How Yoga Helped Overcome The Mind-Body Divide

In 2007 Dr. Chris Streeter, a psychiatrist and neurologist at Boston University School of Medicine showed that the level of GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), a neurotransmitter associated with the feelings of tranquility and relaxation, increased in the subjects regularly performing postural Yoga.

Three years later in 2010, Dr. Streeter conducted yet another experiment to find out if ‘the changes in mood, anxiety, and GABA levels are related to yoga or related to physical activity.’  The study compared those who do yoga with those who do a routine physical relaxation-exercise activity (in this case walking).

The results of the study for the ‘first time’ showed that yoga postures (rather than the physical exercise) as a ‘behavioral intervention has been associated with a positive correlation between acute increases in thalamic GABA levels and improvements in mood and anxiety scales’. In 2012 Dr.Streeter, et al, made another study which showed that yoga practice resulted in ‘decreased cortisol levels’ and yoga breathing correlated with increased ‘parasympathetic tone…associated with improved mood and anxiety reduction’.

The above research series spanning five years is just one of the many scientific studies exploring the ‘mind’. They help us understand the structure and function of that elusive entity called consciousness. But there was a catch – the Jungian challenge.

What is this ‘Jungian’ challenge?

Carl Jung, the path-breaking psychiatrist, himself was interested in Yoga and studied it deeply. Jung considered Yoga to be ‘the perfect and appropriate method of fusing body and mind together so that they form a unity’.

Without taking this unity into consideration he warns that Yoga would become ‘unthinkable and would also be ineffectual’.  While the Indian could easily blend the two, body and mind, the Westerner was ‘always forgetting either the one or the other’.

Here Jung touched a very important heart center of Yoga philosophy:

The Indian not only knows his own nature, but he knows also how much he himself is nature. The European on the other hand has a science of nature and knows astonishingly little of his own nature.

In other words, from Jung’s perspective Yoga has seamlessly integrated the Cartesian mind-body divide (i.e the ‘divide’ between immaterial mind and the material body) that ran so deep in the Western psyche.

Thousands of years of Indic thought saw mind and matter as the same continuous spectrum. It provides the basis on which the Yoga system has flowered (as did some other major systems of Darshanas).  Trying to transplant Yoga, without understanding this fundamental basis of unity, onto the European psyche would be ‘sheer poison’ for Carl Jung.

This then was the challenge: to bring not just Yoga as a ‘technology of mind’ or physical postures to the rest of humanity but to integrate the Yogic understanding of inner realm with the non-Indian psyche.

However, things were moving too fast in the realm of modern science than Carl Jung anticipated. Many experiments and studies have been attempted in an effort to overcome this challenge.  The Cartesian mind-body divide is being increasingly replaced with a view that is more in sync with Indic view of mind and body. The following is a small list of studies that have helped us get there:

1. A Scientific Pratyahara

John Lilly a neuroscientist famous for his work on dolphin communication was introduced to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) an American born spiritual teacher. Soon, he would come up with Samadhi tanks or tanks in which subjects would float in saline water with sensory deprivation- a yogic concept Pratyahara, or the withdrawal of senses. A technological simulation of Patanjali’s yoga was thus being attempted and became quite popular. Though today largely forgotten this was an important attempt to simulate yogic conditions through modern technology.

2. A Kundalini Framework To Understanding The Mind?

Pandit Gopi Krishna, an Indian Yogic master was another major figure in the history of this yogic exploration of consciousness in the context of modern science in his book Kundalini: The Evolutionary Energy in Man. This was followed by ‘Biological basis of Religion and Genius’.  In his works, Gopi Krishna pointed out that Kundalini has a biological basis. Very importantly Gopi Krishna put forth a methodology to test the hypothesis of the biological basis of Kundalini and its awakening as a universal phenomenon.

Starting from the study of mystic literature to carrying out detailed medical and biochemical analysis of people experiencing excited or disturbed inner lives and planning a controlled study of channelizing this inner excitement/disturbance in the framework of Kundalini awakening, Gopi Krishna provided an entire roadmap for studying Kundalini in a scientific way. Interestingly, the Indira Gandhi government was interested in taking up this as a major research project but it fell shortly before doing that. Even today, the Kundalini model provides the most elaborate framework to study the movements and processes in the collective and individual psychologies of human species.

Another important milestone in this journey was by the famous psychiatrist Lee Sherman Sannella. Sannella’s classic work, The Kundalini Experience, delineated through a single-handed study of one thousand cases, how Kundalini awakening can provide a powerful tool to understand many of the psychological problems that the modern society faced. The most important thing he pointed out was that if the Kundalini awakening process, which could occur spontaneously or through systematic cultivation, is supported in a healthy way then it invariably led to positive outcomes.

3. Dream Yoga Of Vajrayana Buddhism

Daniel Dennett pointing to studies conducted by Francisco Varela on dream yoga admitted that it is possible to gain ‘valuable insights into the relations of embodiment that permit us to understand how the inner and the outer, the first-person point of view and the objective point of view of science, can coexist.’

All these did provide a shift that was needed in the world that once accepted mind-body divide. Yoga can thus be a powerful tool to explore the consciousness. It can even offer a framework for understanding the socio-psychological phenomenon in fields like creativity, harmony, and even politics and economics.

Far from being a remote academic philosophical musing, this has immense benefits for humanity. And that may be one of Yoga’s most important contribution to the West.