Hell-Bent (19 page)

The result is disquieting.
Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran talks
about the essential dilemma this dichotomy produces in his patients. “Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.” Yoga offers an essentially secular materialistic pathway to stitching together this divide. By acknowledging and indulging in the sensations that line the edge, it gives us an opportunity to practice regulating the more bestial aspects of ourselves while also recognizing those areas beyond our control. It is a physiological serenity prayer.

Jill Bolte Taylor took a decidedly
less pleasurable route to this same realization. At thirty-seven, she experienced a massive stroke effectively wiping
out most of the characteristics we ascribe to self, including the ability to read, write, walk, talk, process emotions, or recall memories. In her book
Stroke of Insight,
she details the opportunity her recovery gave her:

The number one question that I am most frequently asked is, “How long did it take you to recover?” My standard response, and I don’t mean to be trite, is, “Recover what?” If we define recovery as regaining access to old programs, then I am only partially recovered. I have been very fussy this time around about which emotional programs I am interested in retaining and which ones I have no interest in giving voice to again (impatience, criticism, unkindness). What a wonderful gift this stroke has been in permitting me to pick and choose who and how I want to be in the world. Before the stroke, I believed I was a product of this brain and that I had minimal say about how I felt or what I thought. Since the hemorrhage, my eyes have been opened to how much choice I actually have about what goes on between my ears.

Losing access to the physical qualities hardwired inside her brain empowered her to differentiate and choose between them. This “learning to choose,” as Esak calls all yoga, gives us an opportunity to resolve Ramachandran’s dilemma: not as angels or as beasts alone, but as unified humans: where instead of feeling trapped by our animal spirits, we pay respect to their hoof stomping, but also understand the power we wield over them.

Back in the Real World

“Actually, I wouldn’t be surprised if someday lots of athletes use heat as a training tool,” Santiago Lorenzo explains, “just as athletes use altitude training or hypoxic tents now, heat acclimatization could provide a very real edge in the future. A powerful nonchemical way of boosting performance.”

It turns out while I was Backbending with Esak and Mary,
the Human Physiology Department of
the University of Oregon published the first scientific paper demonstrating that the benefits of heat acclimation carry
over to a cool environment. Santiago Lorenzo, the lead scientist in the study, is explaining to me the implications. He is excited. Unlike Susan Yeargin, with her background on the sidelines tending to heat stroke victims, Santiago is a former Olympic track and field athlete. He is used to pushing limits, comfortable with punishing workouts.

“We found seven percent increases in performance. Seven percent is a gigantic gain in competitive cycling.”

The study examined the performance of twelve trained cyclists after ten days of heat acclimation. The cyclists were tested in both hot and cold environments while their vital signs were measured by a complex rigging that looks something like the cross between a bicycle-powered airplane and an asthma inhaler on steroids. It turns out that compared to matched controls, the cyclists who exercised in heat improved almost every area of their performance in both hot and cold environments. They could go faster, harder, for longer. Just as important, these improvements were mirrored by corresponding changes to the cyclists’ physiology: increased blood plasma, increased maximal cardiac output, and increased power output at lactate threshold.

“In many ways, heat acclimatization is more practical than altitude training,” Santiago tells me. “And, at least in our study, produced more robust results.”

When I tell him about the yoga, it is the first time I don’t feel bashful. Indeed, he immediately gets it. “Yes, of course. I certainly don’t know anything about yoga, but I can absolutely see it increasing the athletic benefits.”

When I ask if the cardiac benefits are real, he is equally adamant. “Of course. You are stressing the cardiovascular system. It doesn’t matter if you are using a marathon, a stationary bike, or a yoga pose to get those results.”

He also immediately jumps to therapeutic implications. “It’s conceivable that this type of training could be used to give cardiovascular benefits to patients who can’t otherwise get them. Like patients with paralysis or other injuries that prevent them from exercising. It could give them a way of getting benefits when their bodies otherwise won’t allow it.

“Of course,” Santiago adds, “you have to be careful extracting too much from one study. Everything we did was in the safety of a lab. To get benefit
from heat acclimatization, you need to get your core temperature up. Which obviously carries inherent risk and requires caution.”

He’s of course right. It’s a modest study, in a highly controlled environment, certainly nothing that speaks to mental clarity or improvements to memory. But it’s no longer the unstudied area it was when I talked to Susan Yeargin. And hearing Santiago’s excitement instantly seals my decision. The researchers at the University of Oregon think they have discovered a radical new therapy for bringing cardiac benefits to the injured, but—just like the pain-conscious rehab pioneered by the Physicians Neck & Back Clinic—it’s something Bikram has been doing for the last forty years. Rather than wait for medical science to confirm or deny each aspect of the yoga, I decide it’s time to go to the source and see for myself. And so, throwing my common sense—and credit card statements—to the wind, I take a nine-week leave of absence from work and pony up the eleven thousand dollars to register for Bikram Yoga Teacher Training. It’s time to bend with the master.

Part IV
Like Kool-Aid for Water

Bikram Choudhury adjusting postures

“
We talked of everything
,” he said, quite transported at the recollection. “I forgot there was such a thing as sleep. The night did not seem to last an hour. Everything! Everything! … Of love, too!” “Ah, he talked to you of love?” I said much amused. “It isn’t what you think,” he cried almost passionately. “It was in general. He made me see things—things.”

—JOSEPH CONRAD,
HEART OF DARKNESS

The Outer Circle

The Fall 2010 Bikram Teacher Training is held on a peculiar belt of aging 1950s resort-hotels circling the I-5 superhighway in San Diego, known collectively as Hotel Circle. I say peculiar but mean wretched. The Hotel Circle concept seems to be the result of some quarantine movement in urban design. We will isolate you from all that is nice about our city, and you will pay extra for the experience because you will be at the mercy of your hotel for all your needs. It is a concept where everyone wins except the guest. Hotel Circle is not even particularly close to the airport. It was just deposited like some giant pile of contractor’s excrement along an otherwise unoccupied section of the interstate. The resorts themselves sit recessed from the access road like great concrete castles, all ringed by monstrous unfilled parking lots. There are no shops or restaurants along Hotel Circle Road. There is no nightlife. The ten-minute walk between each hotel says it all. It is a walk marked less by decay than desolation: a space for exactly nobody, built into each hotel’s design like a DMZ.

Within this wasteland, we stay at the Town and Country Resort and Convention Center.

Unlike some of the resorts on Hotel Circle, the Town and Country is very definitively a hotel in a senescent state: a few decades past its prime, a little less than one decade ahead of offering an hourly rate. You can still see vestiges of what must have been a proud past—at one point, a family thought it spoke highly enough of them to remark that it was family-run. It is massive in ambition. A tangle of underweeded wending gardens, bungalows, drab conference rooms, shitty chandeliers, and overbleached swimming pools. At this point in its devolution, size is its only draw. If you are trying to host a large group on a bargain basis, overinvite for a wedding/bar mitzvah, the T&C is your place. The staff is unfailingly polite and earnest and looks just similar enough that it makes me wonder how large the original T&C family was and whether or not there was a founder’s instinct toward brood. There is an eccentric’s whimsy, something of a shuttered carnival: bellhops and room service boys pedal around on bicycle-powered carts, trolley cars zip around carrying luggage with drivers who never miss an opportunity to stick a head out to wave hello. But the eccentricity is mostly obscured by a feeling of drab decay, where every curtain is slightly sun-bleached, every carpet only 80 percent clean, and paint flecks collect in the crevices of every wall.

As time goes on, we will come to know the Town and Country very well. We will know where stray gardeners go to get high. We will know which portraits are repeated in every third room and which ice machines clog when pushed too hard. We will uncover the pattern of the rotating specials at each of the five themed restaurants and coordinate our visits to take advantage. We will learn the life cycle of the hotel’s magnetic keys and make friends with the bicycling boys who come to unlock our doors after they demagnetize. There will be mini-wars with the bitchy grounds-keepers who complain about yoga mats hanging from the balconies and awkward birthday parties for old Mexican maids who almost assuredly loathe us and our college-dorm attempts at cookery. Nine weeks is way too long to spend at any one hotel. And the T&C is not any one hotel; it is a hotel going through a prolonged, likely terminal, “rough patch.” But like
an old madam, worn to the point of authenticity, completely self-assured for what she is, the Town and Country actually seems to gain some dignity over our stay. I leave with a grudging respect, somewhat influenced by the fact that upon checking out, I find its aged system for tracking room service charges has awarded me a couple hundred bucks in free meals.

Flexible travel dates and a cheap fare bring me to San Diego a day early, but after investigating the T&C and evaluating its merits, I decide to stay at an adjacent hotel along the circle. So on Day One, I find myself trudging along the otherwise empty Hotel Circle sidewalk to my home for the next nine weeks. When I get to the periphery of the Town and Country, I notice a guy with a huge rolling suitcase and two bursting bags trudging along similarly. One of his bags is full of bottled water; the other contains a juicer. Bingo. When he struggles to lift the suitcase over the curb, I break into a sprint to help him. I want to make friends.

It turns out his name is Daniel, he is from London, he has been here three days, staying, like me, at a hotel on the other side of the circle. We walk slowly across the giant Town and Country parking lot, discussing the unknowns of the next nine weeks. I am enormously relieved to find Daniel sane. One of the first things he tells me is “I don’t know why I like this yoga. I can’t barely explain why I am here. All I know is it makes me feel great when I do it on a regular day and makes me feel like shit when I do it hungover, which means I don’t drink nearly so much anymore. Which is something I really needed to do.”

The closer we get to registration, the more potential yogis I see. The men: all thin, gauntly muscular faces, stick arms, thick legs. The women: squeezed into tight jeans or in sundresses, weird webbed tattoos peeking out along shoulders or down arms. Everyone: dragging enormous suitcases, faces a little unsure about the plunge we are about to take, standing surprisingly silent, occasionally making awkward conversation.

Then we are given room keys. Amazingly, and thanks entirely to my impulsive last-minute registration, I am given a double room all to myself. I was the very last person to register for training, and there is no one to pair me off with.

First Principles

Soon after, all 380 of us are gathered together for orientation. Immediately we are told Bikram will not be attending. Immediately, it becomes mind-drubbingly dull. The room, with its plastic chairs, spare decorations, and pull-down PowerPoint screen seems to be channeling a Holiday Inn conference center. Instead of Bikram in the flesh, we have a stage with three cheaply framed portraits wreathed in flowers: one of a young Bikram straddling a skinned tiger; one of his guru, Bishnu Ghosh; and one of his guru’s guru, Paramahansa Yogananda.

Our orientation consists of a parade of speakers wearing headset microphones, all slightly bored with the information they are imparting, all pacing before us. We learn the schedule for the next nine weeks, as simple and all-encompassing as basic training: a morning yoga class, an afternoon lecture, an evening yoga class, and then a night lecture. In the cracks, we are responsible for finding food, sleeping, and memorizing the official Bikram Yoga “dialogue”—a forty-five-page transcript of a single Bikram class we have to be able to recite in order to graduate. We learn that under no circumstances are we to leave the hot tent during class. We learn that all Teacher Training staff are unpaid, serving their nine weeks as service to Bikram. We are told repeatedly that the single best thing we can do to enjoy Teacher Training is to hold no expectations.