Authors: Benjamin Lorr
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Aka What I Learn about Bikram from the Internet
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Speaking for them all on the mid-1980s TV show the
New Age Connection,
we have the young Charlie Sheen. Bikram is his “mentor, guru, teacher, and friend,” says Sheen. The yoga not only provides calm and focus, which help with his baseball, but Bikram is also beginning to teach him something more intangible and elemental. “He puts a mirror in front of us. … He teaches us god realization … or how to be human.”
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A brief sampling of a much lengthier list
: Hall of Fame basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (“I practice Bikram Yoga. … There is no way I could have played as long as I did without it”), ultraendurance runner Dean Karnazes (“I must admit, it’s amazing how something so torturous can leave you feeling so good”), tennis player Andy Murray, currently ranked number three in the world (“It has helped me a lot with my fitness and mental strength”),
NBC News
Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Bob Arnot (“I was taking twelve to sixteen Advil a day for pain. Almost by accident I tried Bikram Yoga. … I have been virtually pain-free for two years”), Jennifer Aniston (“My legs got leaner. My arms got strong. I’ve maybe even grown a half inch from aligning my spine”), Elle Macpherson (“Bikram is great for detoxification and circulation”), and Jenny McCarthy, who decided to satisfy her Bikram needs by building a studio in her garage.
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And as anyone who has ever experienced the growing trapped anxiety of soaking through their undershirt during a meeting can attest, sweat is effective only if it is evaporated. In conditions where evaporation is precluded, such as a wool suit jacket or a rainy day—or an artificially humid room—the sweat has a much more blunted effect. In these conditions, the body continues to increase its rate of sweat in the hope of cooling, but instead of reducing temperature merely loses more fluid.
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Reference points from my own practice
: During the most strenuous postures, my heart rate rises to 90 to 95 percent of maximum heart rate (around 175 beats per minute). Just as with the much newer exercise fad/phenom of high-intensity interval training, maximum effort is sustained for brief periods (ten seconds to one minute, depending on the specific posture) and then completely released for an equivalent period of rest. My average heart rate for the ninety-minute class is roughly 60 to 70 percent maximum heart rate (130 bpm): or exactly in the sweet spot known as “Fat Burn” on elliptical machines across America. It is important to note that doing the exact same series of postures without external heat produces, for me, an average heart rate of only 45 to 50 percent and spikes that reach 65 to 70 percent, thus significantly reducing the cardiac benefits and eliminating the benefits of high-intensity training.
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This penile-straw being
vajroli mudra.
A practice that the bible of hatha yoga, the
Hatha Yoga Pradipika,
introduces by explaining, “the yogi who knows
vajroli mudra
attains success in yoga even if he acts without following any other injunctions laid down in this text.” An emphasis that makes
vajroli mudra
seem far more important than, say, assuming postures or practicing breathing exercises. In
vajroli mudra,
“the fluid poured from the pelvic region should be raised by practice … saved by exerting an upward pull.” Lest anyone be confused about what is being suggested, the text continues suggesting that a tube be inserted into the urethra to widen the hole and help the yogi acquire appropriate skill. Most modern translations of the
Pradipika
either omit those verses entirely or fail to translate them, claiming they are uninteresting to the modern practitioner.
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Or in specific application to postural yoga, Esak would say, “We use the posture as a playground to explore the fundamental unity of our body and mind. The body becomes a medium to learn how to control the mind.”
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Mary Jarvis, Esak’s coach and mentor, says, “Maintaining stillness in the struggle of a posture is a route into the present moment.”
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This being
amaroli,
another gem left untranslated in many modern versions of the
Pradapika.
Modern practitioners tell me the urine is “an acquired taste, like beer.”
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Although Nikes not so much: his two biggest contracts are for companies selling pond algae and sea algae supplements respectively.
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Which is what we always listen to when we backbend, because Esak loves Michael, because Michael is the perfect blend of optimism and vulnerability for backbending, because Michael was pressed into service roughly at the same age as Bikram, and because like Bikram, Michael spent a lifetime refining himself for others, and you can hear exactly that sad but incredible experience in his voice if you listen past the one thousand times you’ve heard each song before on the radio or in passing cars or at wedding receptions, which is of course the only way you can listen to a song while at the liminal point of consciousness that is backbending.
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When I ask another of Bikram’s oldest students if Bikram ever mentioned sex back in the ’70s, she is aghast. “Oh, no. All the women were mad for him too. We gossiped, of course. But he never was vulgar, never showed any interest, not even a glance. I would say he was completely asexual. … We wondered for a while if there was something going on between him and his Mexican friend, Tony Sanchez. They were so close, and we thought maybe if he was gay that would explain every-thing.”
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Or as Bikram says: “I don’t care whether you live or die in Locust posture, just get your legs up and keep your knees locked. … People say I am a great businessman. That is wrong. I know nothing of business. I know ‘lock the knee.’ I know ‘two hips in one line.’ I know exactly what my guru told me, and I teach exactly that. … When you die, I do not come to the funeral. I come afterwards, late at night. And I jump on the coffin box and say, ‘Lock the knee, lock the knee, lock the motherfucking knee’ because only then do you do yoga and only then you can you get to heaven.”
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“Closed eyes brought an anxious void, open eyes brought paranoid illusions and hallucinations, none of which were so drastic as to be obvious, making them all the worse. There were always people’s voices and they were always talking just out of range but on a subject matter that certainly regarded me. The corners of my vision revealed family members and neighbors, faces blank or filled with nasty scorn. Everything tasted horrible. And I was filled with a constant sense of shame and fear.”
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Despite orchestrating things to end in a tie, and despite the fact that Sol subsequently puked about half of his portion up, I’ve always felt Sol won that contest because his wings were CHEESE WINGS, an absolutely revolting and short-lived concept that involved buffalo wings being smothered in easy cheese.
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And then there is Bikram himself. Who says: “People come to me and think yoga is relax. They think little flower, little ting sound, some chanting, hanging crystal. … No! Not for you! Waste of time! Here I chop off your dick and play Ping-Pong with your balls. You know Ping-Pong? That is yoga!”
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It did!
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Descartes ended with somewhat comical precision, pinpointing the location of the soul in the pineal gland.
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The one area where Janis is equipped to compete with the other trainees: his injury story. In addition to tearing the ACL on his left knee, he shattered his lower leg into four distinct pieces, leaving him with a metal rod running the length of his calf to bind it together while it heals. Doctors told him he would never walk normally again, and indeed, if you know what to stare at, there is a slight limp to his gait.
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When we have guests over to our room, I often find them staring at a single stray hundred-dollar bill Janis has spilled about, engaged in some personal morality struggle. Should they quietly slip it into their pocket? Should they alert Janis? Side benefit: we get exquisite maid service.
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Made of some highly synthetic material obviously designed to be impervious to bacterial growth despite the epic sweat being deposited on it daily, the carpet is somewhat itchy to look at. Definitely the type of substance that in civilian life I would avoid touching with bare skin out of fear of developing a rash.
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Like everything at TT, water consumption escalates from terrifying into farce and back to terrifying. I start training taking class in proper Esak–Mary Jarvis format, without any water. But classes are indeed hotter than normal, and we are repeatedly told that water is important and we will experience cumulative dehydration without it. So I quickly begin lugging a single bottle. On Rajashree’s advice, I add salt, lemon, and honey, making a cheap, unprocessed Gatorade. This is the Eden period of my water consumption. Later, inspired by classmates who are lugging huge four-quart thermoses into class, I graduate to two water bottles. A few weeks later, I break down and buy a thermos of my own. The exhaustion of training builds on itself and the mental strength needed to refrain from guzzling water is one of the first things to go. By the final weeks (sorry, Mary!), I am lugging a four-quart thermos plus original water bottle into each class. Sucking down the entire 4.5 quarts over the ninety minutes. My body at this point is totally fucking confused and betrayed by my behavior: the decision to indulge in plus or minus three hours of extreme heat while also swilling gigantic amounts of water results in cells that are expert at storing any residual hydration. At my maximum, I have fourteen-pound swings in weight loss from a single class. Twice a day. Between classes, when my body goes into storage mode, my fingers start swelling so much, it becomes difficult to make a fist until I’ve sweated through the first twenty minutes of a class. Still, despite this obviously crazy relationship to water, I am too terrified of dehydration and mentally blahzo to reduce water consumption until I return home. I am not nearly the worst either. Many in my training will cart entire ice chests into class. They become water and ice fairies, offering a handful of melting cubes to anyone nearby and in agony. The first time this happened, I was stunned. It was like cheating. I was totally self-absorbed in my practice. A woman next to me tapped me on the shoulder during the floor series. She dropped a few ice cubes on my chest. They felt like gifts from an icy goddess. I watched her dig back into her cooler and take another handful to give to the person on her other side. Finally, she attended to herself, snapping open her bikini bottoms and shoving a handful of ice in. It being the seventh week of training, this behavior didn’t strike me as odd at all. In the “water consumption as metaphor” department, I meet a visiting teacher and studio owner who explains he has trouble opening his eyes if he skips class for two consecutive days: his lids swell shut.
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In order: nope, nope, nope, nope, tragically nope, and actually, if it was late fat desperate Elvis, and you count spending a lot of time together on the phone as best friends, maybe.
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In another loss of identity moment related by someone who was there, Bikram is driving late night in Vegas in his Bentley and pulls into a gas station where his car is quickly surrounded by hookers. The gas station attendants vocally refuse to serve him and threaten to call the cops because based on dress and car and mannerisms they are convinced Bikram is a pimp and very much don’t want him to think that he can use their gas station as a place of business.
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A construction cone orange that he will later earnestly describe as “saffron, the color of all yogis, a symbol of giving up material possessions and dedicating your life to teaching.”
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Which is the idiom that inspired my favorite exchange of all training, which I feel encapsulates the essence of what it feels like to sit in a lecture with a rambling yoga guru and 380 people in various stages of mental and physical decay. Bikram: “Tell me what is the best food in the world?” “Squash!” screams the man behind me. “No food!” Bikram booms back. “Best food in the world is no food!” “It’s true,” says the man behind me, nodding his head enthusiastically. “So many people die because they don’t eat enough squash.”
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Every training has its own particular horror. In Acapulco, the yoga room was so poorly ventilated and the humidity so stifling that the back of the room was lined with “puke buckets” for students who needed to disgorge quickly and then get back to class. In Palm Springs, there was the punishing late nights. In Hawaii, lectures and yoga classes were held in the same disgusting room, ensuring that cadets remained sweaty and sticky all day long. Ours in San Diego? Like I said, we get it easy. Probably the single most difficult aspect is the Hotel Circle isolation and associated lack of access to healthy food. Also, in combination with heavy rain and recklessly swilled Gatorade, there are truly epic amounts of ants in the hot tent.