I practice Iyengar yoga. Yoga is a discipline. It is grounded in a set of teachings about the body and the mind. What this practice has to do with spirituality is, for me, an open question.

There is no question about one thing: to do yoga in America today is to make a statement. Doing yoga says that you are young and flexible, or maybe just that you are older and determined. You care about more than “just exercise.” You, and more than 15 million other people, are in recovery from a steady diet of aerobics or running, or too much time spent with re-runs of Sex and the City. Even those who don’t do yoga will gesture vaguely toward the hope that they “should” do yoga, or “get back to” yoga. It is a $5.7 billion dollar industry, with more than 70,000 teachers. The old days of yoga practitioners wearing their tie-dyed T-shirts to the food co-op seem long gone.

I do Iyengar yoga. Not Ashtanga, or Bikram, or the oh-so-generic “Vinyasa” yoga. Naming your yoga is a statement of identity. It situates you as part of a yoga denomination, with a very particular set of doctrines about the way yoga should be practiced. To do Iyengar is very different than joining into the “flow” of Vinyasa classes, where things go quickly, and sun salutations mix with twists and backbends. There, you might get some music to set the pace—a little Native American flute, perhaps a sitar-inflected hip hop mix, as the teacher tells you to “do what feels good to you.” I’ve even done Oms with Amy Winehouse moaning along. (I’ll admit, I kind of liked it.) But none of that can be heard in the stolid silence of Iyengar classes. There you find no music, no dancing through a class with your individual flow. You don’t do what “feels good.” You do what is needed, as you launch into an entire class of backbends, or perhaps an hour and a half spent perfecting triangle pose.

As avowed atheist, with only a tiny inclination toward sentimental humanism, I haven’t had much interest in the yoga sutras or the various books of wisdom that circulate in the yoga world. I’m dubious about collections of yoga poetry or daily mediations. (Although I do have a real fondness for the title of one of those “wisdom” books, which offers a fine bit of Buddhist wariness: After The Ecstasy, the Laundry.) When I challenge my body, quiet my mind, and pay attention to the state of things—this brings me a kind of joy. It is a different joy that what I feel when drinking wine with my friends, and different, too, than the joy of teaching a good class or holding a child’s hand. But a spiritual joy? I liked it when we called that poetry. Or happiness.

I do Iyengar yoga, and as such I am part of a long genealogy. Yoga is a spiritual tradition, thousands of years old, with a complex history intertwined with the development of Indian religious traditions. Americans were fascinated with their understandings of “Hindoo” practices from the mid-19th century onward. Emerson and Thoreau both eagerly read as much as they could about Hinduism. As one yoga history puts it, Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers “stacks quotes from the Bhagavad-Gita, like cordwood, and recommends it as highly as the Bible.”

Modern posture-based yoga, however, emerged alongside of the US and European physical culture movement of the late 19th century, which associated moral health with physical health, including body-building and gymnastics. The YMCA was a global influence on the early development of this model of intense, individualized focus on athletic health for the masses. The YMCA was big in India, and it had a real influence on yoga’s modern development. In 1905 bodybuilder Eric Sandow traveled to India to promote physical culture; by that time, he was, according to Mark Singleton, “already a cultural hero.”

While Indians were embracing physical culture along the Western model, they were also embracing and re-imagining yoga into a form of nationalist pride and anti-imperialist cultural production. As we might imagine, there were competing schools and approaches, but most shared the sense that India needed to re-energize its ancient traditions with a vital awakening of the (male) body. At this point, several sages also began to export their own visions of the practice of yoga to the West. Some, like Vivekananda, taught breathing exercises along with philosophical lectures, while others introduced the few simple postures associated with hatha yoga in India.

It was only in the 1920s that Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi) introduced a version of yogic “muscle control,” which drew on the metaphysics of the American New Thought movement and the bodily postures of European bodybuilding as well as Hindu traditions. Yogananda told his followers that this practice offered “the highest possible degree of mental, physical, and spiritual well-being at the minimum expenditure of time and effort.” The Indian sage already understood the efficiency obsessions of his American audience.

I practice Iyengar yoga. The Iyengar style of yoga comes from the teaching of B. K. S. Iyengar, one of the most influential yogis in the world. He is now 92, and he was already an extraordinary practitioner in the 1930s. (Here is a 1938 practice video.) His innovation was to slow down the yoga practice, and to demand the most profound and particular attention to detail.

Iyengar-style teachers will teach the poses deliberately, slowly. As an advanced student, when I go to class, I know I will be asked to hold the pose for a long time while carefully attending to alignment: the hands perfectly spaced, the pelvis balanced, the “three points” of the feet positioned evenly on the earth. The teacher may well explain the exact angle for the correct positioning of the foot in a standing pose or how to do camel pose by curling your upper back, right at T4 (for the initiated, that’s the 4th thoracic vertebrae).

These perfected bodily alignments are not achieved easily, however, and Iyengar yoga is known for its students’ enthusiastic embrace of an impressive array of props. There are blocks that extend the reach, and belts to tighten splaying body parts, and blankets and blocks and metal folding chairs, even ropes hanging from hooks in the walls. All of this can make the average Iyengar studio appear vaguely like a set-up for an S&M session, albeit with big windows and cheery lights.

B. K. S. Iyengar was still a boy when modern hatha yoga began to become popular in India. He was a student of Krishnamacharya, the famous founder of the “Mysore school” that taught a vigorous form of yoga to young Brahmins. Iyengar eventually went to teach in Pune, a provincial capital in Western India, quite distant from the elite and insulated culture of the Mysore Palace. In Pune he taught students who were far removed from the young, flexible boys who had been the core of the Mysore tradition under Krishnamacharya.Working with non-adepts, Iyengar eventually started to slow down the practice, and to use the props for which he became famous.

From here, there is a longer story that could be told about the embrace of yoga in the West, and the development of competing systems like that of Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga yoga. (He and Iyengar soon became global stars and serious rivals.) Iyengar was a much admired yoga teacher in India in the 1940s, but he became the exemplar of modern yoga for the West when he published Light on Yoga in 1966. That book quickly became the standard reference, bringing yoga to a new generation of Americans and Europeans. In 2004, Time declared Iyengar to be one of the most influential people in the world. The full and rather remarkable history of Iyengar’s life and his global influence cannot be adequately recounted here. It is told elsewhere, including in Iyengar’s autobiography Iyengar: His Life and Work.

I practice Iyengar yoga. Just as surely as it says something about what happens when I walk into class, this statement locates me firmly in the social order of the yoga world. In that world, the Ashtanga yogis are the track stars and the class presidents. They glide through conferences, with shoulders sculpted by sun salutations, looking lithe and confident. The Bikram folks are purified by their steamy practice rooms. I’m pretty sure the phrase “hot yoga” wasn’t meant as a pun, but it’s hard to avoid the association: these yogis look good, and they wear excellent, color-coordinated spandex. The Anusara yogis are lovely, emotionally open souls who are destined to run the bake sales that raise money for children’s charities. The Iyengar folks like to think of ourselves as more intellectual and precise. For everybody else, we’re more like the kids who stay home on Saturday night, carefully searching for flaws in the design of Klingon war ships.

For me, Yoga in the West began when I showed up at Patricia Walden’s studio in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the mid-1980s. Walden was not yet the yoga superstar she would become when she made Yoga Journal’s Yoga for Beginners blockbuster videos. She was, however, an amazing teacher, and I knew it. Nonetheless, I developed slowly as a yoga student. It was a hit or miss relationship for a long while. I would go to a class, try to do some yoga at home, watch Patricia’s tapes once in a while. I liked yoga—liked it well before Madonna or Gwyneth or Sting. But I was busy living my 20s and then my 30s, and consistency wasn’t my strong point: who had time?

Eventually, and for many reasons, I developed into a serious student with a daily yoga practice. I began to pay attention to the things that happened on the mat: how my body worked in this pose or that. When my mind wandered. When I gave up, and why. I struggled with poses—particularly with my bête noire, backbends. And I struggled, too, to figure out how I was supposed to get better at backbends if I was somehow also supposed to be “non-attached.” And, finally, in the middle of all that attention and struggle, I found my teacher.

I do Iyengar yoga and my teacher is John Schumacher. To name and claims one’s teachers is a common practice among serious yogis, a sign of respect. As a professor, I’m very impressed by this. For me, claiming John is also a statement about commitment; I’ve spent ten years in his classes, and I’m not going anywhere. John, however, is not my guru. He doesn’t do guru. And that’s one reason he’s remained my teacher; I don’t do guru either. What I do is listen and learn. And practice. And practice some more. And again the next day.

John is a particular kind of teacher, one who says relatively little about yoga philosophy directly, channeling pretty much everything through the poses themselves. Funny, sardonic, a little bit reserved, he is brilliant at structuring a class sequence. He demands attentiveness, and he offers attentiveness in turn. He also offers correction and advice, helping all of us avoid injury and commit to our practice. In the remarkably demanding hours I spend in his class, I learn a great deal, but my emotional state is usually a strange combination of fearless jubilance and despair of my own inadequacy. (Iyengar himself is famously a hard ass; don’t let his winsome smile fool you.) John is a generous presence but a hard teacher. He is not a warm and fuzzy cheerleader for my empowerment. He does not begin class by reading a yoga sutra or end it by reading a poem. I am deeply grateful all of these things.

See, I don’t want to be part of a yoga world of happy talk about unending potential and perfect happiness. I don’t have much time for the kind of self-impressed platitudes that give yoga a bad name. Like so many of the secular, health-oriented, somewhat prideful members of my clan, I do yoga to quiet my brain, not to fill it with nonsense. And yet nonsense abounds. Last month, I dropped in on a class at another studio. As class began, the teacher offered her thoughts about the goodness of the world and its benevolence toward us. “If you just reach out with your intention,” she said sagely, “the universe will rise to meet you half-way.” I almost walked out. The earthquake in Japan had happened the day before.

A few weeks ago, John also took the time to offer some thoughts. There is generally an opportunity at the beginning of class for us to ask questions, but these mostly involve things like where to put your elbow in a seated twist. This time, someone asked a question about the meaning of a yoga sutra. The sutra (II:3) states that “clinging to life” is an obstacle, “a pain-bearing obstruction.” In response, John said that “clinging to life” does not refer to what we do when we fight off an attacker or get surgery for cancer. Instead, clinging is the refusal to accept the reality of our own deaths, not just intellectually or abstractly, but fully and profoundly. To avoid clinging is to avoid the mistakes we make, both quotidian and profound, when we live without a recognition—an embrace—of our own mortality

If this sounds like the yoga version of The Bucket List (or, worse, Tim McGraw’s maudlin country hit, “Live Like you were Dying”), it wasn’t. The point is that the practice of attentiveness—the fundamental practice that yoga cultivates—should lead us to contemplate the full reality of our life, which includes its inevitable end. As the yogi Richard Freeman puts it, “Yoga is a rehearsal for death.” That is the universe rising up to meet you.

For me, this discussion was a rare moment when I had some inclination of what “yoga spirituality” might mean, particularly for someone who doesn’t actually believe in spirituality. In this version, there is no promise of health or happiness. There is only our embrace of reality, in both its quiet joys and its suffering. We recognize ourselves as part of the universe, and we accept that universe’s fundamental indifference to us. Then we see what flows from that. I suspect that this embrace of death, and life, doesn’t arise from an act of will or from reading the right books. Maybe, though, it comes from the act of the placing one’s feet in exactly the right alignment, and paying attention.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a spiritual person.” This from a man I’d phoned as my expert witness on spirituality, Ray, a pastor I’d grown to adore and admire during my stint undercover at his church. “I don’t even like to say I’m religious.”

Well, great. When I’d emailed to see if Ray had any free time to tell me what spirituality was, he had kicked me a definition that lit up a rope of lights to the David Foster Wallace Kenyon College commencement address I so loved, and that connection had made me think he’d have answers.

The Kenyon address seemed to offer the antidote to the alienations of modern experience represented in such delectable detail in Wallace’s books—our love affairs with screens, the cognitive dissonance we construct to live with the senseless nightmares of existence: our appetites, pouring ceaselessly into the unfillable emptiness inside; the irrepressible feeling that we’re forever alone. The Kenyon address said, leverage up on something greater than yourself to meet those forces with a beam of compassion.

“What is spirituality?” Ray had written to me. “In short, the non-physical. Being spiritual means living for something larger than yourself.”

The echo there revived the hopeful feeling I’d had writing In the Land of Believers—that evangelical Christians and the rest of us were more the same than different.

But on the phone, Ray resisted talking to me about spirituality. Christianity, he told me, was “more like a relationship. Like the one I have with my wife. It’s a commitment to Jesus Christ. It doesn’t mean I get everything that I want. There’s certainly been a lot of days and a lot of heartache, but I tell you I don’t know how people live without it, all alone. He never promises to take me out of pain, but He does promise to go with me.”

God’s thereness and its relation to spirituality—perhaps I’m the last person who should try cracking this stuff. I don’t believe in any supernatural-type situation, no kind god with soft hands or angry god with whirling hair, no presence, no powerful witch with the face of a spider, no pulsing orb that knows our secrets and accepts us still, and even after two years undercover at Jerry Falwell’s church I still don’t even know what anyone means by spirituality. Once, when I rolled my eyes at his friendly invitation to watch a Christmas movie starring Nicholas Cage, my stepdad told me I wasn’t a spiritual person. What was that supposed to mean? That I was a snob? I talked too much? Couldn’t experience mindless pleasure? Was I a cynic? A bad hugger?

When people tell me they are spiritual, first I think of healing crystals and astral charts, a lock of white hair tied to the end of a stick, drum circles and dreamcatchers, the cosmic juice between us all, man, synchronicity as a sign of some kind of, like, churning force!

Shaking off the stardust, I turn to thinking that the Spiritual Person probably has cobbled together a set of private beliefs they don’t really feel like explaining. After one of my best friends almost died in a car accident, he custom designed a personal program based on the Beatitudes, Buddhism, and Emerson. It verges on genius, and it is a spirituality. Religion is a form you sign; spirituality is ideas. But if we each get to decide what spirituality means, what the freak is spirituality?

See how terrible I am at this? Spirituality is one of those annoyingly flexible words like freedom, a blankness that invites our self-centered definition to scribble itself all over the big dry erase board of its name.

In Andre Comte-Sponville’s excellent morsel of meditation, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, he writes that “we are finite beings that open onto infinity.” That’s better. Let me request that you suppress the word spirituality for two seconds, and instead invite you to open onto the ethereal atmosphere between us, weather, vibes, the forever stuff, our flickering understanding of what connects us, and what connects us all to eternity. Sometimes it’s there, locking us into all the life around us, calling us to unbind the narrow corset of our own needs and serve the world with compassion, to transcend, to tap into what Wallace called the “mystical oneness”; sometimes it’s just us with our one aging slab of flesh and our bag of snack carrots and the flat screen in front of us.

Two questions: what does that unreliable connection thing do for us? And does a person need a higher power to stabilize it?

As far as I can tell, the main reason for finding a practice whereby you can refresh your connection to the forever stuff is that it sustains us in the bad places, and it helps us be resiliently our best compassionate selves, no matter what the circumstances. I struggle with this! Sometimes I feel downright selfish! Sometimes, when a person asks for a bite of my granola bar, this evil little voice inside says, What about ME?

The practice: I’m not about to throw down and say that religious people are any better at knifing their inner troll than the rest of us, but I can say that most of the people I’ve known who can levitate over their rolling moods and be the person they believe they ought to be practice religion. Ray was this way. He held out the same warm hand to everyone, always. When I told him I’d lied to him about being a Christian so that I could write a book about his church he was shocked, asked a few questions, sipped his soda, and forgave me. Maybe he could tell me about spirituality. Maybe he was the most spiritual person I’d ever known.

According to him, he wasn’t. But could he tell me—what was a spiritual person?

“A spiritual person is the searcher, the pioneer looking for the land of milk and honey. I’ve found the land of milk and honey, but I do have responsibility there. It’s hard! I’m not a robot. But when you’re committed, it’s easy to forgive. It’s easy to do the right thing.”

Can I extrapolate from this? Can I make an evangelical Christian’s version of spirituality approximate an atheist’s? I’ll try: maybe we can say that spirituality is the system we design to make doing the right thing feel easy.

Despite his well known status as a staunch—if friendly—atheist, the radio producer and iconic black-framed-glasses wearer Ira Glass has used his program This American Life to delve into people’s spiritual lives with a sensitivity unique in media coverage of religion. As specific and eclectic as its stories are, the show’s frequent treatment of religious subjects seems to bring out in Glass a desire for transcending particular beliefs that approaches an orthodoxy all its own.

Beginning with the premiere episode of the program that would become This American Life, broadcast on November 17, 1995, Glass framed his new enterprise in explicitly nostalgic terms. Even the show’s name—at the time it was called Your Radio Playhouse—self-consciously tweaked the anachronism that storytelling on the radio already evokes. Complete with tinny jazz music that sounded as though it were playing on vinyl, Your Radio Playhouse was every bit as backward-looking in its appeal as Charles Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour had been sixty years before. And Glass, likewise, used this first episode of his fledgling program to deliver a sermon of sorts.

“One great thing about starting a new show,” he says in his distinctive rapid-fire nasal delivery, “is that it’s an unchartered little world…”

No one hearing my words is saying, “Remember that show back when it used to be good?” Actually, that force, that human desire to say that, to say “I was there when the show was good,” is so strong, is so basic to who we are as people, that I know that, two minutes into the new show, there are one or two people out there who are saying, “Sure, I used to listen to that show in the first thirty seconds, back when it was good.”

It is a cheeky, knowing sort of monologue, full of stammers and reversals that at the time—before Glass’s awkward delivery became the lingua franca of public broadcasting—would have made most radio professionals cringe. But it establishes immediately a mode of storytelling perfectly suited to the kinds of spiritual narratives This American Life would tell.

For the first act of this first episode, Glass offers something of an upended conversion tale, the story of a young man lost and found. “Kevin Kelly spent most of his twenties wandering around Asia,” Glass explains. “He was a freelance photographer. And he found himself photographing a lot of religious ceremonies. He found himself drawn to religious ceremonies. He was confused about what he believed.” Kelly’s voice then comes in:

I would get twisted and caught up, and these things were sort of in the background, consuming me. And actually I found that I could think about little else, for many many months. That behind all that I was doing there was always this unresolved question: Was God real? If he was real, then how could we ignore him? And if we were trying to not ignore him, what would we do?

While pondering these questions, Kelly finds himself in Jerusalem, where he falls asleep inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on the night before Easter. When he wakes up, he is convinced of two things: first, that Jesus Christ died and rose again, and, second, that he has just six months to live. From that moment on, he explains, he acts as if his days are numbered. When Kelly’s story reaches its climax, it is six months later. After living daily with the feeling that his death was near, he returns to his parents’ home to spend what he thinks will be his last night on earth.

I went to bed that night—which was a very difficult thing to do, because I was fully prepared at that point never to wake up again. I had been praying, I’d gotten everything arranged. At that point I’d fully gone through in my own mind, my own soul, all the things I might have regretted, and I had righted as many of those as I thought I could, through letters, and I was prepared, as much as anybody could be prepared to die.

The next twenty seconds of airtime seem as orchestrated for spiritual uplift as any of Charles Fuller’s old hymns could be. As Kelly speaks, long breaks follow each word, letting the emotion he feels come through.

And, the next morning I woke up… And… The next morning I woke up and it was as if… The next morning I woke up and it was as if I had the entire, my entire life again… I had…The next morning I woke up and I had my entire life again… I had my future again.

Like Glass’s framing of the episode, it is a poignantly awkward narrative, suspended often by silence, second-guessing, and repetition, all of which serve to heighten the drama of the telling.

“There was nothing special about the day. It was another ordinary day,” Kelly concludes. “I was reborn into ordinariness. But…” Here Kelly’s voice breaks audibly, as if he is fighting tears until finally he lets out the story’s closing words with a small sob: “What more could one ask for?”

After a beat, Glass provides a coda about what became of Kelly. “Nearly two decades after that happened,” Glass says, “Kevin Kelly is now the executive editor of a magazine about the future, Wired Magazine.” Like a puzzle piece dropped into place, identifying Kelly this way highlights the apparent contradiction of the editor of a forward-looking technology publication choosing to tell this story on a self-consciously nostalgic radio show. Only then does the listener realize that the conversion narrative just experienced through Kelly was not what was expected. As framed by Glass, Kelly’s story is not of a conversion into belief, but out of it, a rebirth “into ordinariness.” Kelly begins with confusion, finds faith, and then moves beyond it. The narrative arc of religion on This American Life may run through particular beliefs, but it ends with the non-sectarian sanctification of the everyday.

In this and in other religion stories featured on This American Life, it is clear that Glass is not after Come-to-Jesus moments. The point of Kelly’s story was not to tell how a young man found God. Rather, Glass creates radio experiences that, in current NPR lingo, have become known as a “Driveway Moments”: suspenseful epiphanies that forge such a bond through the airwaves that the listener cannot pull away. As explained on NPR.org: “What is a Driveway Moment? You’re driving home, listening to a story on NPR. Suddenly, you find yourself in your driveway. Rather than turn the radio off, you stay in your car to hear the piece to the end.” A Driveway Moment occurs when one wants nothing more than to be alone with the radio.

As ordered as any liturgy, This American Life leads inevitably to this kind of communion. As Glass once explained:

This is the structure of the stories on our show: There’s an anecdote, a sequence of events. This happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. And the reason why that’s powerful… is because there is something about the momentum, especially in a medium where you can’t see anything… that you just want to know what happens next. It’s irresistible…

Then, there’s the part of the story where I make some really big statement like, “There’s something about the kindness of strangers.” Because you can’t just have an anecdote. It’s got to mean something. You can have people read the little story from the Bible, but unless you tell them, you know, the lesson they’re trying to draw from it, it’s not a real sermon.

A Driveway Moment is a perfect cocktail of anecdote and meaning. Considering that the creation of such moments has also become a measure of a radio program’s success, it may be that while broadcast technology promises to relieve one type of isolation, it simultaneously increases another. “The mission of public broadcasting,” Glass once said, is “to tell us stories that help us empathize and help us feel less crazy and less separate.” It may be that stories of other people’s lives can be told so well that we never need to leave the car to hear them.