Back in March of last year I started going to Bikram Yoga. During the ensuing stressful months (couch-surfing, nervous breakdown, identity deconstruction, freefalling onto rocks below), I continued. I continued until drama at the studio became unbearable. The studio owner is, to put it kindly, an insane m*****f***er – major psych issues, unethical behavior, personal morality a notch above child molester. Not kidding.
Ironically, this is yoga – recognizing that people will do what they will do, that their behavior will be unacceptable and that it must be accepted because it cannot be changed. That to keep them in one’s space is a choice, that to be in their space is a choice. I chose to step out of her space. Also, it would have been a choice to betray a friend and give financial support to an alcoholic, narcissistic, statutory-raping, sex addict if I had continued to pay this woman for yoga classes. Other students chose differently and stayed. Her school is still open and continuing to (slowly) grow. Some might have fantasies of bankruptcy, but I don’t think it’s in the cards – and I also don’t think there’s any point in fantasizing an outcome for her, as her future is HER decision, no one else’s.
So, anyway, I decided I could no longer go to this conveniently-located-within-1-mile-of-me Bikram school. So, by August of last year (after 5 months of regular practice), I stopped practicing my yoga. I missed it. At the same time, the serious divorce action began to take place. Final decisions were made, papers were (finally) filed, I moved into an apartment, moved again, etc. etc. Weeks turned into months. In the end, it was 6 months before I came back – at a different studio, in another town, 30 minutes away (if there’s no traffic). Not as convenient as minutes down the street, but we do what we must.
My practice was irregular. I think I was averaging 3 times a week for a couple of months. Then the health weirdness and stress of the past year (most of which had resolved by then) hit me. My body was weak, needed recovery, and the yoga was NOT helping. I was still tweaking my food choices, coming to an understanding of how to best help my body get strong again. And I was regularly experiencing dizziness – both out of class and in it, but the worst of it was during class.
Then I decided to release my job. That’s the last part of my old life to go. I made an agreement with myself. I will complete the release, focus my attention on transitioning my replacement, THEN return to yoga. And commit to a regular practice.
So, I have now returned to Bikram Yoga. At yet another new studio. This one is slightly closer, but still about a half hour drive. But it doesn’t matter. The distance doesn’t matter (I know students who drive an hour or even more to get to class, I’ve got it pretty easy by comparison). The reduced convenience doesn’t matter – I was angry with kookookrazy local studio owner for so long, and an embarrassingly high proportion of my anger was simply about MY selfishness to have MY yoga at MY convenience (‘that bitch took my yoga away!’ I would think when driving past her studio. Hey – I’m just being brutally honest here. I acknowledge the self-absorbed narcissistic bitch in myself. How can I purge her if I don’t acknowledge her?), and I’ve come to recognize that if it’s important to me to practice, a slightly inconvenient drive doesn’t matter.
And not surprisingly, I’m not experiencing the dizziness I was before. There are one or two points during the standing series where I still have a little bit of it, but that clearly points to my low blood pressure being tickled (coming from an inversion to standing up straight). And even that has gotten better in this one week.
As happens after every break from regular practice, I am a beginner again on the first day. Today was Day 8, and my body is remembering. The wonderful thing is, the body comes back. It’s like each day is a week. Rather than being a true Day 8 Beginner, I’m more like a Week 8 Beginner. My experiment this time was to attend every day for the first week, just to see how quickly I would improve. It worked out well. I didn’t lose momentum. My short term goal was to rebuild my body’s overall strength via daily practice over the first two weeks. My next goal is to build the strength in my legs, and have toned legs in time for my trip to Hawaii (in August) – I want to be bikini-ready. My next longer term goal is to maintain a committed, regular yoga practice - 4 to 6 times per week for the next 6 months. I have plenty of time for yoga right now – no job, no schedule. I can go pretty much whenever I want. No excuses! No breaks!
Anyway, about the Yoga. Bikram has his critics. Inevitably. And I have agreed with some of the criticism around the money money money (copyrighting yoga? franchising studios?). But I’m coming to appreciate what’s under the surface of his approach.
First, the series itself – the same postures, same sequence, same dialogue, hot room, students at varying levels all working to do their best. The brilliance of this: you are always doing your OWN yoga. The sameness of it – you are ALWAYS doing your own yoga. You can feel when you’ve strengthened the muscles in your legs, or increased your back flexibility. Look at yourself in the mirror, focus on your legs, your flexibility, your strength. Listen to the dialogue (the same dialogue) day after day, and you will suddenly get something new out of it after weeks of hearing nothing but drone. Miraculously, your yoga changes, after days, weeks, months of (seeming) plateau, it changes. The heat – I love the heat. Yes, I hated it at first. Then I changed, my body changed. It was uncomfortable then, and it’s uncomfortable now – but I love the sweat. Where I used to focus on the discomfort, I now think about how wonderful it is to have the blood rushing to the surface of my skin, bringing nutrients and oxygen, and the sweat clearing my pores.
Bikram said something in an interview on 60 Minutes about suffering – how in this country, we don’t really know about suffering. That suffering for 90 minutes is nothing when you get so much out of it. So I think about that during class: I’m suffering for 90 minutes, for a lifetime of better health and well-being. That’s not such a terrible thing – that’s not really suffering at all. It’s 90 minutes of discomfort in exchange for a stronger, healthier body. So I don’t get caught up in stories about how uncomfortable I am, anymore.
As for copyright, legal action, and whether or not Bikram himself is full of crap … at the Bikram website, a read a short bio on a longtime teacher who was quoted defending Bikram’s decision to copyright the sequence, saying, “If you take the formula for penicillin and leave out one of the ingredients, you no longer have penicillin.” The argument being, the sequence is as important as the individual asanas contained in it. I liked the way she looked at it, because it pulled me out of my outraged ‘what a jackass, he can’t copyright yoga!’ mentality and allowed me to see that there might be something more loving underneath the surface. A guru teaches with everything he or she does. Bikram is an outrageous teacher – a showman. He’s incorrigible. That doesn’t automatically make his lessons inconsequential. We may have to work a bit to see that … yes, the sequencing might be important, yes, the heat might be important, yes, teaching it the same way to everyone might be important, yes, keeping to the dialogue might be important. There may be lessons in the perceptions that Bikram seemingly wants to ‘control’ anything related to ‘his’ yoga and that he supposedly cares about making himself rich through its franchising. There may be something for us to learn about perception versus reality. The reality may be somewhat more or less complicated than mere control. There may be lessons in the fact that some Bikram teachers can’t do the series as well or as strongly as some of their students. It occurred to me yesterday that the teachers I appreciate most are the ones that I see struggling in class during their own practice. And there is probably a lesson in there for me. It’s not easy for them. They keep doing their yoga anyway.
I notice that even the dialogue (the same dialogue over and over, yes, yes) exhorts us to push to the edge, keep trying harder, focus. I suddenly got it today, that Bikram doesn’t leave it at ‘good job, now stay there’ – it’s always , ‘you can do better, keep going.’ There is something very loving in not accepting someone’s belief that they have limitations – recognizing we can do better is wonderful. I’ve never considered myself particularly disciplined. Now, suddenly I am. I set little goals for myself in class, or to attend X number of classes in X number of days – then I reach it, and stubbornly want to surpass it. Because I know I can. And I am exhausted, but ecstatic.
