“THE purest, most peaceful moments of my life have happened on my yoga mat,” says filmmaker Kate Churchill in the opening of her 2009 film Enlighten Up! A Skeptic’s Journey into the World of Yoga. “The problem is the closer I look at yoga, the more contradictions I find.”

She finds a multibillion dollar industry devoted to what some maintain is exercise and what many fervently claim is a spiritual discipline. Nevertheless, Churchill decides to prove that yoga can transform anyone both physically and spiritually.

For a quick overview of the world of yoga and its major figures, I recommend this light and inconclusive documentary. Though it is now more than 10 years old, the film’s subject matter is as relevant. Obviously, yoga continues to be hugely popular and a major American obsession.

Churchill recruits Nick Rosen, 29, a likable, unemployed journalist who lives in New York City and has no interest in spiritual matters. He is her guinea pig. She wants to prove that even he can become “enlightened” and also resolve her own confusion about yoga. Rosen sets out with Churchill to visit, practice with and interview famous practitioners in America and India. The interviews include South African Tantric and Kriya Yoga Master Alan Finger, who channels the body’s life force into healing directions; Diamond Dallas Page, the former pro wrestler who offers macho yoga for men; B.K.S. Iyengar, since deceased, who became the foremost popularizer of modern yoga in America after befriending and instructing the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and many others.

Rosen’s happiest moments in life, he says, have been those in which he has been physically fit. He insists that whatever yoga claims it must appeal to him intellectually, and not just through feeling. “I’m not interested in believing in anything that cannot be proven.”

In the popular yoga studios in New York City that Rosen visits, yoga is clearly not just exercise for even its mainstream practitioners. The students chant the Hindu incantation, “Om,” and are instructed to alter consciousness along with their movements. Rosen is surrounded by young women. One tells him that yoga is better than sex because it gives her “an overwhelming feeling of good will and warmth.” A 62-year-old woman tells him that yoga has given her a new lease on life.

In Woodstock, New York, that bastion of America’s New Age, Sharon Gannon and David Life engage in vague language centered on the self in explaining their own version of yoga. Rosen, the (presumably Jewish) son of divorced parents, admits to feeling uncomfortable around people such as this. They remind him of the friends of his mother, who is involved in “shamanistic healing.”

One of the most compelling figures he meets is Dharma Sittra, the instructor of Dharma yoga in Manhattan (Sittra was raised a Catholic in India), who blends the pantheistic worldview common to yoga practitioners (God is in everything, God is everything) with a gentle and humble personality. The self-mortifications of practitioners such as Sittra is obviously deeply appealing to Westerners in a secularized and confusingly “spiritual” society.

But the interview of Iyengar in the video above is typical of the vague and often contradictory language Rosen encounters everywhere. He is told he must believe and he will be transformed. Concepts of truth and duty to compel perhaps someone as laid-back as Rosen do not appear. He starts to have nightmares along the way. Rosen  is told to “practice, practice, practice” and then he will find true enlightenment. Frequently annoyed by his lack of progress, Churchill admits that she herself is “sick of yoga.” She continues to practice it, but does not know why.

After this intensive immersion, Rosen is unconvinced. In a possible effort to console yoga fans in the audience, he says yoga has, however, made him more compassionate. But “basically, it’s just something I do every morning.” Then he ceases to do yoga at all.

Yoga’s appeals to “wholeness” do not include this inquiring mind. I give Rosen and Churchill much credit for insisting we should try to know more. For no subject is treated with more airy banalities in America than Eastern mysticism.

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