Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr Page A

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 oversoldbenefits: 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