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http://enlightenupthefilm.com

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LISA MULLINS: A new documentary film poses a recurring question: Why practice yoga? The answers are all over the map. Filmmaker Kate Churchill didn't need convincing. She'd been a yoga devotee for 7 years. Journalist Nick Rosen, on the other hand, was a yoga skeptic. And therein lay the seed that grew into the movie. The documentary is called “Enlighten Up!” It follows Nick Rosen's six-month investigation of yoga under the watchful camera-eye of Kate Churchill. She says the idea struck her as a natural for the movie.

KATE CHURCHILL: If we'd took someone who had never done yoga and we could go anywhere in the world and have a period of time to do it, what could happen? And I really thought that there would be something quite profound. I was convinced of it.

MULLINS: A lot of pressure, Nick, to do something quite profound.

NICK ROSEN: Yeah, there was a certain amount of pressure. I mean, when Kate asked me to do this, it was sort of like how could I say no? We're going around the world, we're going to make a film about yoga, and you might just be transformed in the process. Even without the transformation, it sounded like a really fun thing to do. So I couldn't say no.

MULLINS: Okay. So you met, and by the way, had you ever done yoga before?

ROSEN: I had done yoga maybe a couple of times, but certainly no serious practice before. I knew barely very, very little about it.

MULLINS: Well, it's interesting to watch how various people, especially here in the United States and then in India, personalize yoga. And I wonder, Kate, if you can tell us about a few stops along the way as you and Nick made your way finally to India? And actually, you know, one of the stellar characters – and I mean characters – here in the US who is practicing his own version of yoga is the wrestler Diamond Dallas Page. He promotes something called “Yoga for Regular Guys”, is that right?

CHURCHILL: That's right. Yeah. We met Diamond Dallas Page in Los Angeles, and Dallas was a find of Nick's. He was bound and determined to go meet DDP, as he's called. It was very different from all other yoga classes we had walked into. But Nick was really quite excited about meeting Dallas.

MULLINS: I can see why, Nick. Let's hear Diamond Dallas's yoga philosophy.

DIAMOND DALLAS: To sit around humming and the chanting? That's not what Yoga for Regular Guys is. Ours is about the workout, you know, and sweating your ass off. When you get to India and you've got some guy doing humming, I want you to walk up and blast him with the chair, and say, “Hey. That's what they do in yoga for Regular Guys.”

ROSEN: Where do the girls come into this thing?

DALLAS: Well, for me, to grab the guys there's got to be an elephant. And where yoga opens with ‘nomaste”, mine's more about “T and A”.

MULLINS: Nick, what did that mean to you?

ROSEN: Well, Yoga for Regular Guys was about as far from the whole sanctimonious spiritual yoga scene that you could get. But it also wasn't made perhaps as far as it seems. I mean, every aspect of Western Yoga – and by that I mean the sort of stretching with a spiritual component to it – really was very much about physicality and physical fitness and people working on their bodies, and you know, there's a whole very sort of materialistic, vain quality to yoga that people try to sort of talk around and act like it's a spiritual pursuit. But really, if it wasn't good for their abs, then would they really be doing it? I don't know. So you know, Yoga for Regular Guys really precipitated the materialistic quality of yoga.

MULLINS: So right there, Diamond Dallas Page was kind of the extreme of what you found here in the United States. I mean, not entirely -- and maybe Kate, you can speak to this -- but there is a great emphasis on what yoga does physically in making you fit?

CHURCHILL: Yeah. I think so. I mean, I think the attraction for Westerners is certainly physical, first and foremost, and many teachers will agree to that. We were told by a number of different teachers that they felt the spiritual studies came second, and that once people started doing the physical practice, they would become more curious.

MULLINS: All right. And then you guys eventually get to India, and one of the things you're greeted by is this.

CHURCHILL: So we had gone to Mumbai, and we had met Dr. Madan Khutaria, who is known as the international Guru of Giggling. The idea is that if you raise your spirits, then you can become spiritual and through laughter you can open yourself up. So they incorporate laughter with certain stretches and breathing, and it's their form of yoga that he's created.

ROSEN: Throughout, we were looking at the conflict – the apparent conflict between the physicality of yoga and the spirituality of yoga as practiced in the West, because they seem like very different themes. And I think that ultimately, you know, you can go to India to explore the spiritual side probably more effectively, but to have a yoga practice that is fulfilling on a physical and a mental level, I don't think you need to go to India. And I don't think it really matters what yoga style that you practice. You know, when I do practice yoga these days, which is very often, I go to a yoga class where right in the middle of it, they lapse into very transparently physical things like crunches and sit-ups. It's basically an ab workout in the middle of the yoga class. And I like it, you know? And at the end of the class, they sort of end it with a Sanskrit blessing. So whether these things go together, I think our explanation showed that the phenomenon of physical and spiritual together is very modern thing. But that doesn't matter. I think it's okay. It still works great.

MULLINS: All right. The film is called “Enlighten Up”. It opens tomorrow. Kate Churchill, filmmaker Nick Rosen – journeymen, as you probably both were. Thank you. Very nice to talk to you.

ROSEN: Thank you.

CHURCHILL: It's a pleasure to speak with you, Lisa.

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