Hell-Bent (38 page)

After talking with Hector, I go back just one step further.

I find Sarah Baughn living in a toy-strewn house on the edge of San Francisco proper, a little row house by the ocean in the Sunset District. We hug hello. Although I have met her only once, when she arrived at my studio in Brooklyn two years ago, I feel like I am connecting to something vital.

Sarah leads me through her living room. Her daughter Paiden plays on the floor, pushing multicolored pegs through multicolored holes. Her partner, Kyle, is at work at the bar he manages. Both are new additions since her tour as yoga champion. Theirs is a house with a Christmas tree clearly decorated by the whole family—complete with dangling homemade ornaments of stern-faced snowmen and crazy-legged reindeer. It is cozy in the way busy overwhelmed houses get cozy, a mess of overuse, not of neglect. We sit down at her country-kitchen table, high chair between us, and as I set up my notepad and tape recorder, I am served two thick slices of bread slathered in tayberry jam. Naturally, it is homemade. Paiden is laughing and splashing at her multicolored pegs in the background.

I wonder if it is all still a dream. Everything is exactly where it needs to be.

And as I make idiotic gestures, trying to convey my gratitude for the jam—which might contain an actual recipe for the divine—Sarah disassembles that notion completely. She does this without a trace of regret or pity while moving around in full multitasking mom mode: kissing Paiden on the forehead after a crash, pushing more raisin bread in the toaster for me.

“I hardly practice at this point,” she explains as she moves around the room. “I’m still in significant pain. It all just slipped out of my control. … I became so skinny. I never saw anyone else. I never even saw my grandparents anymore. I was this tiny, obsessed, hyperbendy thing. My knee was the first thing to go.”

Just after her first competition, Sarah had surgery on her knee.

“I was training too hard. I was already this superflexible girl, and I was pushing my body to the limits. … One day my knee just started locking as
I walked. It would make a
click click
noise when I bent it. You know, just felt slightly stuck. And when I went to a doctor doctor—not a yoga doctor—he told me that was an indicator of a torn meniscus.”

She slathers my toast with jam so briskly, it almost feels like a reflex reaction. “I was young and flexible and full of arrogance. … Looking back, it was almost necessary for me to be humbled.

“But it was hard,” she says. “Not just the pain. I felt tremendous pressure when I returned. I wanted to practice more, but people would look at me and I would feel their disappointment. Like ‘That’s Sarah, my teacher, the champion.’ And they would wonder why my practice wasn’t very deep. It took a long time for me to get to the point where I could say in my head, ‘Good! I’m glad you see me. This is me—this is my practice—it might not be as deep as it used to be, but it is mine. … Now stop looking. What you need to do is look at your own practice.’”

Sarah arrived at a Bikram studio at nineteen during her sophomore year of college. Within six months, she had dropped out to attend Teacher Training. Just like with Tony, when she talks about those early days, I feel like I am listening to her talk about an old, momentous romance.

Childhood was sad for Sarah. The death of a friend when she was twelve connected with a powerful predisposition toward depression, and she sank into a hole that she never quite crawled out of. “I spent my high school feeling like crap all the time,” she says. “Just really depressed. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t even see myself—all I saw was ugly and fat. I thought that might change at college, but instead, here I was, walking around telling everyone I met that I hated life.”

By the end of her third class, she had decided she wanted to become a teacher. “I took an evening class, and when I came out, it was raining and dark—basically, a perfect recipe for my depression. But I was singing. Singing and walking in the rainy dark. I felt so good. … And that was when I realized I wanted to teach this yoga to sad people.”

And so at age twenty, convinced the yoga had just saved her life, Sarah arrived at Teacher Training.

Bikram was on her from minute one. “He called me his ‘assistant.’ He told everyone he ‘created me.’” Her multitasking has stopped for a moment,
and Sarah is sitting at the table with me flipping through the thick cardboard pages of a children’s book, running her fingers over the scenes in the book and their primary colors. “I loved the attention he gave me. I loved being the special one. But I was too young, and the pressure became difficult to handle. …”

“In the end, it made me stronger.” She is staring hard at the children’s book. “Learning to separate the man from the teacher is one of those delicate balances. It’s a yoga in itself. Really one of those things you look back and say, ‘Thank you, Mom, thank you, Dad. You raised me right.’ ”

I click off the tape recorder and ask Sarah instead about competing.

“It became my life. It was the most valuable time of my life. My coach made it much more about the philosophy than the postures. Really nourished me, because it wasn’t something I was otherwise getting. But it wasn’t until I didn’t win that it all made sense.”

Didn’t win?

“Yep.” She laughs. “I came in second place, you didn’t know that. … Bikram played a big part in judging back then.” There is a pause. She moves onward. “It was crushing for me, I wanted to win so badly. Looking back, I probably needed to lose. It certainly taught me a lot.”

Sarah had dreams of using her championship to raise money for children with cancer. It is a dream so big and so wholesome and so cliché that if I weren’t sitting in her home eating her homemade tayberry jam amidst her homemade crayon-enhanced Christmas ornaments, I might not take it on face value. But I am here, so I do. Unconditionally.

She explains, the winner of the Asana Championship goes on a paid tour—as a yoga ambassador of sorts—and she saw the tour as opportunity to fund-raise. She didn’t even know a child who had died of cancer; it just struck her as a something important. A way to give back for the time she had spent on herself. And so throughout training, it provided an all-consuming motivation to push into the next set.

“When I lost, there was this huge sense of failure. You know here is this thing, where I did everything I was asked to do. No, no, no—I did everything I was asked to do
perfectly.
I dedicated my life to it. I executed.
And then, it didn’t work out at all. Coming in second is nothing. You get nothing, no tour.

“I went to class the next day, I dragged myself—one of those things you very much do not want to do, but do because everyone expects you to be there—and the woman who won was teaching in the next room. As I did my practice, I could hear her. And in the middle of it, I woke up. I was staring at myself in the mirror. Nothing had changed. Being champion had absolutely nothing to do with raising money for children with cancer. I could still do my routine. And if I wanted, I could still use it to raise money. None of that had been taken from me.”

And so Sarah went on the tour where I met her. She asked yoga studios across the country to donate the space for single class. Then she packed the class full—in the one I attended, there were over forty-five people in a room that typically held twenty—and she taught. Then when we were all exhausted, dripping, and open, she concluded with the posture routine that changed my life. The tour was entirely self-funded and occurred without the blessing or encouragement of Bikram the man. It was Sarah’s gift to the community. With the ironclad idealism of someone in her early twenties, she didn’t reimburse herself for anything and took on a significant amount of debt during the process.

But it was necessary. “That tour saved my relationship to yoga,” she says. “Everything I learned, every good thing it has given me, I tried to give back during that tour. And I came back having gained so much.”

It also set the stage for her current life. She gave away enough that she no longer felt beholden to the yoga. “One thing I have to tell people is, I’m not the person I was on that tour. I do yoga to live; I don’t live to do yoga anymore,” she tells me. “Some of the studio owners I teach for, they want me to smile constantly. They want me to bounce around like a yoga cheerleader and sell it to everyone who comes in. Yoga is a tool I use when I need it. It is a certain pair of clothes I have in my drawer. I can put it on if I choose to wear it. Or I can save it for a special occasion. I don’t depend on it anymore. I don’t allow it to define me.

“You know, after my knee surgery, nobody from the yoga world came to see me. They were all too immersed in their practice to visit. … That was
also a wake-up call too. Not because I blamed them. But because that was just where I had been—exactly who I was. The only difference is that now that I was on the sidelines, I could see it all clearly.”

Paiden has been periodically running into the room to deliver different goodies to Sarah. A blue plastic block, a clump of red ribbon. After each handoff, she runs out of the room, giggling with energy. Sarah points into the other room at her. “You know what I still believe in completely? Yoga babies. I practiced all nine months with Mary Jarvis. No water in class. It was wonderful. Magic.” When Paiden delivers her next goody to me, I give her little hand a little kiss. She is as excited and eager as I have ever seen a child, and my momentary puzzlement over Sarah’s certainty, hopefully forgiven.

The Yoga Effect

All this leads me to one unavoidable question: How much of the yoga is the yoga?

If Joseph had taken kickboxing classes as a twelve-year-old, would he have regained his health? If Luke had decided to dedicate his life to rhythmic gymnastics, would he have kicked heroin? If Sol had done sixty days of Tae Bo, would he have lost the weight and gained the energy?

It’s impossible to tell.

When selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs) hit the market following FDA approval in 1987, they represented a new era of neurotrans-formative medicine. Over the previous twenty years, our understanding of the brain had been radically updated, largely through advances in imaging techniques. The SSRIs were presented as the promised fruit of that research—our newest, best, and most promising weapons in the war against depression.

Unlike previous generations of brain-fuzzing and personality-bludgeoning antidepressants, the SSRIs were precise, targeted, and clear in effect. Researchers could document how they affected neural channels, measure the exact changes they wrought on the brain. Almost as soon as they hit the market, they were a sensation.

In 1987, prior to the introduction of the first of these drugs, Prozac, approximately 4.5 million adults were using antidepressants.
Over the next two decades, that number
increased sixfold,
so that by 2007, approximately a full 10
percent of Americans over the age of six years old were regularly taking an antidepressant. And because pills sold equaled dollars spent,
the SSRI-driven antidepressant market grew
into a 19 billion per year super-industry within an industry. The brand names of the compounds—Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro—became household names.

It is no understatement to say that the new SSRIs changed the landscape of mental health. A paradigm that had been slowly drifting in one direction shifted suddenly and decisively: brain-based medicine was here to stay. Freud, long since dead to his field, was now relegated to the most insulting status for a scientific thinker: historical figure. Nature, not nurture, was behind most psychiatric disease. And with that disassociation, a whole culture of cloistering shame was lifted. Side effects were debated on the sidelines of high school soccer games.
Listening to Prozac, Prozac Nation,
and the
Prozac Diary
became unlikely bestsellers. The depressive personality was marked for such a rapid extinction that a whole new contrarian movement of melancholy poets and artists began to champion it.

Nowhere was this shift more present than the psychiatric community.
Doctors long wary of the growing influence
of the pharmaceutical industry were won over by the powerful results.

The Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression
rates a patient’s mood, sleep patterns, suicidal tendencies, and energy levels. It is a detailed exam conducted in a one-on-one interview with a doctor. For something as slippery as a mood disorder, the Hamilton Rating Scale represents a hard statistical measure to gauge progress. It is the gold standard. And bottom line, when patients swallow an SSRI, their scores on the Hamilton Rating Scale change for the better. Doctors see results, patients feel brighter, the world is literally a happier place.

The problem is, it is all built on a mirage.

As early as 1995, Guy Sapirstein and
Irving Kirsch decided to pool the results of previous studies on antidepressants. What they found shocked them. Over 75 percent of the effects of the SSRI antidepressants were
attributable to the placebo effect. The tactical nukes of depression were three-quarters tactical Tic Tacs.

When Sapirstein and Kirsch examined the specifics of the studies, they found something even more damning. Most patients could tell when they were given an SSRI pill as opposed to a placebo because the SSRIs came with a host of side effects (dry mouth, nausea, low sex drive). Patients could and did enhance the placebo effect by figuring out whether or not they were getting the “real thing.”

Nowhere was this clearer than when the drug company Merck—to much excitement—produced an SSRI with no side effects. The drug failed miserably. Merck ended up voluntarily withdrawing it from clinical trials after only four months because it could find no differences between the drug and a placebo.

Similarly, in nine studies
in which active placebos were used—“active placebos” being those placebos that produce side effects but that should not yield any relief—there was zero significant difference between SSRI and placebo in seven of the studies. And when you look at the results of a successful antidepressant, such as Prozac, you find a 96 percent correlation between experiencing a side effect and experiencing improvement.