CARNAL NATION

I always felt that yoga was something for closet perverts, not out-and-proud pervs like me. (Personally, I'm a Thai boxing enthusiast, martial arts being the Zen physical activities of choice among a heck of a lot of BDSM aficionados. But that's a movie yet to be made.) Right or wrong, I always associated the practice with the granola, free love, hippie shit that I've hated since my punk rock youth. So I was relieved to see that Kate Churchill's "peek behind the curtain of a 5.7 billion dollar 'spiritual' industry," according to the press notes for her yoga doc Enlighten Up!, stars a skeptical journalist named Nick Rosen whom Churchill enlists in her attempt to prove that down the road and past the hype lies a very real path to enlightenment.

Churchill takes her wary guinea pig on a journey around the world, starting at home base NYC, where after one class Rosen probes a particularly enthusiastic yoga practitioner, a middle-aged white woman, who tells Rosen it's "better than sex," that she gets this incredible feeling of "goodwill, warmth and love." Rosen responds that he's heard one can have an orgasm practicing yoga, and she readily, though with embarrassment, concurs. I wondered—is this the "enlightenment" people are chasing? That ecstasy they get from sex?

I decided I'd set out to seek my own enlightenment from Enlighten Up! What exactly is the correlation between yoga and sex? Is yoga as it's practiced in the puritanical west really just a fuck substitute for the upper-middle-class uptight? Is it nothing more than a billion-dollar, politically-correct porn industry? As I focused my kink lens on Churchill's chaste doc, the connections became clearer. A master teacher refers to the physical poses as "preparation for something higher." Achieving the spiritual through the physical is also the point of screwing, I realized. Yet people can acceptably wax rhapsodic about a yoga class in a way they can't enthuse about, say, a one-night-stand in polite company (trust me, I've tried it). Yoga evokes the clean and pure, while sex is down and dirty.

Which brings me to former pro wrestler turned yoga teacher Diamond Dallas Page. (This entrepreneurial hulk should hire Mickey Rourke as spokesman for his "Yoga for Regular Guys.") Page's very L.A. studio is his courtyard where fake-tit bimbos take a class with Rosen, who describes the atmosphere as similar to a porn set. "Get a shot of that," Page advises Churchill's camera as a bottle blonde's cleavage gives a big shout-out as she comes up from a pose. (Yup, you guessed it, Page is the guy who says "T&A" instead of "Namaste.") Later, in Hawaii, Rosen discusses doing stuff for his "small self" with guru Norman Allen. "I'm hungry, horny, greedy," he says as Allen twists and turns his limbs during what looks like an excruciating massage. Allen describes yoga as "the soul being liberated while in the body." (Yeah, isn't that sex?) When he tells Rosen "Go fuck yourself," he means it as a "tantric thing."

"Inside your whole unit not needing another entity to confuse the matter," Allen rattles off stream-of-consciousness style. In other words, yoga is sex with oneself. Eureka!

But this inner masturbation is not enough for poor Rosen. Deprived of physical contact for months on end due to Churchill's overzealous shoot, the hot and bothered journalist finally asks a girl on a date in India–then decides to cancel because Churchill wants to roll the camera. The star and his director have a spat, leaving Rosen to write in his diary that Churchill refused to talk to him for two days (i.e., Churchill wants him to go fuck himself because this is proof Rosen hasn't been taking the mission seriously–he hasn't been fucking himself!) Rosen finds the filmmaker crying on a rooftop, then falls asleep during his private meditation there. In his dreams he makes plans with one of his friends to double-date some chicks and maybe even "take turns with them both."

Alas, it seems there is no moving beyond bodily desire for Rosen. And that's the point (even if it wasn't the one Churchill set out to make). The yogi who gets the last word is a wise man who advises Rosen that happiness is within us, not outside–and that being true to oneself is a spiritual act in itself! And what is sex other than the ultimate expression of a raw and vulnerable, naked and true self? (Hence, a spiritual act.) So, what is yoga? Churchill may just as well have tried to answer "What is sex?"