Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr Page B

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 neatlysnipped 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 thewindow, 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,