Authors: Benjamin Lorr
The absence of this guidebook—the most important step from a practitioner’s standpoint—is where we enter obscurity. It is where a thousand gurus bloom. It is why for all its promises of authenticity, yoga will never have certainty.
In an early attempt to clarify this
tangle, Patanjali, a sage of the second century—alternately identified as a grammarian or thousand-headed ruler of the serpent race—took it upon himself to organize the many disparate yoga schools of his day into a cohesive system. Anticipating his placement
on the self-help shelf of today, and inspired by the Buddha’s EightFold Path, Patanjali compiled a step-by-step guide to liberation: an eight-limbed—or Ashtanga—yoga system.
Patanjali organized yoga practices into a stepladder, with each of the eight limbs built atop the proceeding one so that a practitioner could start at the basics and ascend to the heights promised by the
Katha Upanishad.
Beginning with simple and fundamental ethical prescriptions, not unlike the Ten Commandments, Patanjali instructed his yogis to master progressively more difficult techniques: first for sitting in contemplation, then for linking breath to contemplation, then on withdrawing the senses, then on focusing the senses, and finally, the ultimate step, samadhi, yoking to the divine. It is a gentle stepladder, largely focused on contemplation and internal meditation.
Approximately one thousand years later
, a wholly different yoga emerges from the jungle. This yoga, hatha yoga, translated literally as “the yoga of violence or force,” arose in dialectal response to Patanjali’s abstract approach. Like all great revival movements, hatha emphasized personal experience in the place of formal doctrine. It literalized concepts like transcendence and union, applying them directly to physiological responses in the human body. This new approach was the work of the Naths, a spliteared sect of Shiva-worshipping yogis driven into northern jungles of India by waves of Muslim migrations. Drawing on Buddhism, Tantrism, indigenous alchemy, and an obsession with physical health demanded by their wet, pestilent home, the Naths created hatha: a yoga to align with the great tantra proverb: “One cannot venerate a god unless one is a god oneself.”
In hatha, yoking to the universal is a by-product of proper physiological alignment, the body fined-tuned like an old-fashioned antenna to get a clearer broadcast signal. By removing impurities, strengthening the physical core, and controlling the literal gateway to spirit that is breath, the hatha body is perfected into a sort of divine lightning rod: a
vajra deha
or diamond body, an awakened channel for conducting the universe’s energies.
The violence of the Violent Yoga comes primarily from the method used to achieve these results: the forceful fusing of opposites. It’s an ideal embodied in the Sanskrit name
Ha-Tha
(where
Ha
stands for the solar,
masculine energies and
Tha
for the lunar, feminine forces) and reiterated throughout all hatha practice; but it is perhaps best appreciated by the Naths’ principal innovation: postures or bending the body into forms.
Prior to the medieval rise of
hatha yoga, standing contortive postures simply did not exist in yoga. The word
asana
was present, however it was used almost exclusively in the etymological sense, as “seat” or “throne.” The asana practices described in pre-hatha yogic literature were meditative postures: firm and stable positions, thrones from which to contemplate existence.
In hatha, asanas serve an entirely different purpose. The body is used as a stage: held in stillness while internally exploding with exertion; limbs stretched while muscles are contracted; tension explored until its duality resolved.
Vyasa the sage says that perfection
of posture occurs “when effort disappears … when the mind is transformed into infinity.” Mircea
Eliade the ethnographer says
, “refusal to move, to let one be carried along in the rushing stream of states of consciousness … is to abolish (or to transcend) the human condition by refusal to conform to the most elementary human inclination.”
8
Holding an asana embodies the chaos of existence framed within the stability of the universal.
If yoga is a science, then the hatha yogis of the jungle were its madmen, hair forever frizzled, face smeared with ritual ash, wide-eyed and forever ready to the throw the Frankensteinian switch.
Their early texts alternate between
being refreshing and frightening in their vulgar specificity: nasal passages are cleaned with water (neti!), water is sucked in through the anus in self-enema (basti!), the rectum and intestines are pushed out and washed by hand in water (bahiskrita dhauti!?). Coordinate with the Vedic belief that all perception is illusion, in hatha the natural world is present to be subverted. However, unlike the comforting liberation promised in the ancient texts, hatha techniques read like a string of cocky Faustian bargains. Each practice comes equipped with a long string of impossibly oversold
benefits:
Drinking the middle third of
your urine stream will, for instance, destroy diseases of the eyes, grant you clairvoyance, purify the blood, and give insight into the divine.
9
This simultaneous propensity toward magic, sex, and the vulgarities of the human body did not make the hatha yogis particularly popular. Within India, their claims were greeted with skepticism, their personal habits, disgust, even as their knowledge of the human condition afforded respect. They lived on the peripheries of society in dung-smeared huts. They proved their transcendence through bizarre austerities (remaining chained to a single spot of ground for days) and masochistic feats of strength (a bed of sharp nails for the back). They were often called in to help barren women conceive and cure ailing children. In fables, hatha yogis are portrayed as powerful but potentially evil meddlers, resources of last resort, analogous to the witches and sorcerers found in Western fairy tales.
With the arrival of the Colonial British,
the Naths became outlawed people
—in the grand shameful tradition of indigenous groups who are not easily assimilated. Labeled as “Miscellaneous and Disreputable Vagrants,” their traditional costume and outfits were banned. This shift into persecution drove many hatha yogis into petty crime and street performance. Once-sacred demonstrations of divine power became fixtures of the carnival, the desperate schemes of the beggar.
When yoga jumped to America
, its different traditions were packaged together for export, presented to eager audiences as a cohesive whole. The first great yogic ambassadors were practical-minded reformers: intellectuals eager to modernize Hinduism by infusing it with enlightenment thought and Christian imagery, fund-raisers looking to use Western money to help India’s poorest. Hatha, with its vulgar preoccupation with the body, its culture of superstition, and its associations with the street, served none of their purposes.
Instead its “queer breathing exercises”
and “gymnastics” were neatly
snipped off and grafted onto Patanjali’s third and forth limb, presented as a subsidiary of that rather more ancient, more cerebral, and more Christ-friendly tradition.
This unnatural grafting has resulted in an odd sort of legacy. For the most part, the false grafting did not take. But instead of wilting away, posture has flourished in isolation: devoid of connection with its historical background, subject to incredible but hidden innovation. Hence the truly secular America yogacizing gym class, ripe with asanas that didn’t exist one hundred, much less one thousand, years ago. To fill this void, the postures connected with exercise and therapy, with the Human Potential Movement and nutritional claims, with altruism and vacation getaways—each providing new American soil for the snipped appendages of hatha to root.
And when the medieval spirit of hatha does seep through and assert itself, which of course it does now and then, everyone gets a little weirded out and wonders how this inauthentic, almost martial, more magical than mystical, explicitly narcissistic crap got associated with their “real yoga.”
To a practitioner, all this uncertainty can feel really uncomfortable. When I first started practicing, I got tremendous satisfaction from the fact that the postures I was doing were thousands of years old. Not only is there something innately cool about heritage and tradition, but on a purely physical level, it helped. I was confident: Of course the postures wouldn’t hurt me—all the kinks had been ironed out centuries ago. What was being transmitted to me by my lovely bouncy teacher in her leotard was clarified, reified, time tested, and approved by an unending succession of gurus (all wizened, bearded, and scrawny with dancing eyes) stretching back to the time when sages sat lonely in caves.
But in reality, yoga just ain’t that type of enterprise. It is ten thousand rain droplets rather than one holy spring. The yogic literature is too vast, too muddled, and ultimately too limited by the fact that it is only literature in a tradition that has passed its most vital secrets orally. The postures are being innovated. The ideas reorganized, reinterpreted, and reimagined. And there is a long, hearty history where lone individuals have appointed themselves all-knowing gurus and deliberately twisted facts to their own satisfaction and cosmology. So throw your ideas of authenticity out the
window, and when I bring up practices like the competition, backbending, and hallucinations, try to do something yogic (wink) for a change: Let people claim yoga as they always will, but this time, detach, observe, and make no judgments.
Portrait of a Guru as a Young Man
For Esak, detaching and observing came through competition. Hoisting a trophy didn’t hurt either.
“Yoga is union,” he says. “It is resolving duality, realizing the oneness we are a part of. You don’t need to push yourself to extreme depths to realize that. … I would never tell anyone that backbending or competition are necessary. I would never even recommend it to them if they weren’t already interested, but for me, they acted like a switch.
“It makes some people in the yoga community incredibly angry, but for me, competing, preparing to compete gave me an excuse to practice all day long. … And the extremity opened me. It deepened my practice; it changed my understanding.
“Even if I wished it away, never competed again, it’s part of me right now. It’s part of who I am. Which means it’s part of my yoga. Maybe someday I’ll move past it, maybe someday the whole community will move past it, but until then, competition only reflects what is already part of us.”
Given his pedigree, competition was an unexpected route to self-realization. Esak was practically born in posture. When his mother was twenty, she ran away from her childhood in Milwaukee to follow a Sufi mystic. A yoga class followed, and unlike the mysticism, it stuck. She continued practicing through her pregnancy. There is a lovely picture of her in a headstand with an embryonic Esak in her belly. When he was born, she began teaching at local health clubs, eventually holding classes in their home.
“But growing up, I never thought about it,” Esak says. “My mother never invited me to a class, never pressured me once. It didn’t enter my life.”
Instead he gravitated to American sports, especially football and baseball.
The first time he heard the term
enlightenment
was from a girlfriend whose parents were Buddhist. When he describes high school, it hits the wholesome trinity of varsity athletics, studious academics, and weekend beers. Never yoga.
When he was seventeen, that changed. His mother met Bikram at a seminar and was smitten. Very soon after, she flew off to attend Bikram’s teacher training in Los Angeles. For the first time, she pushed her son to join her. It was Bikram’s first training, tiny and intimate. “She was very insistent—she knew it would be powerful and really wanted to involve me.” Esak flew out during his spring break and took classes with the trainees. His mother made a point of introducing him to Bikram.
He loved it and reveled in the ways it would improve his baseball.
At Yale, the yoga became a refuge but never the main attraction. “Freshman year, I had a dorm with an incredibly hot furnace, and I had a tape of Bikram teaching a class.” When he got stressed, Esak would slide the cassette tape into the machine, punch the buttons, and bend. It was an escape. “I wasn’t even thinking about yoga as yoga,” he says. “It just helped keep me balanced. I’d be sitting in a cubby studying all day and needed it to stretch out.” His roommates were fascinated, and when his mother visited, she organized a class in the basement.
But those moments weren’t the norm. The academic environment of New Haven left him disenchanted. “I was working incredibly hard, on one level very successfully, but I didn’t see where the work would take me,” he says. “My peers were either going into academia, law, politics, and I didn’t connect with that.”
In response, he began sneaking off four nights a week to a local capoeira studio. The martial art spoke to him. Soon he had convinced the political philosophy department to give him a fellowship to travel to Brazil. He stayed for three years. The yoga came with him, but still as a sideshow. “People were getting injured all the time, everyone was curious, so I taught informally. The yoga had its place, but in Brazil it was always secondary to capoeira.”
When he returned, yoga began taking on a progressively larger role in his life. In 2001, he went to teacher training a second time, spending the
full nine weeks immersed with Bikram. By 2002, he was making a living teaching in the San Francisco Bay area.
In 2003, he decided to compete. And almost immediately the switch was thrown.
“It is difficult to describe. I came from a capoeira background, which is very much about ritual and celebratory energy. Yoga is different. It is internal. … I can tell you that externally my body changed dramatically. Capoeira requires a lot more bulk, and aesthetically I liked that. It was good for the beach. With yoga, my body tightened. … I felt like I looked emaciated. But the energy pulsating through my body was amazing—there was an incredible vibrancy.