitutes the difference.”
For her dissertation, Wise needed at least a dozen think-off volunteers. But now, with the rise of Neotantra and alternative sexuality, recruitment in the New York City area proved to be easy. Wise knew her way around the sex-and-spirituality crowd and knew the right people to contact for volunteers. “I know somebody who knows somebody,” she mused. “That’s how it works.” One group she drew on was One Taste. Its founder had taken up the methods of More University and set up businesses in San Francisco and lower Manhattan that promoted open sexual relationships as well as orgasmic meditation. Wise’s think-off volunteers ranged from New Age mystics to radical feminists who preached the virtues of learning how to achieve sexual satisfaction without men.
The more Wise learned, the more she marveled at the diversity of euphoric states. “There are orgasms and there are orgasms,” she said. “For me, thinking off feels like a diffuse orgasm. Now that I’ve been interviewing people who have this capability, some of them have unbelievably intense orgasms. I think some people can cue their nervous system in that direction pretty easily.”
I asked about length.
“We’ve seen all sorts of different styles,” she replied. “There seem to be some people who can create an orgasmic state and keep it going. I’ve never timed it. But there are people who can go on and on.”
While science over the decades has made some progress in illuminating the relationship between sex and yoga, it has cast less light on an esoteric issue that is even more fundamental and important. For ages, the topic was seen as having to do almost exclusively with divine inspiration. Today, it is perceived as the heart of what it means to be human.
VII
MUSE
Paul Pond wanted to know how the universe began. His doctorate in particle physics from Northeastern University in Boston opened the door to a world of thinkers who sought to identify how the building blocks of nature coalesced in the first instants after the Big Bang, how things like mesons took shape and disappeared in bursts of other elementary particles. He published in Physical Review—the field’s top journal—and did research in such places as Toronto and London, Paris and Vienna.
Then he began to undergo kundalini arousal. In 1974, he decided to give up physics research.
Pond and his friends lived in Canada, mostly in and around Toronto. But they became enamored of a Kashmiri mystic by the name of Gopi Krishna who lived half a world away. Late in the summer of 1977, Pond, along with more than two hundred and thirty other Canadians, boarded a jumbo jet and flew to India to visit the aging kundalite. A few helped him spread his message. In turn, the pandit visited Toronto in 1979 and again in 1983, a year before his death. Krishna shunned guru status. But the Canadians revered him as a visionary and felt an obligation to keep his agenda alive, most especially his passion for studying how kundalini could foster intuition and genius, insight and creativity.
Krishna taught that the mystic fire “must” turn a common person into “a virtuoso of a high order, with extraordinary power of expression, both in verse and prose, or extraordinary artistic talents.” His teachings—laid out in The Biological Basis of Religion and Genius—made the human potential movement seem like a tea party.
A farm in southern Ontario became the headquarters from which Pond, his wife, and their friends spread the word. In 1986, they held the first of what would become decades of annual conferences under a big tent. They called their group the Institute for Consciousness Research. The small Canadian charity with the esoteric agenda became a magnet for hundreds of people. It sold kundalini books, built an extensive library, put out a newsletter, and sought to show that the mystic fire could result in artists and writers, saints and innovators. Over the years, it examined such figures as Brahms, Emerson, Gandhi, Victor Hugo, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Rudolf Steiner, Saint Hildegard, and Saint John of the Cross. The published results were typically rich in endnotes.
Pond underwent his own transformation. He became more open to people. So did his writing. As a scientist, he had specialized in papers that were extremely dry. Now he found pleasure in poetry—something he had previously avoided and engaged in only when forced to do so in school. The muse compelled him to write.
Restless ego like a child
eating candy, running wild.
I say ideas come from a higher source
but secretly wish they’re mine of course.
Life holds few mysteries greater than those concerning the wellsprings of creativity. Thinkers down through the ages have developed many theories about what keeps the springs flowing and what causes them to dry up. Freud proposed one of the most enduring when he suggested that the sublimation of sexual energy fosters the artistic temperament and the creative impulse. But he denied that he, or psychoanalysis, could provide much else by way of explanation. “Before the problem of the creative artist,” Freud remarked in a study of Dostoyevsky, “analysis must, alas, lay down its arms.”
Despite the durability of the question, a fair body of evidence—much of it anecdotal, some of it middling, parts of it robust—has emerged over the decades to suggest that yoga can play a role in stirring the wellsprings. And kundalini is only part of the story.
The evidence has accumulated even though the issue is scientifically challenging. Creativity, after all, is rooted in human subjectivity, and even the best investigators can have a hard time finding ways to explore the ephemeral nature of inspiration. By definition, the research is much more difficult to do properly than measuring hormones and muscle tension, brain waves and blood pressure.
A complicating factor is that the overall issue of yogic creativity
tends to be poorly known. It has received little public attention compared to more popular aspects of the discipline. The low profile and lack of buzz mean that scientists face serious challenges in trying to obtain funding to pursue the unfamiliar lines of research.
Even so, the topic is potentially quite important. Artists and creative thinkers have reputations as rebels. But throughout history, they have starred not only in the annals of invention but in the social upheavals that frequently result in periods of civil progress. If yoga contributes to the advance of artistry, it seems like the discipline might act as a cultural force of some consequence.
This chapter explores that possibility and the extent to which science in its current state of development can illuminate the topic.
The potential links between yoga and creativity often lie hidden in plain sight. For instance, Carl Jung relied on the calming effects of yoga during one of the most tumultuous and inspired periods of his life, doing so long before he issued his warning about the dangers of kundalini.
The Swiss psychiatrist (1875–1961) and founder of analytical psychology turned to the discipline relatively early in his career as he struggled with two crises. The first was personal. In his thirties, as part of his inquiries, Jung engaged in a furious battle to pry open his own mind, so much so that he would often shudder with hallucinations and cling to nearby objects to keep from falling apart. Ultimately, his “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it, resulted in a secret journal bound in red leather that, when published in 2009, was hailed as the genesis of the Jungian method.
The other crisis was World War I. It raged beyond the psychoanalyst and his home in neutral Switzerland, shattering the old European order. Jung perceived an enigmatic link between the inner and outer conflicts. And, in the interest of science, he used that relationship to push himself to what he considered the edge of madness. “I was frequently so wrought up,” Jung recalled, “that I had to do certain yoga exercises to hold my emotions in check.” He did so sparingly. “I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious.”
Another example of the ostensible interaction between yoga and creativity centers on Leopold Stokowski (1882–1977), a conductor renowned for his exuberance, intuition, and a style that shunned the traditional baton for hand motions. He is often remembered for his starring role with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Disney film Fantasia.
Early in his career, Stokowski became a confirmed health enthusiast, throwing himself into a disciplined regimen of yoga, meditation, and strict limits on what he ate and drank. He was said to be able to relax completely at will and, on six hours of sleep, handle workdays running up to eighteen hours. Before each concert, he would meditate to clear his mind.
Stokowski was also a famous womanizer. When, in the 1930s, he and Greta Garbo (1905–1990) found they could, so to speak, make beautiful music together, they traveled to Italy and, in the ancient town of Ravello, rented a villa overlooking the Mediterranean. There he taught her yoga. The actress, in turn, adopted the discipline wholeheartedly, studying with such teachers as Devi—famous as the first yoga teacher to the stars.
Garbo became such a devoted fan that she not only spread the word among friends and acquaintances but even played the teacher. Gayelord Hauser, a health guru of the day who advised the actress on dietary matters, recounted how Garbo taught him to do the Headstand. He found it rejuvenating. But Hauser also learned that it could damage the neck. Ultimately, he recommended avoiding the pose in favor of relaxing on a slanted board that lowered the head and raised the feet.
The world of classical music provided another possible example of how yoga can foster the creative impulse. Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999) was a prominent violinist and conductor. Born in New York City, he performed hundreds of times for Allied troops during World War II and, as the soldiers liberated the German concentration camps, for the inmates who managed to survive. Many were little more than skeletons. In 1947, in a courageous act of reconciliation, he traveled to Berlin and became the first Jewish musician to perform in Germany following the Holocaust.
During this period, the exhaustions of conflict as well as the unstructured nature of his early training conspired to cause Menuhin great physical and artistic hardship. By the early 1950s, he was complaining of aches and pains, of tension and deep fatigue, of the impossibility of getting any rest. His art suffered.
Then, in 1952, while visiting India, he met Iyengar. The yogi taught him how to relax in Savasana, the Corpse pose. The musician immediately fell into a deep sleep. The ensuing yoga lessons gave Menuhin feelings of deep refreshment, as well as better control of his violin. Menuhin became a huge fan. In 1954, he gave Iyengar an Omega watch engraved on the back: “To my best violin teacher.” Soon, the musician was introducing Iyengar to audiences in Britain, France, and Switzerland. It was Menuhin who put the unknown yogi on the world stage.
In 1965, when Light on Yoga came out, Menuhin wrote a foreword of considerable grace and passion. The star of classical music praised the discipline as giving a new perspective “on our own body, our first instrument,” teaching individuals how to draw out the “maximum resonance and harmony.” And Menuhin, a witness to war, recommended yoga as a path to virtue.
“What is the alternative?” he asked. “Thwarted, warped people condemning the order of things, cripples criticizing the upright, autocrats slumped in expectant coronary attitudes, the tragic spectcenter1e of people working out their own imbalance and frustration on others.” By nature, Menuhin concluded, yoga cultivated a respect for life, truth, and patience. He saw its civilizing qualities as implicit “in the drawing of a quiet breath, in calmness of mind and firmness of will.”
More recently, the rock star Sting (who plays not only guitar but the lute) has praised yoga. He told an interviewer that it can produce a state of inner calm in which music comes to him as if from another dimension. “I don’t think you write songs. They come through you,” he said. “Yoga is just a different route to that same process.”
What inspires such artists as Sting and Menuhin, Stokowski and Garbo, Jung and many other innovative minds, is impossible to know, as is precisely how yoga may have influenced their careers. Still, the question is worth asking given the discipline’s deep resonance not only with celebrated artists but a variety of modern practitioners as well.
A cottage industry has sprung up in recent years that employs yoga as a means of inspiration. Yoga as muse gets promoted in workshops, books, retreats, travel tours, classes, and magazine articles, as well as by coaches and consultants. It is a little-known but increasingly common testament to yoga as a path to artistry.
“Yoga won’t make writing easy,” says Jeff Davis, a teacher, “because, well, writing is difficult. But yoga is helping thousands of writers to facilitate and design their own creative process—rather than to be at the whim of random flashes of inspiration, moods, or energy peaks.”
Linda Novick is a painter who calls the Berkshires home but likes to travel to Miami Beach in the winter, Tuscany in the spring, and back to the Berkshires for the summer and fall. She also teaches yoga, and uses it to inspire her painting students. Her website, www.yogapaint.com, advertises her classes and philosophy. “Let go of fear and blocks to creativity,” it counsels. Novick’s book, The Painting Path, outlines gentle yoga exercises and uplifting thoughts that culminate in art projects, including ones in pastels, watercolor, batik, collage, and oil painting.
Mia Olson, a flautist, was teaching at the Berklee College of Music in Boston when she fell in love with yoga. She signed up for a teacher training course at Kripalu and began sharing yoga tips with her Berklee peers. Soon, she offered a class, Musician’s Yoga, and was quickly asked to open another section. “The students,” she recalled, “were craving this connection with mind and body.”
The inspirational power of yoga seems to arise—at least in part—from nothing more complicated than the release of psychologic
al tension and the quieting of the mind. Over the ages, many artists have looked to quiet for insight, exhibiting what Emily Dickinson called an “appetite for silence.” The quietude let them see things differently.
That yoga can produce this state seems beyond doubt. In metabolic terms, the quieting depends on physiological cooling and the kind of relaxation response that Benson documented. Experience shows, however, that the path can be rocky.
Most yoga teachers, and many practitioners, know how a seemingly dull routine can erupt in sudden displays of upheaval. Mel Robin, in one of his books, called it not unusual for a beginning student toward the end of class to break down into “muffled sobs and copious tears.” He suggested that yoga’s lessening of tension can result in bursts of long-suppressed emotion.
Over the decades, several kinds of popular psychotherapy have sought to use physical leverage as a way of releasing and neutralizing toxic emotions. The methods include Rolfing, Neo-Reichian massage, Holotropic Breathwork, and Somatic Psychology. All seek to undo body tension as a way of breaking through mental blockages.
The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards Page 25