EDDIE STERN has been practicing and studying yoga since he was fifteen, and was drawn by India and the yogic life. Here he explains the science of yoga, and how the practices affect both physical and mental well-being.
What Is yoga?
There are many definitions of yoga. I am partial to Patanjali’s definition, “chitta vritti nirodhah.” Then yoga is like an equation: yoga=nirodhah, the stilling or mastery of the vrittis, which are the fluctuations and movements or activities in the chitta, which is the field of mind, thought, consciousness.
And key to Patanjali’s definition is the idea that yoga is an umbrella term for different things we can do to achieve nirodhah. It’s not just one thing. We can use asanas, pranayama, mantra, service, bhakti, and other different modalities.
From a scientific view, yoga is a systematic multi-modality intervention of practices that influence our anatomical body and physiological systems, balance and calm our emotional and mental states, increase discernment (buddhi), and increase devotion, gratitude and awe. These last three have been scientifically shown to have a multitude of benefits on cardiovascular health, and the way we relate to the world, and also provide conceptualizations of transcendental principles. For example, there are meditations on tanmantras, panmantras, and panchamahabhutas that expand or dissolve our sense of separateness from the rest of the world, and allow us to integrate ourselves in different ways.
Scientific research
About 12 years ago, a researcher approached me and asked if I could design a yoga protocol to help with pre-hypertensive conditions in African Americans. I’d never done anything like that and I didn’t have a college degree. After high school, I went straight to India and started learning yoga. I learned everything from Mother India.
We did a trial, and had very good outcomes on diastolic, systolic, and sleeping blood pressure measures. I did another study with the same researcher, this time with a yoga protocol to help improve grade point average in high school students. We did a 40-week study comparing yoga to gym class, and at the end of the study the students in the yoga group had a 2.7% higher grade point average than the students in the gym class. Yoga helped reduce stress, increase time on task, and help with task completion. Many students who are under a lot of stress have a hard time with task completion.
After a few years, I worked on a study about back pain. In between, while developing courses for universities on yoga and physiology, I questioned: how is it that studies on hypertension, grade point average, and other things, had the same outcomes? I use the same protocol – asanas in basically the same sequence, pranayama, meditation, and relaxation – and the outcomes were the same. We don’t find that in medical science. If you have high blood pressure, you are not given diabetes medication. If you have anxiety, you are not given diabetes medication. You are given the medication which suits your malady. But here we had a host of different problems, we were applying the same methodologies, and people were getting better.
So my question was: what do hypertension, grade point average, back pain, anxiety, digestive disorders, certain cancers, type 2 diabetes have in common that is driving those diseases? The answer is stress and stress perception.
Stress
Even when we see the word “stress” in huge red letters on a screen it makes us stressed. But if we change the colors, if we use soft blues, all of a sudden we can deal with it. Stress is a term borrowed from physics and it’s a neutral force. When we have a lot of it, and the body can’t deal with the demand, it becomes distressed, whereas when it’s a positive stress, we call it eustress and we grow from it. Stress is something we actually need in our lives to grow; but when there’s too much of it and our body can’t adapt, it becomes chronic and leads to problems.
We need to start reframing our perception of stress to understand, “When do I need to pull away? When can I engage? When do I have to manage it because I don’t have a choice?” In yoga, we have lists that help us do this:
There are stress-induced states that we can all identify with – when we get super stressed, irritable, angry, aggressive, hostile, or defensive.
The yogic states are things like being calm, quiet, content, accepting, surrendered, loving, appreciative. Stress-induced states are associated with chronic inflammation, sympathetic hyperarousal, and out-of-control chitta vrittis. Yogic states are associated with the healing response, and parasympathetic up-regulation, which occurs through Kriya Yoga and Pratipaksha Bhavana. In-control chitta vrittis can lead us into the healing response, while out-of-control chitta vrittis lead us into stress-induced states.
Why is yoga so effective?
One of the hallmarks of yogic practices is top-down and bottom-up information processing. We do things for the body that affect the brain, and we do things for the brain that affect the body downstream, and then we get integration.
We think about the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems as complementary paired systems, not antagonistic systems. They’re antagonistic when they’re out of control, while we want to make them complementary. In yoga we see the idea of complementarity with Hatha – ha, sun, and tha, moon. Hatha Yoga is about creating complementary systems and increasing and maximizing them within us. Bottom-up practices are things that we do with the body, e.g. asanas, pranayama, diet, sleep, and exercise. They affect the brainstem, sending messages up toward the prefrontal cortex through the limbic system. Top-down practices are things like meditation, behavioral practices, self-examination, devotion, loving kindness, maitri, karuna, mudita, upeksha, etc. These use the prefrontal cortex, starting at the top level of the brain, which is going to shift the messages coming downstream through the brainstem into the body, changing physiological body states. For example, in Heartfulness Meditation, you’re doing things with your heart and your cognition. When you’re done, you feel relaxed, you feel calm, you’ve entered into a healing response, you’ve had a downstream physiological response.
Bottom-up practices affect heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, digestion, elimination, sleep, reproduction, etc. These are our survival functions, and they are targeted through physically-oriented practices. Top-down practices affect cortical processing of compassion, empathy, strategic planning, task completion, pro-social engagement, sensory development and language. These are higher level order practices. We can begin here, we don’t need to start at the bottom and work our way up. That’s what Heartfulness does by beginning with the meditative practices.
Bottom-up practices: research shows that
Top-down practices support regulation of the autonomic and neuroendocrine systems, emotions, and behavioral responses to challenge and stress perception. As well, they affect vagal tone. The vagus nerve is 80% of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is directly impacted by these practices, and when vagal tone is low we have inflammatory problems. So these practices are very important for down-regulating the inflammatory response.
Kriya Yoga
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2:1 says, “Tapah svādhyāya Isvarapranidhānāni kriyā yogah.“
Tapas, swadhyaya, and Ishwara pranidhana are the practices contained within yoga that are going to have a particular effect. Kriya Yoga is an umbrella term for the physical practices of tapas, the verbal practices of swadhyaya, which include the study of texts, mantra repetition, and self-examination, and Ishwara pranidhana, which includes mental and emotional practices, surrender, devotion, gratitude, a sense of unknowing and of awe at the universe.
These three categories of practices do two things. First, they thin the kleshas, which are the reasons we suffer and the things that prevent us from knowing who we truly are. They help reduce the kleshas and prepare us for samadhi, the deeper levels of concentration and absorption.
So what are the five kleshas? For those who are not familiar, we have avidya which is an incomplete knowing of who we are. Sometimes it is translated as ignorance, but everyone here is not ignorant. You all know so much about so many things. Maybe what some of us are ignorant of is only reality, truly knowing deeply on a full level who we are. So the idea of avidya is not that you don’t know who you truly are. You’re doing yoga to find out. So avidya is an absence of knowledge, of truth. When we don’t fully know who we are, we start making up stories: I think I’m Eddie, I think I’m a yoga teacher, I think I’m a father, I think I’m a husband, I think I know what I’m talking about.
All of these are false narratives that we create, especially that last one – I think I know what I’m talking about, when we don’t truly know who we are. And along with that false narrative are a few other things. One is raga, the things we like, another is dvesha, the things we don’t like. What is my story about myself based upon? The things I like and don’t like – I like the Indian cricket team, I don’t like the Australian cricket team. Not only do I like the Indian cricket team with raga, I’m so attached to them, I dislike all of the other cricket teams in the world.
By holding fast to raga and dvesha, we get stuck on the things we like, and set ourselves apart from the rest of the world that doesn’t fit with the things that we like, so it becomes quite challenging. Because our likes and dislikes form the entirety of what we think our personality is, then we start to cling to them, we hold fast. And that is called abhinivesha.
Abhinivesha is clinging to life, clinging to narrative, and it’s a fear of extinction: “Who will I be if I’m not my likes and my dislikes? Who will I be if I’m not my narrative?” And if that’s pulled out from under us we go into a void, and that’s terrifying. So the idea of abhinivesha is fear of extinction of the false narrative that we’ve created.
Now, here’s the key thing. Where does the clinging to life occur? It occurs in our survival function. So for example, right now you’re all breathing. If you held your breath for a few seconds, at a certain point your body is going to tell you it’s time to breathe. Why? Because if you don’t breathe, you’re going to die. One of the primal ways our body works is through survival functions that are clinging to life every moment of the day – every breath is clinging to life, every heartbeat is clinging to life, every moderation of blood pressure, of the chemical balance of our blood, of blood sugar levels, of oxygen saturation. These things are maintaining life. That’s what we like to say.
From a yogic point of view, we are clinging to life, we’re stuck on this stuff. Let’s go back to the bottom-up practices. Where’s clinging to life expressed? The brainstem functions are monitoring all of our survival functions. So what do yogis do? They do bottom-up practices to transcend brainstem operations. They do asanas to control blood pressure. They do pranayama to control respiration. They ask, what happens if I don’t breathe for a few minutes every day? What happens if I hold my breath for extended periods of time? Who am I when I’m not breathing? Who am I when my heart rate slows down from 60 to 50 to 40 to 30 to one beat per minute? Who will I be when I don’t depend on my survival functions for my identity? All of the primary practices within Kriya Yoga help us transcend the brainstem functions so that we can have an expanded experience of consciousness, self or reality.
If we don’t support homeostasis through right living,
if we don’t sleep enough, eat at the right times,
eat the right food, do some exercise, meditate,
and be kind and loving and compassionate,
we’re not supporting homeostasis,
and then homeostasis won’t support our internal balance,
and then things go wrong.
Homeostasis
These brainstem functions collectively control the functions that we call homeostasis. Homeostasis is the body’s innate ability to restore balance. And we spend a lot of energy restoring balance throughout the day through micro-adjustments to maintain blood pressure, oxygen levels, etc. So it’s balance within change. If we don’t support homeostasis, through right living, if we don’t sleep enough, eat at the right times, eat the right food, do some exercise, meditate, and be kind and loving and compassionate, we’re not supporting homeostasis, and then homeostasis won’t support our internal balance, and then things go wrong.
Where do we see keys to this? Well, verse 6:17 of the Bhagavad Gita says:
Yuktaharaaviharasya
yuktacestasya karmasu
yuktasvapnaavabodhasya
yogobhavatiduhkah
In other words, for those who are moderate in food and the enjoyment of life (we enjoy life but we don’t indulge too much), in our work (most of us, at least in New York City are overworked all the time. I like to say I work a lot, my wife likes to say I work all the time), sleep and wakefulness, then yoga will be the remover of suffering.
So yoga can be the remover of suffering when we support the practices of yoga through lifestyle. If we’re not eating well, if we’re not sleeping, if we’re not doing yoga at the right time, if we’re not doing it under the right conditions, yoga is not necessarily going to work and give us all the things it promises.
So transcending the survival functions changes asmita, our sense of I-ness, by changing our narrative. And then we begin to embody a new narrative on a cellular level. At the same time, our fear of extinction is weakened because our narrative has expanded beyond ourselves. Abhinivesha weakens, our attachment to the things we like reduces, we stop harshly judging the things we dislike, so we’re not so opposed to them even when we know they are not for us. All of these automatically begin to thin.
At that stage, we can begin to contemplate the very important questions of life: Who am I? What am I doing here? What is my purpose? What is my dharma? And what do I do next? How do I act upon a new narrative of myself? With the “Who am I?” we create a new narrative that we can embody in an expanded sense. “What am I doing here?” is my purpose. And “What do I do next?” is how I live now, how I behave, from this expanded sense of self that I’m inhabiting.
And as we go deep into meditation, we can ask: Does this “I” exist or is it all just being?
Personally, I’m studying the effect of Kriya Yoga and the neural correlates of the kleshas, the neural correlates of suffering. Can we somehow correlate where kleshas are expressing themselves physiologically through the brain? Maybe we can also begin to research some of the tremendous physiological and mental benefits put forward by Patanjali, along with an expanded sense of self beyond personal narrative into integrated narrative, global narrative.
This article is edited from a talk given at the international conference on an “Integrative Approach to Health and Well-being” hosted at Kanha Shanti Vanam, December 16 to 18, 2022.
Eddie Stern
