Yale's Yogin

Yoga is an ingrown Hindu philosophical system whose object is fusing the "individual soul" with the "universal soul." Hindu yogins achieve that mystic goal after years of practice in emotional serenity and bodily control. The desired physical relaxation of yoga is achieved by means of contortions which "purify" the body. U. S. devotees of yoga are usually more interested in the philosophical and religious than the gymnastic aspects of the system. In India, on the other hand, the most extraverted yogin to appear in centuries, Swami Kuvalayananda, thinks so highly of the physical side of yoga that he has developed his own special yogic system of physical culture and physical therapy. He maintains a health centre at Bombay.

One of Swami Kuvalayananda's students, Dr. Kovoor Thomas Behanan of Yale, has now published the first physiological analysis of yogic exercises, most of which he found hygienically beneficial.*

Dr. Behanan was a graduate student of psychology at Yale in 1931 when he won a Sterling Fellowship on which he returned to India to make a scientific study of one of his country's strangest cults. Under Swami Kuvalayananda, Dr. Behanan conscientiously underwent a year's novitiate in yoga. Already acquainted with the philosophy, he concentrated on yoga's principal calisthenics.

Dr. Behanan says he first practiced posterior stretching. Sitting with his legs stretched out he hooked his forefingers over his big toes and touched his knees with his head. This "brings a rich supply of blood to the pelvic organs and tones up the nerves arising from the lower part of the spine."

Next came the plow posture, "one of the finest exercises for keeping the spine flexible and the nerves healthy." The disciple lies on his back, slowly brings legs and torso over his head until the toes touch the floor and he can gaze only at his navel.

Standing topsy-turvy on one's head for 20 minutes "clarifies the mind, cures dyspepsia and constipation." Standing similarly on the shoulders "has a beneficial effect on weak sex glands."

All these exercises should be taken at dawn and sunset, on an empty stomach, on a firm but soft seat, in a quiet neighborhood, naked except for a loin cloth.

Yogins, reports Dr. Behanan, "place a great deal of emphasis on abdominal exercises. . . . Yogins attempt from very early in their practice to gain control of the anal sphincters. The first effort in this direction consists of repeated contraction and relaxation of the sphincters for several minutes in succession." An adept can, by muscular force alone, ventilate and irrigate his colon, or rinse out his stomach. A photograph of one of Swami Kuvalayananda's disciples in the latter act is included in Dr. Behanan's well-illustrated text.

Yogins have eight different ways of breathing. Most effective posture for breathing is the lotus. One sits crosslegged, spine and head erect, hands crossed palm-upward on the lap, eyes focused either at the tip or the root of the nose. Expert yogins hold their breath four times as long as it takes them to inhale, and take the equivalent of two inhalation periods to exhale. Thus their breathing ratio is 1:4:2. They inhale once every two minutes. Beginners, advises Dr. Behanan, had better use at 1:2:2 rhythm, to prevent dizziness and anoxemia.

After gathering his yoga experience, Dr. Behanan returned to Yale's Institute of Human Relations where he used occidental psychological and physiological apparatus to analyze the effects of yogic practices, which he continued as much for self as for Science. Before he took up yoga he suffered frequent headaches, lacked vigor. Now: "No work, physical or mental, could tire me so rapidly as it did before. . . . My mental-emotional life is no longer a blind catch-as-catch-can."

As to the breathing exercises by which yogins claim to achieve a state of mental sublimity, Dr. Behanan says they merely dulled his wits, possibly due to a lack of oxygen in the brain. Breathing normally, handsome Dr. Behanan, 35, is famed at Yale as a first-class poker player, an ambidextrous ping-pongist hard to beat.

*YOGA, A Scientific Evaluation--Macmillan ($2.50).

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