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Chapter 2

Six-Packs

All life is an experiment.

The more experiments you make the better.

— RALPH WALDO EMERSON, journal, November 11, 1842

Iwanted to practice and study yoga as much as possible, so I incorporated it into my Georgetown classes in every way that I could. For philosophy class, I wrote a paper entitled “Was Plato the Founder of Yoga?” (Unlike many modern philosophers, let’s say, for example, Woody Allen, Plato believed that a sound mind requires a sound body, and in fact, the word Plato means “broad shoulders.”) And for Catholic imagination class I wrote “Did Jesus Do Yoga?” (By the way, believe it or not, he did. Maybe. There is some pretty good evidence that sometime during his “lost years,” between the ages of twelve and thirty, Jesus might just possibly have journeyed to India and Tibet and intensively studied yoga and Buddhism.)

Sophomore year of college I moved with a bunch of friends into a house way off campus. To avoid the extra round-trips to school, I took a semester off from Oskar’s yoga at Yates and found a class right around the corner from my house. This class offered a different style of yoga, called Iyengar. Until then I had not imagined that there could be different schools of yoga. I thought, “Yoga is yoga, like basketball is basketball.”*

But I learned that Oskar taught a type of Sivananda yoga. A Sivananda yoga class includes a bit of everything: chant, breathing exercises, meditation, poses, relaxation. And if Sivananda yoga is the five-course meal, or even the buffet table of yoga, then Iyengar yoga is the curmudgeonly dietician who demands that you sit up straight while you chew.

My Iyengar yoga class met in a junior high school gymnasium. We were supposed to bring a towel to practice on, but a towel offered little padding, and I usually forgot mine anyway, so I’d wind up practicing right on the hardwood floor. This was 1990, before the popularity of the now-ubiquitous “sticky mat” that you can purchase at Whole Foods, Target, and any gas station.^† (Okay, maybe not the gas station, but I think they’re headed there soon, along with the full line of Prana yoga wear.)

Beyond the superficial discomfort of elbows and knees on the cold gym floor and the resulting flashbacks of elementary school dodgeball humiliations, I enjoyed the class. I missed the relaxed flow of yoga postures and the overt spirituality of Oskar’s yoga classes, but I appreciated the Iyengar teacher’s detailed instructions for the proper alignment in each posture.

That year, I also began practicing a bit of yoga every day on my own, even when I went home to New Jersey on school breaks. (Though, in New Jersey, when someone goes into a room by himself to “meditate” and emerges thirty minutes later looking glassy-eyed and refreshed, there is all sorts of elbowing and winking, “Yes, he’s been meditating, if you know what I mean, nudge, nudge, wink, wink.”)

To connect with other yogis, I started subscribing to Yoga Journal magazine and visiting yoga centers in Washington, DC. I even sent away for a giant laminated poster of Dharma Mittra, demonstrating 908 postures. It’s fair to say that if there had been a yoga chess set in pewter, I’d have had two. I was a full-scale yoga buff.

It was also that year that my colitis flared up again. My doctor had told me that colitis comes back at intervals and that everyone has their own period of return. It looked like mine was two years. I was devastated and flew home to New Jersey to see my doctor, get violated by three feet of rubber tubing, and start treatment.

After a very long weekend, I returned to Georgetown armed with a pharmacy bottle of sulfasalazine pills and several six-packs of Rowasa enemas. I think I can speak definitively for all nineteen-year-old boys when I say that amid the busy schedule of studying, partying, and attempting to meet women, I had no wish to steal away into a dorm bathroom and issue myself an enema. I was no fonder of colitis, however, and so I did it several times daily, feeling quite deflated and sullied each time.

Over the next three weeks, my symptoms persisted, even with the treatment. I began again to lose weight and become lethargic. Two years earlier Dr. Brenner had told me that when the symptoms returned they might be more difficult to control. He had even mentioned the possibility of surgery and a colostomy bag. I was sad and scared.

The doctor had also told me that the medicine would make me temporarily sterile, but that I could go off it later in life when I wanted to have children. Even at age nineteen, when I felt as close to having children as to retiring, this side effect disturbed me. Something that made me temporarily sterile seemed a pretty harsh substance to put into my body.

As fate would have it, though, I needed the meds for only a little longer, because the following week something unexpected and somewhat miraculous happened.

One evening in October 1990, I noticed that my symptoms were worse on days that I had skipped yoga. And I wondered, therefore, if doing more yoga would lessen the symptoms. For me, this was a giant leap. I had never heard of a mind-body connection. I had no clue that the choices I made could affect my health. I know that sounds crazy, but I was that ignorant.

Once I made the connection, I decided to medicate my condition with yoga. I self-medicated with four sun salutations, followed by ten minutes of deep relaxation, five times a day.

Taking these twenty-minute yoga breaks five times every day was a huge time investment. But it felt like the right thing to do.

I was a man on a mission. I was Rocky in Rocky IV.

And my effort proved worthwhile.

Because three days later my symptoms were gone.

GONE!

No losing weight and becoming lethargic. No medicine that made me sterile. No colostomy bag.

I was elated.

It actually makes perfect sense that yoga would help colitis. Sun salutations involve a repeated sequence of forward- and backward-bending yoga postures. These poses stretch, relax, and massage the muscles and organs in the abdomen and stimulate circulation and energy flow — all of which increases oxygen levels and improves cellular waste removal.

Furthermore, colitis is an ulcer in the colon, and like any ulcer it is affected by and possibly even caused by stress. Exercise, and especially gentle exercise paired with deep, relaxed breathing, triggers a parasympathetic nervous response (referred to as a “relaxation response”) that helps relieve the stress. Many people, like me in 1990, spend all day in a sympathetic nervous state (a fight-or-flight stress response), and yoga literally resets the body’s stress switch from stress response to relaxation response.

Yoga also helped me gain awareness of my body and my belly so that I could notice when I was tensing up and then release and relax those muscles. In addition, yoga taught me to stand straight rather than slouched over. I used to stand like Bull in Night Court. Perhaps I didn’t want others to feel small, or maybe I was just trying to hear my girlfriend, who measured in at a grand total of four-foot-eleven.

Better posture is good for the organs. Picture your colon or liver working hard but being squished in an awkward position between your hipbone and ribs as you slouch over a computer. Now picture your organs resting freely in your body. Uncramped, they have better circulation and are better able do their jobs. Indeed, improving posture to uncramp the lungs is the first thing singers are taught: “If you want to project your voice you need bigger lungs, so stand up straight.”

You can try this right now. Slouch and try to breathe a slow, deep breath. Then do the same thing while sitting up straight. In fact, a full, relaxed breath, impossible while slouched, actually triggers a relaxation response.

Ten minutes of deep relaxation five times a day would change anyone’s life, whether or not he or she suffered from colitis. Imagine how relaxed and focused we’d all be, all that tiredness and irritability gone. I think we’d see the end of all war and hostility, a full-scale Age of Aquarius, if we all rested for ten minutes every three hours.

From a holistic health perspective, I’d say that my colitis was a condition of repressed angst pooling in my abdomen. In Western allopathic medicine we speak only metaphorically about emotion acting on our organs, and even then the quack police are readied for dispatch, but in the medicine of yoga, called Ayurveda, there is an actual language for this. Repressed anger affects the small intestine and the liver. Repressed anxiety affects the colon. Ayurveda literally states that disease happens when repressed or blocked energy pools and overflows into an incorrect channel. My ability to express and release angst was blocked, so the angst, with nowhere to go, pooled and pooled, and eventually, like acid, ate an ulcer into my colon wall.

Sun salutations massaged my muscles and organs, moved things around, broke up the blocks, and allowed some of the pooled energy to flow and release. This gave my colon wall a chance to heal itself, just as a cut on my finger would mend on its own. As the famous physician of integrative medicine Dr. Andrew Weil states, “Wounds heal by themselves…. If we want to foster healing and promote health, we should … encourage the body’s own, innate mechanisms of self repair.”* Stretching, relaxing, resting, reducing my stress level, exercising, improving my circulation and energy flow, and straightening my posture were supporting this innate process in my body.

* By the way, don’t let this cool basketball reference fool you into thinking I knew anything about basketball. I was an odd duck at Georgetown, caring nothing for the sport. The extent of my knowledge included knowing that Alonzo Mourning and Dikembe Mutombo (both at Georgetown at the time) were very tall. And I recall that Dikembe had an unbelievably deep voice.

^† Sticky mats were invented, by the way, in the 1980s by Western yogi Angela Farmer from simple carpet padding, like the stuff under the rug in your den. And it was Sara Chambers of Hugger Mugger who took the nascent yoga mat industry to the next level in the 1990s by designing a mat of similar texture, made specifically for yoga. That’s when the sticky mat that you now know and love was born and popularized. All rejoiced at this innovation, especially the tigers of India (whose skins were the choice mat for Indian yogis of yore).

* Family Guide to Natural Medicine: How to Stay Healthy the Natural Way (New York: Reader’s Digest, 1993), 8.