Hell-Bent (12 page)

She has the type of self-comfort that makes aging look attractive. In the middle of a talk about sex and reproduction to a room of three or four hundred young women, Emmy will suddenly spin off topic. “Oh, that reminds me, ladies. Kegels. These are very important. … You can live your whole life and not know about Kegels.” And suddenly, this lovely old grandmother will be lying on her back onstage, staring at the ceiling, dictating into the microphone: “I’m tightening my anus, now tightening my vagina, now tightening my anus,” and explaining to a room filled with women a quarter of her age the importance of vaginal grip for really high-quality sex.

“I take only the things that fit into my life as a modern Western woman,” she explains. “The yoga is tremendously powerful. But I believe in bliss in this world. I believe in using it to strengthen the self. I drink wine, which is, after all, only fermented grapes. I will enjoy a coffee. I do not think more is better. I do not believe in holding a headstand for hours.” She tells Esak she thinks doing repetitive deep backbends after the age of thirty-five is probably dangerous. “There is nothing to be gained by extremism. And that includes devotion to the self. There is nothing helpful in victimology.”

If she has an operational principle for her vision of yoga, that’s it. A Latvian who fled the German invasion of World War II, Emmy lost her
mother as a child. Lost, in the potentially more terrifying sense, as in her mother was still alive and Emmy actually lost her amidst the waves of occupying German then Russian troops. She was placed with a host family, arrived in the United States, and taught herself English while running the hosting desk at a YMCA in Chicago. She married. Her only son died of a massive sudden heart attack. She moved forward. Every year at teacher training, she leads the pain lecture. It is her area of expertise, although she never mentions her personal history. She does, however, make overt comparisons between the ability to distinguish and hold on to different bodily sensations and learning to manage your life. “Never hold on to the bad sensations. … I always put the things I have survived behind me or used them to make myself stronger. … Learning to recognize the differences in pain sensations is learning to recognize the difference between anything: musical notes, colors, emotions. It is essential, and if you are going to practice yoga, you must learn to recognize and distinguish. Do not allow yourself to be held hostage by anything you don’t need. Let it go.”

Emmy met Bikram when she was a fully formed adult in her forties, when he first came to America. She had practiced yoga before but was entranced by Bikram’s authenticity: not only as an Indian yoga master but also as a human. “He tells people what they know about themselves. And he has the charisma to make them own up to it instead of hiding.” The Bikram she met didn’t swear. He didn’t brag endlessly about himself. He never spoke about sex.
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“When I first met Bikram, he had opened his studio for about a week. This was in the basement of a bank. He taught four or five classes a day, and there was a room in back where he slept. … He was a real workhorse.” Although he never bragged about himself at this time, he did talk. And talk
and talk and talk. “Bikram would tell us, ‘Old yogi eat little, sleep little, talk little. Me, I
never
sleep,
never
eat, but make up for it in the talking!’” This Bikram was a storyteller and jokester. The classes he taught were difficult but passed quickly because he was constantly entertaining. In between postures, he’d name-drop the celebrities who’d stopped by earlier, he’d sing, tell stories his guru told him, or jump around the room, testing people’s postures by using their outstretched legs as a bench or pressing down on their shoulders, anything to entertain, to get a quick laugh, to prevent his students from remembering how uncomfortable they were.

But soon, the best technique he learned for holding attention was pointing out flaws. And so before her eyes, Emmy watched Bikram evolve into a master insult comic. If you were the target, you doubled down on effort, stung awake by his honesty. If you were anyone else in class, you laughed along with the group. He had an almost superhuman ability to detect effort levels—Bikram used to say all the time he spent avoiding work with his guru made him an expert in laziness—but effort wasn’t the only thing he picked on. A messy divorce, a flat chest, a set of stretch marks, an awkward haircut: Bikram would sense the weakness, identify the source, and pounce.

“But you see, he was like a terrier pup—all growls, no bite,” another very early practitioner, Bonnie Jones Reynolds, tells me. “He could get away with saying things nobody else could—not your mother, not your best friend—because he was a pup. He would make you laugh. And we just adored him for it. … You’d have famous actresses who he had just insulted bringing him cookies.” And as Emmy notes, people put up with it because he was usually right. “He really holds a mirror up to you. It can be uncomfortable to look at yourself. But he never flinches.”

In Beverly Hills, where idle bits of flattery were practically built into the local grammar, Bikram stood out as fearless. “It was the thing to do,” Bonnie remembers. “At least half the class was Hollywood stars. … Hot Lips from
M*A*S*H
got me to my first class, and once I was there, I hid the whole time behind Shirley MacLaine.”

The Hollywood stars brought their own adjustments to his teaching; Bikram learned to put swollen egos in their place. As more and more money flooded into his studio and as the entertainers gave way to superstar athletes,
and everyone demanded his time, Bikram gained certainty: he held himself apart, refusing all overture for private classes, his sense of self growing in a direct arms race with the egos of his fabulous newcomers.

“We’d have the Lakers coming to Beginning Class, and they were so tall, they’d have to bend down at an angle during all the standing postures,” another senior teacher from that era remembers. “But if they were five minutes late to class, Bikram would put them out. … This was while they were winning championships. Literally the most popular guys in town … Nobody else could do that.”

But that was because Bikram could get them to laugh. The same teacher remembers, “Bikram would work with Kareem’s father [this being Kareem Abdul-Jabar, captain of the Lakers at the time], and the old man loved him. He had the guy in stiches the whole time.”

When he did get serious, when his voice dropped, it was to talk about yoga. He believed in it completely. That it was his gift. That it could actually change the world in the only way the world could ever be changed: by incrementally altering each person who practiced with him for the better.

His class was a laboratory for transformation. Bonnie remembers a man brought in on a stretcher and propped against the wall. “Basically for weeks, someone would bring him in and prop him up. The poor guy would make any little movement he could in order to try to do the postures,” she laughs. “And that same guy, months later, was bouncing around like a kid.”

This was a Bikram fresh with the miracle—still glowing from his twelve-hour training sessions with Ghosh, from his work as a healer sitting with elderly clients, hand behind their head, coaching them to breathe. He would walk around the room, giving hands-on modifications. He would jump into postures at every opportunity to demonstrate. His body was impossibly powerful and bright, and he showed it off constantly—“Best advertising,” he’d say of his decision to teach class in a tiny Speedo. “This is what I do; this is what I sell.” It was a Bikram who, after class, would retire to the backroom of his studio to practice the advanced postures he never shared with students. A Bikram convinced that spreading the yoga was his mission and that it was the most important thing he could do for the world.

“The absolute maddest I ever saw him, and actually this was a bit
frightening at the time,” Jimmy Barkan, Bikram’s head of instruction for the late ’80s and early ’90s, says, “was when someone who was a regular student
skipped
class without telling him. I remember a woman who went away for two weeks without practicing, and Bikram was furious. He physically threw her out of class. ‘Where have you been?! Where have you been?!’ And he pushed her out by the neck. … But for the rest of us, it was a lesson in dedication. That was how much he cared. The yoga, having integrity to the yoga, it was everything to him.”

This Bikram was a one-man operation, manning his studio day in and day out. Bonnie remembers, “He was absolutely intent on giving those twenty-six postures to the world. There was this true loving intent. I mean, you simply couldn’t sit there like that—from eight A.M. to seven P.M.—unless you were dedicated.”

And it didn’t stop when class was over. “I remember going out to dinner one night in Miami, a big dinner party,” Barkan tells me, “and one lady’s father was there with arthritis. He was probably seventy-five years old, in real pain. And Bikram left with him, took him back up to his hotel room, and spent an hour and a half with him at nine P.M. at night in the middle of the dinner party. … You see, he felt like he had to, like it was his service. He couldn’t not heal if someone nearby needed it.”

“He thought everybody could benefit,” Bonnie says. “He’d say it to us a million times: ‘Never too late, never too old, never too sick to start all over again.’ It was a quote his guru said to him. I don’t think he envisioned the empire it would become. He didn’t plan it. He just wanted to give it to as many people as he could.”

The push to democratize the yoga, with the pull of maintaining its integrity, became Bikram’s biggest difficulty. To Bikram, who had suffered through incense burns and preadolescent tears as he strove to meet his guru’s demands, yoga was as fragile as it was powerful. The difference between a correct asana and silly stretch was one of minuscule degrees of intention. The power of Ghosh’s yoga came from its exactitude—in the focusing on specific alignments, on subordinating the spontaneous mind to an abstract form, of the unity between physical attributes and mental focus that was created if that exactitude was achieved.

It demanded that practitioners push themselves beyond what they thought was possible. But that, in turn, demanded that the physical alignments of the postures be carefully regulated. Pushing the wrong way—especially over time—causes injury. To demand intensity, the alignments of the postures had to fall within motions that would be difficult but not harmful to move into.

In a Lululemonized world, where yoga postures “should never hurt,” this focus on alignment simply doesn’t matter as much.
Practitioners who are taught never to
push themselves will only rarely push to the point of injury in even the most irregular alignment. Instead, each invents a subtly different but specific posture within the more generalized form. To Bikram, arriving after twenty-five years of dedication to his guru’s standard, that yoga was apostasy. It was hollow. A scam yoga that coddled American egos by refusing to push them beyond their comfort zones but still promised them the spiritual benefits of that struggle. To Bikram, to do a posture without a standard, without a form, and without precision was “cheating, shopping with no money.”

Thus the most difficult and uncomfortable of his alignments—such as locking the knee in standing postures and maintaining perfect stillness between postures—became the aspects he held to most ruthlessly. To adhere to their form became an essential aspect of his yoga.
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This left a contradiction: yoga for the masses, but yoga without modification. It was a contradiction that Bikram negotiated with two twin sayings: “Ninety-nine percent correct, one hundred percent wrong,” and its complement, “Try one percent the right way, get one hundred percent of the benefits.” The latter opened the benefits of the yoga up to the world, especially when applied to his twenty-six-posture sequence.
Everything in the sequence was
within the normal range of motion, nothing would cause
injury by itself, and by pushing toward the posture to the best of their abilities—even 1 percent—a practitioner would achieve the therapeutic benefits. The former ensured a focus on perfection, demanding forever an attention to detail. A posture that was 99 percent in alignment was insufficient. Only with total dedication to form, an almost unattainable 100 percent perfection of posture, where concentration knitted the mind to the body—with higher functioning baked to submission by heat—could a practitioner experience flickers of that elusive union.

This 99 percent wrong/1 percent right mentality created the classic Bikram dynamic. During class, internally, there is a perfectionism, a demand for an almost hostile conformity that works like metallurgy on the human form. Outside the hot room, externally, or from the teacher’s perspective, the yoga is compassionate, open, and tolerant. Every improvement is praised because every improvement is hard won. Bikram himself plays both roles, toggling in and out from the demanding voice inside your head to the encouraging coach on the outside: the strict disciplinarian and the loving healer.

“Sometimes,” Barkan tells me, “I think the worst thing that happened was he decided to hold his teacher trainings away from his regular classes. He used to teach everyone in one room right at Headquarters. His trainees lined up in the back, regular students off the street up toward the front. Then the students he was training would really see how caring he was during class. How compassionate he could be to someone elderly or obese or injured. Now his trainings are so large, he can’t do that. Everything is in isolation, in a hotel, in a tent, and the teacher trainees don’t see that side of him. … What they see is how hard he is on his teachers. Which he always has been—there is a hazing process, that’s part of his training from his guru—you force your teachers to do extreme amounts of yoga and push their limits. But teacher training isn’t what a general class is supposed to look like. … And so the message many teachers take away is—Bikram, tough, kill, hurt. They get all of the punishment, but see none of his love.”