Is yoga the new godless religion?

Project sleep has not been going too well (I slept for the whole of 4 hours). I've been reading Patanjali's Yoga Sutras online, and looking up the life and works of Wilhelm Reich. Yes, that is Yoga Sutras (not kama sutra) and Wilhelm Reich (not Theodore Reich) although the other ways around might have made more sense, in retrospect.

A friend of mine said, after the yoga prayer for peace at Power to the Peaceful last month, that we [scientists] have blown away the people's religion so they have cobbled one together out of the pieces. Yoga practice has been increasing steadily in the US since the 1990's, to the degree that up to 12% of Americans are now thought to have tried it and with 3% becoming regular yogis. Those who practice yoga regularly do so on average 5 times per week, and are split roughly equally between seeing it as a form of exercise, therapy (mostly for back pain) and a spiritual practice (guesstimated from various online sources). Research shows that yoga is an effective treatment for back pain, migraines, recovery from chemotherapy etc. It both increases wellbeing and reduces the use of pain medications as compared with self-help control groups. I wonder why? Perhaps this has something to do with breathing and relaxation, but I suspect there is also an element of faith. A recent study found that Catholics exposed to pictures of the Virgin Mary experienced less pain when exposed to pain-inducing stimulation, as opposed to atheists exposed to the same pictures or other calming works of art. [There was also a change in the pattern of activation in their brains, but this only matters if you doubt what they reported and either way there is always room for doubt]. The point I'm making is that while yoga is not associated explicitly with faith in any particular object, faith in yoga is part of the health zeitgeist.

My insomniac reading suggests that yoga in its origins is anything but godless. In fact, according to wikipedia, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (around 150 BC) were a branching away from the older Samkhya system of Hindu religion or philsophy, adding the specification of a divine entity and a practice for gaining disentanglement from the bondage of human nature and unification with the divine (possibly the meaning of the word yoga). Hatha yoga, or the practice of asanas (postures) was outlined in the 15th Century in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Swatmarama. Why is this so popular now? The focus on the body matches the materialism of our culture, as does the obsessive emphasis on detail - posture, diet and lifestyle made into words. Samkhya philosophy stems from a primary dichotomy of self vs. other (rather than mind vs. body) that suits our individualist society better than the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion, with its baggage of an unpopular creation myth and the pre-requisite faith in the miraculous.

Personal experience of yoga suggests the opposite. My first experience of chanting om at a workshop in the North of England, years after I had started asana practice, was one of surprising loss of self in the community. It made me want to do this (chanting) with my own people, in a synagogue, not here with a random gathering and improperly explained articles of faith. Around the same time, I used yoga while babysitting to help calm my 8-year-old charge who was having an asthma attack. I had her lie in savasana on some cushions and breathe. Later she told me that she used to live with her family above the Quaker meeting place and watch people practicing yoga while her father was working on his PhD. She remembered this pose being described as the corpse pose, and she used to practice it on her own wondering if this was what it was like to be dead. I have to say that death is fascinating, and as a child I used to meditate on what it might be like to join some small animal that seemed to die easily, such as a sparrow, on its mysterious journey into nothingness. One thing I learned from the Yom Kipur sermon this year was that fasting and mourning practices are a symbolic exercise in death. As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I find savasana one of the most beneficial poses and like to do it before and after the other poses to experience them at their fullest.

I mentioned Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst. If you want a good laugh, look up the 'orgone accumulator'. Now I will have to sit straight-faced through a training on Reichian analysis. Yikes! Anyway, he got in trouble with the FDA and the FBI in the 1950's because of the sex taboo (compounded by the fact that he was a socialist and a charlatan among other things). I would argue that money is an even greater taboo in the wider society. In my corner (if I have one) sickness is taboo. I recently heard a psychiatrist say that his patients don't mind having a disorder, but they don't want to know that they're sick. It hasn't always been this way. In the past, people loved their ailments. Read Pepys. Or maybe death is the real taboo, and that's why we can't sleep and need to practice savasana.