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Updates - 10 May 2007
Learning from the past He's been called a Himalayan master and a bridge between East and West. To his admirers, Swami Vidyadhishananda Giri is that and more. But don't try to put the swami in a category. That only creates limitations, he gently explains. Ancient Vedic, Sanskrit traditions are applicable to modern life, monk says. For example, he doesn't mind if people refer to him as a Hindu monk, but that doesn't capture his true essence and his lineage, which dates to pre-Hindu times. He is a Vedic monk, ordained in the Hindu tradition, who spent the first years of the 21st century meditating in the Himalayas. At times during his four years in the mountains, he would spend as many as 18 days at a stretch in uninterrupted meditation, without food or water. But don't think he is a man with his head in the clouds. He also has a doctorate in biophysics and sees no conflict between science and spirituality. "It's very common for monks of the Vedic order in India to be scholars while they are in the prayer tradition," he said. "One reason is that the Sanskrit heritage and literature do not separate science and spirituality." The Vedic culture is the oldest known culture in Indian history. The written and spoken language of the pre-Hindu civilization was Sanskrit, which is believed to be a root of the Indo-European languages. The swami came down from the mountains in January 2006 to receive the prestigious honorary degree of "great ordained teacher" from a prominent Sanskrit university in India. It's considered "the blue ribbon of Oriental learning" and is usually given to older monks at the end of their career. Swami-V, as he prefers to be called, is considered a relatively young monk, But he wouldn't reveal his age or details about his pre-monastic life. Since early last year, he has been on a mission to help Americans understand the wisdom contained in Sanskrit literature and heritage and the ways that wisdom might be used in modern life. "This is not about selling spirituality," he said. "That makes me very uncomfortable. What I'm doing is called cultural transmission." Cultural transmission is the process of passing on culturally relevant knowledge, skills and values from person to person or culture to culture. He is eager to see Sanskrit taught and researched at places like Rice University and the University of Houston. The ancient language can provide a window to the past, he said. Although his mother was "a bit of a mystic" and he was exposed to spirituality and monks from a very early age in Calcutta, the swami did not plan on becoming a monk. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in India, he began doctoral studies in the United States. He was preparing for the life of a college professor when he met his master, the Paramahamsa Swami Hariharananda. The master described his student as a "true-blue monk." "He said: 'I don't think that your spiritual experiences and deep communion will allow you to put one foot in the centric world, continue the research full time, guide students and still be able to do the explorations for meditation. Even though there is no conflict in you for the tradition, it will be too much, I think.' " He left the academic world and took formal vows as a monk. The swami now lives near Santa Barbara, Calif., where he is president monk of the nonprofit Self Enquiry Life Fellowship. "I want to raise awareness and represent the ancient heritage of India, because that's what I'm exploring," he said. "Why not try an approach that does not draw boundaries between science and spirituality or between people and sects? Vedic literature is nonsectarian, and Vedic teachings are universal." Though we live in a technical and scientific age, he said, it's important to remember we are holistic and spiritual beings. Becoming a hostage to technology can be a source of extreme stress. "Honoring the soul is so essential to our existence," he said. "If we just keep on tinkering with technology, we can forget the ideal of soul-to-soul transmission and heart-to-heart transmission. There has to be a balance." Balance can be found through spiritual practices, conscious living, meditation and prayer, he said. "I don't spend too much time in the religious ethos aspect. I teach more about personal spiritual experiences, spiritual consciousness, mind/body integration, becoming a noble human being, service to the country and service to the community." The swami, who is visiting Houston this month for the second time, has several talks scheduled with college students, professors and doctors and at area Hindu temples. College students often ask him about emotional strength and how to handle stress and set goals. "There's a lot of pressure on modern youths," he said. "The values I talked about at Rice University were kind of an intangible gift — how you can get a return of emotional strength from honoring and respecting parents and elders and the great teachers who are passing on their knowledge." An honorable relationship, he said, builds up emotional strength and leads to a sense of peace. That feeling of peace in a daily routine can help one avoid stress. "I told them that when you drive on the freeway, you don't just focus on the bonnet of your car," he said, using the British term for hood. "You focus on where the freeway is merging on the horizon. So you need to have a vision and a goal. If necessary, set daily goals which are realistic." Other ways in which he believes the Vedic and Sanskrit heritage can help people in the 21st century include:
The goal of the ‘Self Enquiry Life Fellowship’, based in California, is to preserve and share:
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Better Brain Thanks to the Dalai Lama, lots of monks have lent Richard Davidson their brains. For almost 20 years Davidson, a neuropsychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a long-time meditator himself, has been curious about how Buddhist meditation of the kind the monks practice might change their brains. He has lugged electronic equipment up into the hills above Dharamsala (the Dalai Lama's home in exile in northern India) to test the brains of yogis, lamas and monks living in primitive huts there, and persuaded other monks to visit his lab. Over the years he has found that the brains of monks who are the most experienced meditators are indeed different from other brains. They have a much stronger "gamma" wave, a form of electrical activity in the brain that is associated with consciousness and pulling together information and perceptions from different regions of the brain. They also have much greater activity in the left than the right prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead), a mark of well-being and happiness. But all of these studies came with an asterisk. There was no way to tell if the monks' brains started out different. That is, maybe people with high gamma-wave activity and lopsided left-prefrontal activity were more likely to become Buddhist monks. If so, then their brain traits caused them to become expert meditators, rather than their years of meditation changing their brain. Now Davidson has taken a big step toward showing that the causal arrow really does point from meditation to brain changes rather than from brain differences to a life of meditation. Specifically, meditation can change brain circuits linked to attention. He and his colleagues taught volunteers a form of Buddhist meditation called Vipassana. In this form of attention meditation, you first focus on an object such as your breath. You then let your focus expand, cultivating "bare attention," in which you let thoughts or perceptions engage your attention, but keep yourself from reacting emotionally or judgmentally. The goal is to improve attention and reduce distractability. The volunteers practiced Vipassana meditation for three months, for 10 to 12 hours a day. Another group got only a quickie one-hour course, then practiced Vipassana for 20 minutes a day for a week. Before the intense training, Davidson and his team tested them all on one form of attention, called attentional blink. In this glitch, if you pay close attention to one thing it's hard to notice something that comes hard on its heels, typically within half a second. "The attention momentarily goes off-line," Davidson says. "Your attention gets stuck on the first target, then you miss the second one." But as he and colleagues report online today in the journal PLoS Biology, mental training in the form of Vipassana meditation can change that. The meditators significantly improved their ability to detect the second number amid the barrage of letters, even when it came less than half a second later (the period when paying attention to the first number ordinarily keeps you from noticing the second). In addition, the amount of brain activity associated with seeing the first target fell in the meditators "apparently, mental training allowed them to use fewer neural resources to detect the first number, thus leaving enough to notice the second. "Their previous practice of meditation is influencing their performance on this task," Davidson says. "The conventional view is that attentional resources are limited. This shows that attention capabilities can be enhanced through learning."
The Yoga therapist Will See You Now FOR three years after a car crash left her with chronic pain, Deanna Adams searched high and low for relief. Mrs. Adams, 41, a stay-at-home mother in West Palm Beach, Fla., consulted a physical therapist, a chiropractor, two doctors (a pain specialist and a neurologist) and an acupuncturist — to no avail. She also went to basic yoga, hoping asanas would ease the debilitating back pain, neck spasms and migraines that plagued her. After each class at LA Fitness, Mrs. Adams felt better for a few hours, but her symptoms inevitably returned. It was only after her first yoga therapy session with Emily Large, who runs Living Large Therapeutics, that she realized why group yoga left her cold. “When you go to a yoga class, everybody is doing the same thing,” Mrs. Adams said. “If you have a neck or back injury, the instructor doesn’t know.” Yoga therapy — one-on-one visits which take place in medical clinics, physical therapist offices and yoga studios — takes into account pain and injuries for a customized experience. As her client did yoga postures she had handpicked, Mrs. Large, a yoga therapist with a physical therapy license, lightly touched her to sense where Mrs. Adams was tense or weak. Then she designed a sequence of poses to target those areas, including a lying twist with the knees bent and a repetitive variation of triangle pose. As Mrs. Adams grew stronger and more flexible doing poses at home, her routine was updated, and after three months, her pain has largely subsided. People often turn to yoga when they are injured because they want gentle exercise that’s easy on the joints. But, most yoga teachers don’t have time to address individual problems, nor do they regularly deal with special needs. Enter yoga therapy, an emerging field in the United States, although commonplace in India. Therapists work in small groups or privately, adapting poses for musculoskeletal problems that have been diagnosed by doctors. Other therapists help people deal with the anxiety of living with illnesses as varied as cancer and chronic fatigue. “We recognize that not every pose is for everybody,” said Robin Rothenberg, a yoga therapist who runs the Yoga Barn studios outside of Seattle. “If you are a 20-something dancer, that is one thing and if you are a 50-year-old computer programmer, that’s a different thing.” Yoga therapy is nowhere near as popular as one-pose-fits-all classes. Still, in the last three years, membership in the International Association of Yoga Therapists, a trade group based in Prescott, Ariz., has almost tripled to 2,060, from 760. But experts inside and outside the industry say yoga therapy should be approached with caution. In general, a person can practice as a yoga therapist after 200 hours of yoga teacher training, which might include basic training in anatomy, breathing, meditation and giving adjustments. Most reputable yoga therapists have additional credentials. Some are physical therapists or nurses or have completed two years of training in Iyengar yoga, which emphasizes anatomy and kinesiology. Others have been certified as therapists by schools like Integrative Yoga Therapy or American Viniyoga Institute. The institute is run by Gary Kraftsow; applicants must have completed 500 hours of his teacher training. His course teaches the clinical applications of yoga for spine, joint and muscle problems. Just as certain conditions can be helped by extension, flexion, twisting or side bending, they can also be aggravated, said Robert Forster, a physical therapist in Santa Monica, Calif. Some doctors advocate its use, however. “I deeply believe in yoga and know the therapeutic value of yoga for health care,” said Dr. Michael Sinel, an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has a private practice in Santa Monica. In the next six months, he plans to start YogaMed, a company that will offer medical care and therapeutic yoga within the Yoga Works chain of studios. There is some evidence that certain yoga poses help alleviate chronic back pain. A randomized, controlled study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in 2005 found that participants who followed a pose sequence designed by a yoga therapist improved function more than those given a self-care book or sent to exercise class. (The 101 participants did not include patients with sciatica, previous back surgery or pregnant women.) Now, the National Institutes of Health has allocated $1.2 million for a second study to see, in part, if the results can be replicated on a larger scale. A handful of doctor’s offices already offer therapeutic yoga. Dr. Loren Fishman, who runs a physical medicine and rehabilitation practice in Manhattan, studied Iyengar yoga in India before medical school, and now recommends poses to patients like Sharon Williams. Ms. Williams, 46, a development director at Dance Theater of Harlem, suffered from chronic shoulder pain. An M.R.I. revealed a torn rotator cuff, for which Dr. Fishman prescribed, among other things, a variation of a headstand using a chair. This pose can help relieve pain and restore range of motion, yoga therapists say, because of a method called muscular substitution — training the body to avoid aggravating an existing problem by using other muscles. This is plausible, said Dr. J. Hearst Welborn, an orthopedic surgeon in San Pablo, Calif. He added that actively trying to recover helps: “Mind over matter has a huge effect on people’s pain.” Longtime yoga therapists say the next step for them is learning to work with doctors. Larry Payne, who has practiced since 1982 and is the founding president of the yoga therapist association, said therapists need to learn to read medical reports and to work in clinical settings. “The doctors just want to be sure that yoga therapists they work with are properly trained,” he said. To that end, Dr. Payne created a yoga therapy teacher training course at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where students learn yoga therapy for both systemic and muscular ailments. Dr. Payne and Dr. Richard P. Usatine also started yoga classes for medical students at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA “Once they understand and can feel the value of yoga personally, they can then suggest and prescribe it for their patients,” said Dr. Usatine, a professor of family medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. Nationwide, yoga is provided at 93 percent of 755 integrative medical centers, facilities offering under one roof both traditional medicine and other approaches to health and wellness. But it’s unclear how many offer yoga therapy, said Cary Wing, the executive director of the Medical Fitness Association, a nonprofit group. Starting Monday, Donna Karan, the designer, is sponsoring a 10-day Well-Being Forum in Manhattan to bring together doctors, yoga therapists and yoga teachers. The hope is to integrate alternatives like yoga into patient care, said Ms. Karan. A
Big stretch I GREW up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There’s big money in those pretzel twists and contortions — $3 billion a year in America alone. It’s a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages. Should an Indian, in retaliation, patent the Heimlich maneuver, so that he can collect every time a waiter saves a customer from choking on a fishbone? The Indian government is not laughing. It has set up a task force that is cataloging traditional knowledge, including ayurvedic remedies and hundreds of yoga poses, to protect them from being pirated and copyrighted by foreign hucksters. The data will be translated from ancient Sanskrit and Tamil texts, stored digitally and available in five international languages, so that patent offices in other countries can see that yoga didn’t originate in a San Francisco commune. In Sanskrit, “yoga” means “union.” Indians believe in a universal mind — brahman — of which we are all a part, and which ponders eternally. Everyone has access to this knowledge. There is a line in the Hindu scriptures: “Let good knowledge come to us from all sides.” There is no follow-up that adds, “And let us pay royalties for it.” Knowledge in ancient India was protected by caste lines, not legal or economic ones. The term “intellectual property” was an oxymoron: the intellect could not be anybody’s property. You did not pay your guru in coin; you herded his cows and married his daughter, and passed on the knowledge to others when you were sufficiently steeped in it. This tradition continues today, most notably in Indian classical music, none of whose melodies have been copyrighted. Perhaps it is for this reason that Indians do not feel obligated to pay for knowledge. Pirated copies of my book are openly sold on the Bombay streets, for a fourth of its official price. Still, Indians get upset every time they hear reports — often overblown — of Westerners’ stealing their age-old wisdom, through the mechanism of copyright law. They were outraged by a story last year of some Americans trying to copyright the sacred Hindu syllable “om” — which would be like trade-marking “amen.” The fears may be exaggerated, but they are widespread and reflect India’s mixed experience with globalization. Western pharmaceutical companies make billions on drugs that are often first discovered in developing countries — but herbal remedies like bitter gourd or turmeric, which are known to be effective against everything from diabetes to piles, earn nothing for the country whose sages first isolated their virtues. The Indian government estimates that worldwide, 2000 patents are issued a year based on traditional Indian medicines. Drugs and hatha yoga have the same aim: to help us lead healthier lives. India has given the world yoga for free. No wonder so many in the country feel that the world should return the favor by making lifesaving drugs available at reduced prices, or at least letting Indian companies make cheap generics. If padmasana belongs to all mankind, so should the formula for Gleevec, the leukemia drug over whose patent a Swiss pharmaceuticals company is suing the Indian government. But the drug companies are playing rough. Abbott, based in Chicago, has decided to sell no new medicines in Thailand, in retaliation for that country’s producing generic versions of three lifesaving drugs. India supplied half of the drugs used by H.I.V.-positive people in the developing world. But in March 2005, the Indian Parliament, under pressure to bring the country into compliance with the World Trade Organization’s regulations on intellectual property, passed a bill declaring it illegal to make generic copies of patented drugs. This has put life-saving antiretroviral medications out of reach of many of the nearly 6 million Indians who have AIDS. And yet, the very international drug companies that so fiercely protect their patents oppose India’s attempts to amend World Trade Organization rules to protect its traditional remedies. There’s more at stake than just the money involved in the commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge. There is also the perception that the world trading system is unfair, that the deck is stacked against developing countries. Unless the World Trade Organization and developed countries correct this, the entire project of globalization is at risk. If the copying of Western drugs is illegal, so should be the patenting of yoga. It is also intellectual piracy, stood on its head. |
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