avid Duchovny practices Kundalini yoga; Julia Louis-Dreyfuss prefers Ashtanga. Sabrina the Teenage Witch stars Melissa Joan Hart and Soleil Moon Frye throw yoga parties. Jane Fonda cut out aerobics for it; Angelina Jolie buffed up for Tomb Raider with it. The newly clean Charlie Sheen used yoga and dieting to shed 30 lbs. Add at least two Sex in the City vamps, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kristin Davis. All three Dixie Chicks. Sports stars from basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Yankee pitcher Orlando (El Duque) Hernandez are devotees. And speaking of athletes, who showed up the other day at Turlington’s lower Manhattan haunt, the Jivamukti Yoga Center? Monica Lewinsky. Where there’s a yoga blitz, there must be yoga biz. To dress for a class, you need only some old, loose-fitting clothes — and since you perform barefoot, no fancy footwear. Yet Nike and J.Crew have developed exercise apparel, as has Turlington. For those who prefer stay-at-home yoga, the video-store racks groan with hot, moving tapes. The Living Yoga series of instructional videos taught by Yee and Patricia Walden occupies five of the top eight slots on Amazon’s vhs best-seller list. “Vogue and Self are putting out the message of yoginis as buff and perfect,” says Walden. “If you start doing yoga for those reasons, fine. Most people get beyond that and see that it’s much, much more.” By embodying the grace and strength of their system, Yee and Walden are its most charismatic proselytizers — new luminaries in the yoga firmament. “Madonna found it first, and I’m following in the footsteps of the stars,” groans Minneapolis attorney Patricia Bloodgood. “But I don’t think you should reject something just because it’s trendy.” Bloodgood had the bright idea to commandeer part of the lobby in the office building where she works for a Monday-evening yoga class. Yoginis can spend a weekend at (or devote their lives to) such retreats as Kripalu, where each year 20,000 visitors take part in programs ranging from “The Science of Pranayama and Bandha” to African-drum workshops and singles weekends. In L.A. they can mingle with the glamourati at Maha Yoga (where students bend to the strains of the Beatles’ Baby You’re a Rich Man) or Golden Bridge (where celebrity moms take prenatal yoga classes). Yoga is where you find it and how you want it, from Big Time to small town. In the Texas town of Odessa, Therese Archer’s Body & Soul Center for Well-Being has 15 dedicated students, including an 18-wheeler diesel mechanic who drives 50 miles from Andrews, Texas, to attend classes. “He is very West Texas,” Archer says, “and I thought he would flip when he saw what we did.” Yet in eight months the mechanic has sweated his way up from beginning to advanced work. At the 8 Count exercise studio in Monticello, Ga., Suzanne McGinnis runs a “yoga cardio class” that mixes postures with push-ups, all to the disco beat of tunes like Leo Sayer’s You Make Me Feel Like Dancin’. As yoga classes go, this is not an arduous one, but the students don’t know that. They grunt and groan exultantly with each stretch, and are happy to relax when McGinnis stops to check her teaching aids: torn-out magazine pages and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Yoga. So yoga can be fun or be made fun of; it can help you look marvelous or feel marvelous. These aspects are not insignificant. They demonstrate the roots yoga has dug into America’s cultural soil — deep enough for open-minded researchers to consider how it might bloom into a therapy to treat or prevent disease. The sensible practice of yoga does more than slap a Happy Face on your cerebrum. It can also massage the lymph system, says Dr. Mehmet Oz, a cardiac surgeon at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. Lymph is the body’s dirty dishwater; a network of lymphatic vessels and storage sacs crisscross over the entire body, in parallel with the blood supply, carrying a fluid composed of infection-fighting white blood cells and the waste products of cellular activity. Exercise in general activates the flow of lymph through the body, speeding up the filtering process; but yoga in particular promotes the draining of the lymph. Certain yoga poses stretch muscles that from animal studies are known to stimulate the lymph system. Researchers have documented the increased lymph flow when dogs’ paws are stretched in a position similar to the yoga “downward-facing dog.” Yoga relaxes you and, by relaxing, heals. At least that’s the theory. “The autonomic nervous system,” explains Kripalu’s Faulds, “is divided into the sympathetic system, which is often identified with the fight-or-flight response, and the parasympathetic, which is identified with what’s been called the Relaxation Response. When you do yoga — the deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the relaxed focus on being present in your body — you initiate a process that turns the fight-or-flight system off and the Relaxation Response on. That has a dramatic effect on the body. The heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, blood pressure decreases. The body seizes this chance to turn on the healing mechanisms.” But the process isn’t automatic. Especially in their first sessions, yoga students may have trouble suppressing those competitive beta waves. We want to better ourselves, but also to do better than others; we force ourselves into the gym-rat race. “Genuine Hatha yoga is a balance of trying and relaxing,” says Dr. Timothy McCall, an internist and the author of Examining Your Doctor: A Patient’s Guide to Avoiding Harmful Medical Care. “But a lot of gym yoga is about who can do this really difficult contortion to display to everyone else in the class.” The workout warriors have to realize that yoga is more an Athenian endeavor than a Spartan one. You don’t win by punishing your body. You convince it, seduce it, talk it down from the ledge of ambition and anxiety. Yoga is not a struggle but a surrender. It may take a while for the enlightenment bulb to switch on — for you to get the truth of the yoga maxim that what you can do is what you should do. But when it happens, it’s an epiphany, like suddenly knowing, in your bones and your dreams, the foreign language you’ve been studying for months. In yoga, this is your mind-body language. In daily life, that gym-rat pressure is even more intense: our jobs, our marriages, our lives are at stake. Says McCall: “We know that a high percentage of the maladies that people suffer from have at least some component of stress in them, if they’re not overtly caused by stress. Stress causes a rise of blood pressure, the release of catecholamines (neurotransmitters and hormones that regulate many of the body’s metabolic processes). We know that when catecholamine levels are high, there tends to be more platelet aggregation, which makes a heart attack more likely.” So instead of a drug, say devotees, prescribe yoga. “All the drugs we give people have side effects,” McCall says. “Well, yoga has side effects too: better strength, better balance, peace of mind, stronger bones, cardiovascular conditioning, lots of stuff. Here is a natural health system that, once you learn the basics, you can do at home for free with very little equipment and that could help you avoid expensive, invasive surgical and pharmacological interventions. I think this is going to be a big thing.” McCall, it should be said, is a true believer who teaches at the B.K.S. Iyengar Yoga Center in Boston. But more mainstream physicians seem ready to agree. At New York Presbyterian, all heart patients undergoing cardiac procedures are offered massages and yoga during recovery. At Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, cardiac doctors suggest that their patients enroll in the hospital’s Preventive and Rehabilitative Cardiac Center, which offers yoga, among other therapies. “While we haven’t tested yoga as a stand-alone therapy,” says Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, the center’s director, patients opting for yoga do show “tremendous benefits.” These include lower cholesterol levels and blood pressure, increased cardiovascular circulation and, as the Ornish study showed, reversal of artery blockage in some cases. Yoga may help post-menopausal women. Practitioners at Boston’s Mind-Body Institute have incorporated forward-bending poses that massage the organs in the neuroendocrine axis (the line of glands that include the pituitary, hypothalamus, thyroid and adrenals) to bring into balance whatever hormones are askew, thus alleviating the insomnia and mood swings that often accompany menopause. The program is not recommended as a substitute for hormone-replacement therapy, only as an adjunct. Some physicians wonder why it would be tried at all. “Theoretically, if you pressed hard enough on the thyroid, you possibly could affect secretion,” says Dr. Yank Coble, an endocrinologist at the University of Florida. “But it’s pretty rare. And the adrenal glands are carefully protected above the kidneys deep inside the body. To my knowledge, there is no evidence that you can manipulate the adrenals with body positions. That’d be a new one.”

       

Indian researchers have found that yoga can reduce hot flashes and night sweats among women going through menopause. Yoga also seems to sharpen their mental function, say Dr R Chattha of the Swami Vivekananda Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana in Bangalore, India and his co-researchers.

To find out if yoga would help women with physical and cognitive symptoms of menopause, the researchers randomly assigned 120 menopausal women, 40 to 55 years old, to yoga practice or simple stretching and strengthening exercises five days a week for eight weeks.

They said that the postures, breathing and meditation included in the yoga intervention were “aimed at one common effect, i.e. ‘to develop mastery over modifications of the mind’ … through ’slowing down the rate of flow of thoughts in the mind.”‘

While women in the yoga group also listened to lectures on using yoga to manage stress and other topics related to yoga, those in the control group heard lectures on diet, exercise, the physiology of menopause, and stress.

Eight weeks later, it was observed that women in the yoga group experienced a considerable reduction in hot flashes, night sweats, and sleep disturbances, while the women in the control group did not. Although both showed improvements in a test of attention and concentration, the performances of the yoga group were much better. In a test of memory and intelligence with 10 components, the yoga group exhibited improvement on eight, while the control group improved on six. On seven of the subsets, improvements were found to be significantly greater in the yoga group than in the control group.

The researchers said the present study suggests that yoga is superior to physical activity in improving the cognitive functions that could be attributed to emphasis on correctness in breathing, synchronizing breathing with body movements, relaxation etc.

       

For many of us, the arrival of autumn means it’s time to stock up on Kleenex and cough drops. Along with seasonal allergies, autumn means colder weather that can bring with it colds and flu. But yoga can help by strengthening and balancing your basic weapon against sinus conditions — the immune system. Yoga postures, pranayama, relaxation and meditation are powerful tools for helping to stimulate or calm the immune response depending on the situation.

Increased allergy symptoms indicate that your immune system is working overtime. A stuffy nose, ears and sinuses, inflamed eyes, headaches, sore throat and difficulty breathing are all caused by the mucus-producing process of the inmmune system attacking innocuous invaders. Through relaxation, the nervous system can tell the immune system to settle down and stop attacking the foreign bodies, which are naturally cleared out in a non-allergic person by sneezing once or twice a day. When the immune system backs off, inflammation and mucus decrease and symptoms diminish.

Practicing any yoga posture in a relaxing way with slow deep breathing and the intention to let go and relax the nervous system can be very beneficial in decreasing the symptoms of allergies. Kapalabhati breathing is great for allergies as it forces out the mucus. (Don’t forget to keep tissues within easy reach!) The relaxation time at the end of a yoga class can also be an important part of decreasing allergic immune response. Encourage your students to relax and affirm that the relaxation will help decrease their reaction to allergens. However, be aware that students suffering from allergies may become too congested when lying on their backs; you can suggest they lie on the stomach or side if that’s more comfortable.

Relaxing the nervous system has been shown to help direct the immune system to attack the viruses and bacteria that increase in colder weather. Colds are caused by bacteria and affect the upper respiratory system, causing stuffiness, coughing, sore throat, etc. If the immune system is weak, the bacteria can go into the lungs and cause bronchitis or pneumonia. Viruses go deeper into the system, causing chills, fever or pain and aching in the joints.

But a strong immune system can frost the invaders within a few days, preventing more extreme manifestations of the illness and in fact strengthening the immune system. Again, yoga postures done in a relaxed way and slow, deep pranayama can help relax the nervous system and boost the immune response.

Another way to build the immune system and improve sinus-related conditions is to focus on the thymus gland. Located in the chest, the thymus gland is the locus of the immune system. Thus both the thymus gland and the immune system are stimulated by any posture in which we open the chest and breathe deeply into it. The most beneficial postures for this purpose are the Cobra, the Pigeon, the Fish, the Boat, the Bow and the Bridge.

Since the thymus gland corresponds to the fourth chakra, these postures can be enhanced by including chakra sounds such as the fourth chakra bij mantra “yum” or the fourth chakra vowel sound “ay.” Kapalabhati breathing or slow deep ujjayi breathing in postures where the chest is open can also be beneficial. Experiment with practicing the postures as you breathe deeply into the chest and sound the mantras. My audiotape on Prana Yoga, send out through KYTA last spring, will help guide you in combining the mantras with the postures.

With a relaxed nervous system and a focused and revitalized immune system, you’ll find you’re able to resist autumn allergens and throw off winter’s infections more readily.