**1. Introduction**

There is power, both spiritual and therapeutic, in the incantation of *Om.* This sacred syllable that is intoned at the start and conclusion of a traditional yoga session represents an astonishing ancient Indian insight about the play between breath and mouth that creates language. *Om* encapsulates the universe, as all possible letters that can be enunciated are bookmarked by the two sounds o and m. "O" is shaped deep in the back of the throat, at the root of our language-producing anatomy when air is forced through vibrating vocal cords. "M" is produced far at the other end of the mouth, as the lips press together and utter the sound that is made by humans as they suckle on the breast of their mother. All other letters are born somewhere between the sounding points of these two utterances. As the air travels from deep in the throat through the mouth and exits the pursed lips, it journeys through the space where all other letters are produced. Every possible utterance

is therefore symbolically held in this sound. In the words of the great sage Sankara, ´ *Om* "contains within itself the entire literature" (Jha 1942, p. 10).

No civilization has put as much attention into the structure of the mouth and throat and the way that air and vibration travel through them as has ancient India. The Vedics recognized the singular importance of breath for life. Indeed, the very word for breath in Sanskrit, *pra¯n. a*, is the word for lifeforce or soul (Sarbacker 2021, p. 168). A deep and rich catalog of practices emerged for understanding and controlling the breath in India, making its way into techniques that are commonly used today in yoga studios around the world.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the struggle to breathe became a widespread concern, and many people turned to yoga in order to help them cope with the perils of the disease. A consequence of the pandemic has been that people have felt reticent about seeking medical care for other ailments at healthcare facilities, fearing exposure to the virus and wishing to minimize the spread of the disease (Wadhen and Cartwright 2021, p. 331). This opened an opportunity for people to seek alternative methods of staying healthy without having to go to hospital wards which might have a high incidence of the virus and could facilitate transmission. While the subtle body outlined in many yogic texts, with its *nad¯ ¯ıs* (channels) and *cakras* (energy discs), might not correspond to anatomical features that are known to the scientific community today, there is good evidence that yogic practices may nevertheless help in the fight against COVID-19, both in their effects on the physical body and on the mental health of those who have contracted it or are in danger of contracting it. Yoga's postures, breath control techniques, and meditative states have been used for millennia by millions of people around the globe to promote mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. In recent years, significant scientific research has been conducted exploring the potential benefits of these practices (Bower and Irwin 2016; Bushell et al. 2020; Cahn et al. 2017; Falkenberg et al. 2018; Groessl et al. 2015; Kuntsevich et al. 2010; Morgan et al. 2014; Pascoe et al. 2017; Shete et al. 2017).

In this paper, we assess the purported benefits of yoga for COVID-19 related prophylaxis or treatment, exploring three main areas, which we will here raise as questions: (1) is the practice of yoga effective at reducing stress and maintaining the mental well-being needed to combat the extra stress of living during a pandemic? (2) Is there any evidence that yoga boosts the practitioner's immunity, leading to reduced disease contraction? (3) Do breathing exercises associated with yoga help maintain pulmonary health and protect the upper respiratory tract, the portal of entry for the SARS-CoV-2 virus infection? In sum, we explore the claim that the overall bodily health promoted by yoga helps prevent severe illness in situations where the virus is contracted. Related to this last point, we examine the evidence for the assertion made by practitioners that yoga also gives people meaning and purpose in their lives when confronted with the challenges of an isolating lockdown. Finally, we assess these benefits in light of mitigation efforts such as social distancing, arguably disruptive to the practice of yoga, and to religious engagement generally.1

#### **2. What Is Yoga?**

The term "yoga" has many different meanings. Yoga comes from the Sanskrit root "yuj" meaning "to join" and therefore denotes at its core "joining" or "uniting." However, debates persist about what exactly is joined to what: is it the soul that is united with God, or consciousness united with its true identity, or something else? Over time, "yoga" has come to refer to almost *any* religious practice where an aspirant uses some method to achieve greater knowledge of the spiritual world. Historian of religion Stuart Sarbacker has recently compiled a helpful overview of the different paths that yoga has taken, etymologically and heuristically, in India and beyond over the centuries (Sarbacker 2021). In one of the usages he examines, the word yoga is translated simply as "religious practice," i.e., as a term ubiquitously referring to practices from all the Indian religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. This noted, when the term yoga is used in contemporary parlance, especially in the West, it usually refers to a series of postures, breathing techniques, and modes of meditation emerging out of a system known as *Hat.ha Yoga*, translated as the

"Yoga of Forceful Exertion," dating back to the twelfth century and associated with Tantric ideas of the body's relationship to the cosmos (Sarbacker 2021, p. 172).

The origins of yoga in fact go back to the earliest Indian texts, the *Vedas* (1500–500 BCE), which refer to the idea that an aspirant has the ability to tap into the generative power of the universe through self-discipline (*tapas*) and a state of celibacy (*brahmacarya*) (Sarbacker 2021, p. 56). *Tapas* is a Sanskrit word that means "heat" and is used to denote the energy generated deep within the self through the power of ascetic practices. It is conceived as a spiritual fire that can be stoked through difficult practices that deny the body of pleasure, often equated with the heat of the sacrificial fire. Sacrifice, or *yajña* in Sanskrit, is the prime mode of religious expression in the *Vedas*. All of the rituals demarcated therein ultimately drive towards sacrifice, namely the burning of an offering that is conceived variously as a gift to the gods or even as a rite whose merit impels the universe to produce good outcomes for the agent preparing the sacrifice (Jha 2018, pp. 15–18). Over time, and especially in some of the major *Upanis. ad* (500–400 BCE), which are explorations of the deeper inner-meaning of the earlier parts of the *Vedas*, the idea of reconfiguring the physical sacrifice to be a more spiritual practice emerged. This became known as the *inner sacrifice*, the sacrifice made not by taking an animal and placing it on an altar but rather by offering something of value from deep within the individual in its place (Bentor 2000). The oblation was commonly conceived as being pleasure. The aspirant offers the normal pleasures of life, such as sex, good food, grooming, and status as a sacrifice and lives thereafter as a renunciant, someone who has gone beyond the life of a householder and given up financial luxuries as well as sensual and worldly pleasure in pursuit of higher goals. This, of course, requires self-restraint, and the individual living this ascetic life is known as a *Samnyasi ¯* , literally "one who has given up everything" (Sarbacker 2021, p. 151).

These *Samnyasis ¯* took seriously the insight in many of the *Upanis. ad* that we are caught in an endless cycle of physical embodiment known as *samsara ¯* that is driven by ignorance of the true nature of reality (Sarbacker 2021, p. 235). We are born again and again, transmigrating from one life and one body to another, forever doomed to become sick, age, and die, only to be born again and endure the sufferings of life over and over. Yoga was developed as a salvation story to help us escape from this cycle and achieve a blissful state of disembodied union with the divine through the purification of our perception and cognition. Because ignorance of our true nature was regarded as the source of this recurrent trap, the main aim of yoga was to help us disengage from our normal cognitive state and the sense impressions fed to us by our bodily senses that fool us into believing that the world of matter is one of ultimate importance.

The ontology underlying yoga makes a distinction between two entities, not the mind and body as in Western dualistic philosophies and theologies but rather between the mind– body complex and the soul. What we normally think of as the mind is, in this case, a kind of sixth sense, related to, if more complex than, the other senses, though still part of the changing and active material of the cosmos, often known as *prakr.ti*. Underlying this is the second element, the soul. Known variously as *purus. a, atman, ¯* or *j¯ıva*, it is unchanging, eternal, and not active in the world, forever pure and stainless and characterized by pure consciousness (Sarbacker 2021, p. 242). David White notes that "The term yoga is often used to designate the theory and practice of disengaging the higher cognitive apparatus from the thrall of matter, the body and the senses (including mind). Yoga is a regimen or discipline that trains the cognitive apparatus to perceive clearly, which leads to true cognition, which in turn leads to salvation, release from suffering existence" (White 2012, p. 7).

Yoga, then, is primarily the attempt to suppress the riot of sensory perceptions that cloud consciousness in order to let pure consciousness of the eternal soul (often equated with the Divine) shine through, just as the sun must set in order for the moon to shine through. "The self (*atman ¯* ) is likened to a driver of a chariot made of the mind and body of the person, whose purpose is to bring restraint and control to the vehicle. Through control of the chariot of mind and body the charioteer is able to recognize the source of their manifest consciousness in the unmanifest reality of the person (*purus.a*), the reality of brahman" (Sarbacker 2021, p. 65). Breath control, known as *pra¯n. ay¯ ama, ¯* serves as an essential practical technique for stilling the chaos of thought and turning the self's attention towards the soul. Five kinds of breath are sometimes enumerated (such as in the *Maitr¯ı Upanis.ad* 2.6), and one can ride the breath to reach divine consciousness or *moks.a* just as the offering of the sacrifice is sublimated by the smoke into heaven (Cowell 1935, p. 247). The *Maitr¯ı Upanis. ad* further discusses the control of the breath by instructing the aspirant to press the *pra¯n. a* into the central channel (*sus.umn. a¯*) in order to achieve a state known as isolation (*kaivalya*) (Sarbacker 2021, p. 67; Cowell 1935, pp. 269–70). Here, isolation is understood to be a separation of the soul from its conjunction with the material world such that it will not be endlessly reborn and instead will achieve salvation.

In our normal state, the soul is radically intertwined with the material world, and our ignorance of the true nature of our spiritual and material aspects keeps these two spheres intertwined (Sarbacker 2021, p. 103). The intricate process of "teasing out" our soul from its dalliances with the material world involves a six-limbed (*s. ad. anga ˙* ) or eight-limbed (*as.ta¯nga ˙* ) system of yoga, including breath control (*pra¯n. ay¯ ama ¯* ), withdrawal of the senses (*pratyah¯ ara ¯* ), meditation (*dhyana ¯* ), concentration (*dhara ¯ n. a¯*), inquiry (*tarka*), and contemplation (*samadhi ¯* ) as described in classical yoga texts such as Patañjali's *Yoga Sutras ¯* (Sarbacker 2021, p. 67). Another word often used to describe the goal of yogic practice is *amrtyu*, meaning "deathlessness." The conquest of death entails the absence of disease, and although there are differences of opinion about whether the body itself exists in a purified state in such a case, it does reflect an ancient desire to purge the body of disease and impurities. This claim about a benefit of expiation has played out in modern times as a belief that yoga can also provide medical and health benefits, releasing the body from dangerous toxins and other hazards to which it is otherwise susceptible through exposure to the outside environment.
