Has Yoga Stretched Too Far?

In the stillness of a light-filled temple, hundreds of yoga devotees sit with erect spines, breathing slowly, drawing their prana--life force--inward and their attention toward God.

Here at the Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, more than 1,000 followers gather each Sunday to chant, meditate and pay homage to the Self-Realization Fellowship’s lineage of gurus--most prominently Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian swami known as a founding father of yoga in the West who brought the ancient Hindu techniques here in 1920.

A few miles away, along fashionable Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, a different kind of yoga practice is underway. This secular studio is hip, featuring beautiful people in clingy garb who twist and stretch their bodies in poses with names like Downward Dog. Yoga Works offers nearly back-to-back yoga classes--150 a week--along with workshops on everything from the Yoga of Money to Zen Dance.

Yoga, meet yoga.

Seventy-five years after Yogananda established his worldwide religious headquarters in Los Angeles, Americans are embracing Eastern traditions of yoga and meditation as never before. Once seen as the stuff of snake charmers and magic carpets, yoga is said to be practiced today by some 12 million Americans of diverse backgrounds. Celebrities tout it, doctors prescribe it, health clubs teach it, corporations offer it. Advertisers are using yoga to sell Zippo lighters, Ford Rangers and even yoga pedicures--”guaranteed to soothe the sole.”

The yoga craze reflects what the fellowship’s Brother Anandamoy calls a “survival instinct” for stillness amid the frenetic pace of the relentless information age. Yoga Works teacher Julie Kleinman says at least half of her students are desperate for decompression; others are tired of treadmills, Tae-Bo and weight training. Still others say the attraction to yoga reflects a broader hunger for mystical, direct experiences with the divine--evidenced by growing interest in Jewish Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism and even Christian Pentecostalism.

Even as devotees hail the spread of yoga into mainstream America, some question its secularization and commercialization. Earlier this month in Anaheim, for instance, a national organization of fitness professionals held a two-day seminar on how to teach yoga--now the third-fastest growing activity in gyms, offered by nearly 60% of them, according to the fitness group, IDEA.

Such instant yoga offends some, who say that the practice is more profound than a path to tight pecs and that it takes years of physical and spiritual discipline to master. “Yoga is a sacred tradition meant to discover who we truly are in a spiritual dimension,” says Georg Feuerstein, president of the Yoga Research and Education Council in Sebastapol. “If we only focus on our hamstrings, that’s a sad commentary on our culture today.”

Lina Gupta, associate professor of philosophy and comparative religion at Glendale Community College, says the physical postures of hatha yoga are meant to be a means to an end. The end is self-realization, which requires meditation, sitting for long periods and limber bodies--for which hatha yoga was developed. But the physical postures have instead become the end, she laments.

Yoga Works, in business since 1987, tries to straddle a middle course between the spiritual and secular forms of yoga. Founder Maty Ezraty says the studio deliberately downplays yoga’s spiritual dimension to remain accessible to all but hires only experienced instructors well-versed in the broader tradition. Kleinman, for instance, featured light touches of meditation and Sanskrit chanting during her recent class; she has also read the classic Yoga Sutras by the great Indian sage Patanjali.

Ask the group that first popularized it all about any furor and its members seem mainly amused.

“Yogananda-ji would laugh,” says Mrinalini Mata, vice president of the late guru’s worldwide Self-Realization Fellowship, headquartered in a lush oasis of streams, deodar trees and meditation spots in Mount Washington. “He had a tremendous sense of humor.”

Roots in Classic Hindu Philosophy

Yoga, a Sanskrit word often interpreted as “union with spirit,” is a 5,000-year-old sacred path to divine realization developed on the Indian peninsula as one of the major systems of Hindu philosophy. Each of the six major yogic paths offer different methods to achieve its ends: hatha yoga, for instance, employs physical postures to purify the body for meditation. The fellowship practices a form of Raja yoga, using meditation techniques to quiet the body and mind by directing the life energy inward, gradually bringing an inner awakening and attunement with the divine.

The Self-Realization Fellowship’s own brisk growth, as it marks the 75th birthday of its international headquarters and on Sunday celebrated the 50th anniversary of its popular Lake Shrine, offers testament that the yoga boom isn’t merely about muscles.

Since Yogananda’s centennial birthday celebration in 1993, the fellowship’s number of temples and meditation centers has increased from 400 to more than 500, with members in 178 countries. Between 1993 and 1998, attendance at temples increased an average 42%, the organization reports.

The reach of Yogananda’s teachings go well beyond membership. To meet the demand for material, the religious group recently began publishing a line of books in Spanish, along with hand-sized books in English on simple themes such as prayer, success and meditation. And Yogananda’s spiritual classic, “Autobiography of a Yogi,” remains a perennial bestseller, having sold millions of copies in the more than half a century after its first publication six years before his death in 1952.

“It was a pivotal book,” says Phyllis Tickle of Publishers Weekly magazine. “It was the first book on Eastern spiritual practice that made a big play on the popular market. It took spiritual seeking out of never-never land and gave it definition and substance.”

While secular practitioners may aim for physical strength and flexibility in their practice, fellowship members profess strong spiritual yearnings. They include newer devotees such as Lorrie De Young, a Hollywood artist who joined the group with her husband and two sons two years ago. Older members include celebrities ranging from George Harrison to Mariel Hemingway, and the producer-director team of Gloria and Michael Schultz. The practice has brought new energy, peace and calm, say the Schultzes.

Gloria Schultz says that on her first visit to the Lake Shrine 24 years ago, she was instantly gripped by pictures of the gurus and, as she was leaving, felt a powerful urge to make the spiritual commitment she had avoided her entire life. Her husband was a tougher sell. He came from New York with an attitude: “This was California fruitcake stuff,” he recalls thinking.

But when his wife exhorted him to listen and not judge, Schultz says, he found the sermon about how to maintain calm detachment from life’s highs and lows deeply relevant to the roller-coaster entertainment industry. The clincher, he says, was finding that the techniques of concentration, meditation and energizing the body actually seemed to work.

“There was incredible peace and an ability to deal with the toughest situations in business and not be swept away by it,” says Schultz, who produced the film “Car Wash,” has worked on TV series including “Touched by an Angel,” and recently started, with his family, two Internet film and animation firms.

Even as yoga franchises expand in the secular business world, the spiritually based fellowship operates quietly to carry out what leaders say is its highest purpose: to guard the integrity of Yogananda’s teachings and disseminate them as requested.

The board of directors is comprised of six nuns and two monks, following Yogananda’s wish to keep control in the hands of monastics to minimize “undue financial or commercial interests,” according to Brother Chidananda.

Longtime disciples recall Yogananda turning down various marketing schemes to boost membership, preaching a desire to attract not crowds but genuine truth seekers. “Some have said we could pull in a lot of members if we use crystals and spin the approach to where present civilization seems to be rolling,” says vice president Mrinalini Mata. “Never! That would be compromising the teachings.”

The fellowship’s “Mother of Compassion,” president Sri Daya Mata, has kept affairs so true to the days of Yogananda that services almost seem a countercultural throwback to the past--especially as other churches rush to rock music, multimedia sermons and other peppy innovations. Mrinalini Mata says services have not appreciably changed in 75 years, still featuring meditation, a sermon and chants sung to the strains of a harmonium.

Leaving Trendiness at the Door

Unlike many temples that mainly serve Indian immigrants, Self-Realization centers are devoid of Hindu ritual objects and statues of Hindu gods. The centers instead feature a simple altar with flowers and pictures of its six gurus.

The fellowship also bucks current trends toward blending worship and “mix and match” religion--a strong phenomenon on the American religious scene. Yogananda warned of “spiritual indigestion” resulting from too many practices and advised people to choose one and stick with it, according to Sister Savitri of the fellowship. (Even so, she says, Yogananda believed that all faiths were essentially different paths to the same God, and in particular taught that an essential unity exists between original yoga and original Christianity--one reason that Jesus Christ is considered one of the gurus).

The group’s lack of trendiness seems to be one of its attractions. “People say they are looking for authenticity,” says Sister Priya.

Not that the fellowship has been without controversy. A current effort to expand its Mount Washington headquarters has sparked protests from some local residents concerned about traffic and other problems associated with development. And the group has occasionally found itself embroiled in litigation over copyrights of Yogananda’s writings and at least one sex scandal involving a former monk.

But a popular Web site on questionable religious groups, (https://www.rickross.com), does not list the fellowship. “The teaching has maintained its integrity, and the founder himself has certainly laid a foundation for a safe and meaningful method of continued spiritual growth,” says Obadiah Harris, president of the Los Feliz-based Philosophical Research Society and a yoga practitioner.

Spiritual growth may ultimately prove to be the goal for both Self-Realization devotees and at least some of the sweaty souls at secular yoga studios like Yoga Works.

Roseann Spengler, a magazine editor visiting from Connecticut, is 60 and looks 40, thanks to a lifelong regimen of careful eating and exercise--running, weight-training, treadmill. But she’s here for her second class at Yoga Works this day because she now wants something more: “Peace, calmness and a sense of well-being that comes with doing something like yoga,” she says.

She’s ready to try meditation, too. And if all of this brings the lifelong Catholic a new spiritual path--along with greater energy and a more supple spine--she says that’s fine. “I think God is universal,” Spengler says.