Enlighten Up! A Skeptic’s Journey Through the World of Yoga

Enlighten Up begins with a big question: Can yoga transform a person’s life? Can a total beginner achieve a spiritual awakening? Director Kate Churchill wanted to find out the answer to that question, but she was no beginner: as a committed, daily practictioner of yoga for seven years at the start of the project, she needed to find a test subject, a guinea pig. Ideally, a person who had never practiced yoga before, perhaps never even considered yoga before, and immerse him or her in the world of yoga for six months.

It wasn’t long before she found her subject: a young man, named Nick Rosen, who is perfect for the project in almost every way. In addition to meeting all the above criteria, he’s athletic and thus up for the substantial physical challenges ahead, and he has the questioning habits of a skeptic. In fact, he’s a journalist, and one who exemplifies the best qualities of the profession: curiosity, intelligence, a willingness to explore any subject in depth, a fact-based sensibility, and an open attitude towards whatever answers he may find.

And Nick has one additional point in his favor: he’s unemployed. Unemployed enough that spending six months working on yoga full-time doesn’t sound like such a bad prospect.

So the journey begins. Nick is granted a free hand, more or less, to choose the direction the research will take. “Since Nick was a journalist,” Churchill told me in an interview in San Francisco some weeks ago, “I told him to take on the project as if he were writing a long story.” At first Nick seeks out all the various flavors of yoga to be found in NYC, and then he ventures beyond the city to study in other places in the United States; ultimately, he goes to India to study with the likes of Pattabhi Jois, and is granted an audience with him and, later on, with BKS Iyengar, among other lesser-known gurus.

It’s these lesser-known gurus and their sometimes kooky approaches to yoga that cause the most interesting tension between Churchill and Nick. She expected that Nick, as a journalist, would want to see all the same yogis she would. That was largely true, but at times Nick surprises her — sometimes unpleasantly. Whereas Churchill takes Nick to see the creators of a highly spiritual type of yoga, Jivamukti Yoga, Nick takes her to LA, where he studies, for what seems to be a single day, with the former pro wrestler Diamond Dallas Page — a guy’s guy who makes yoga appealing for other “dudes” by putting well-built “babes” in his classes, positioning them in front of the men (to improve the view), and pairing the traditional salutation ”Namaste” with “T&A.”

Oy vey.

Kate’s frustration really erupts when Nick takes her crew to check out so-called “Laughing Yoga” — a practice that consists of breathing exercises, stretching, and forced laughter that doesn’t remain forced for long. Nick kept a daily journal about the project, and in the film he reads portions of it in voice-over. About the Laughing Guru, Nick merely writes: ”Kate isn’t laughing.” Soon we see her confessing to the camera, half in tears, that she’s just sick of yoga at this point.

But that’s just the low point of a fruitful journey, because Nick is entirely serious about his project. Of the many gurus he studies with, some are exceptionally kooky and some are a tad unwelcoming, but most are very appealing, and some he studies with for weeks at a time.

One of most appealing of them all is a guru living on the big island of Hawaii: Norman Allen. It’s hard to describe this man, but if you can imagine Cornell West as a Zen master teaching yoga, and farming on the side, you’d have a pretty good idea what Allen is like: an exacting guru who is given to slightly enigmatic pronouncements, jazzy riffs on the nature of man, and outbursts such as: “You know what you need to do? Go fuck yourself!” Of course, that latter was a friendly joke with a serious moral lesson wrapped up in it.

Does Nick acheive a spiritual awakening? Not necessarily; Nick himself characterizes the project as a failure on that score. But it’s obvious that the experience has had a profound impact on him all the same — in the end he changes his life dramatically, becoming open to parts of himself that he was closed to before. “It’s difficult to assess how much we ourselves have changed,” Churchill said to me, in response to Nick’s claim, “but outside people can see that: they’re the ones who recognize the difference.” So perhaps yoga can transform a life after all, even in just six months.

Enlighten Up is highly recommended, and it’s playing at the Embarcadero Cinemas from 5/1. Trailer here; tickets here.