Everybody Upside-Down
By Yoko Yoshikawa
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From the Goraksha Shataka, a twelfth- or thirteenth-century text on hatha yoga, we learn that "in the region of the navel dwells the lonely sun, whose essence is fire; located at the base of the palate is the eternal moon, whose essence is nectar. That which rains down from the downturned mouth of the moon is swallowed by the upturned mouth of the sun. The practice [of Viparita Karani] is to be performed as a means to obtaining the nectar [which would otherwise be lost]."
Defying Gravity
Until very recently, there has been little interest in the West in objectively documenting the effects of yoga on health, especially for the more advanced or esoteric practices, such as inversions. The medical doctors who have conducted the existing studies are predominantly Indian. Ralph Laforge, M.Sc., managing director at a clinic at Duke University Medical Center and an authority on the scientific foundations of hatha yoga, knows of only two clinical trials in this country designed to determine the physiological benefits of inversions, both of which were too "statistically underpowered" to draw clear conclusions.
Our understanding of how inversions benefit us, then, is built upon expert opinion, case studies, and educated reasoning. In the absence of more scientifically rigorous studies, we can cite biomechanical principles, measure indices such as heart rate or blood pressure, and witness the effects of inversions on people who practice regularly.
All the evidence points to one principal, galvanizing effect that inversions have on the practitioner: They upend one's relationship to gravity. Gravity has a profound effect on the physiological processes of the human body. As NASA discovered and Jerome Groopman reported in a New Yorker article (February 14, 2000), once humans enter zero gravity, we are subject to severe biomedical problems. Our sense of balance, determined by the vestibular system of the inner ear and calibrated to minute fluid movements, is destroyed. Blood, no longer weighted in the lower torso and legs, floods upwards and the heart speeds up, provoking dehydration and eventually anemia. Muscles atrophy and bone mass drops precipitously.
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