'Awake' Explains Yoga

Flat abs. A trendy source of stress relief. An alternative to pumping metal or pounding the treadmill. These rather uninspiring terms are likely the first (or only) words that come to mind when one thinks of yoga. “Awake: The Life of Yogananda”, a new indie movie directed by Paola di Florio and Lisa Leeman, gives even the most disillusioned or skeptical American a chance to discover the true identity and spiritual significance of this several-thousand-year-old Asian tradition through an overview of the life of the man who brought yoga to America, the guru and master yogi Paramahansa Yogananda.

The movie combines video and audio of Yogananda with multiple interviews of yoga enthusiasts as wide-ranging as a New York Yankees fan off the street to the late George Harrison himself. Part documentary, part biography, “Awake” is a kinetic collage that uses Yogananda’s story to depict yoga’s inspiring, spiritual origins as well as its influence on society, business, and technology today—one that reminds the audience of yoga’s ongoing relevance in America nearly 100 years after it took root in the country during the mid-19th century.

The film’s patchwork-like visuals temper the profound and poetic essence of yoga with down-to-earth depictions of its extensive influence in 21st-century American culture. The movie starts and ends in a hypnotizing juxtaposition of Yogananda’s soothing voice with abstract compositions of rolling waves and wavering psychedelic beams of light. These scenes enable the viewer to physically feel the effects of yoga, such as going beyond one’s human finitude to the common spirit that Yogananda believed unites all people, regardless of religion.

"Awake: The Life of Yogananda" explores the life of master yogi Paramahansa Yogananda. By Courtesy of CounterPoint Films

The film develops its historical narrative through photographs and brief footage of Yogananda and the areas that he visited or founded. These disparate images explain the gradual spread of yoga, from Yogananda’s 1920 speech in America at the Congress of Religious Liberals, where he shocked the populace by talking about the possibility of forming a personal connection to God, to the founding of the “Self-Realization Fellowship” in Mount Washington, Los Angeles that same year as the locus of the first spiritual community of his followers, to the astounding annual “Solstice in Times Square” event, in which innumerable yoga enthusiasts take over Times Square to attempt to find tranquility at the world’s most frenzied place.

The fragmented quality of the film’s historical narrative allows moments of poetic and visual explorations of a yogi’s philosophy to appear between the factual photographs and videos. These brief interludes of profound yoga theory and lyricism give the viewer a physical experience of the historical narrative. This fluidity between knowledge and experience provides a convincing taste of the yoga that Yogananda taught to his Western students.

In a particularly striking example, one of the movie’s closing lines, “Life and death are like waves of the sea—I am an ocean of consciousness,” is given a powerful tangible presence through the footage of a wave crashing into a void: the wave’s inability to meet a physical barrier artfully captures the boundlessness that results from connecting one’s consciousness to the common spirit that animates all of humanity. The ocean imagery at the end also echoes the movie’s opening image, an “infant” Yogananda swimming in the amniotic fluid. This cyclic nature of the movie’s imagery captures the spiritual infinity of yoga.

But the movie does not lose the viewer in this meditative mélange of visual abstraction and inspirational quotes. In fact, 3D diagrams analyzing the biological effects of yoga on the human body also appear throughout the historical narrative. For instance, one such diagram tracks the changes in brain activity that result from meditation, validating Yogananda’s description of his own philosophy as “the science of self-realization.” As Andrew Newberg, doctor and author of “How God Changes Your Brain,” put it: “We see a very substantial decrease in activity in the part of the brain that normally helps create a sense of our self and of our orientation in space and time…. You block your ability to establish your sense of self as distinct…and…begin to feel that sense of deep connectedness and oneness with the rest of the world.”

The movie even goes so far as to assert that Yogananda’s doctrine set a precedent for explaining a phenomenon that would be coined 50 years later: neuroplasticity. The yogi believed that the elimination of bad habits could be achieved through contemplation of one’s inner consciousness, similar to how scientists today explain neuroplasticity and brain behavior.

Such divulgences of yoga’s effects on human spirituality and consciousness bring the viewer to a mixed state of awe and frustration. The discovery that yoga has depth beyond its popular identity as a stress-reliever is wonderfully refreshing. However, this new knowledge also engenders a nagging question: why then have the spiritually profound aspects of yoga given way to its now superficial, largely fitness-oriented identity?

Just as provoking as the scientific tidbits is the movie’s clever crowd-pleasing strategy of featuring famous proponents of yoga. The film mentions that Steve Jobs admired Yogananda’s autobiography and that the text triggered in him a belief in humanity’s “infinite potential” in its ability to devise newer, better technology. This allows the movie to fully take on its role as a bridge between the material efficiency of scientific understanding and the timeless spirituality of the East.

Armed with both lyrical and historical assets, “Awake” is fully capable of dissipating one’s prejudices about yoga—and of even bringing the viewer to a state of spiritual discovery that approaches the heart of a yogi’s teachings. Though the movie may convert viewers to Yogananda’s beliefs to the point where they are disgusted with the “yoga” depicted in glossy magazines and offered in their local gym class, the film will trigger in them a new respect for the sheer dynamism of yoga’s presence in the modern American psyche.

—Contributing writer Rebecca A. Greenberg can be reached at rebeccagreenberg@college.harvard.edu.