Hell-Bent (16 page)

I knew all about this from personal experience, and this was exactly what I didn’t want to happen. I knew the yoga was powerful stuff and I knew if he actually went through with it, there would be a ripple effect on his lifestyle. But I did not want Sol to think about that. I didn’t want him wasting precious willpower abstaining from a burger or worrying about a beer. If he really got hooked, that stuff would work itself out regardless.

As motivation, I decided to take class alongside him. The trip to his studio from my apartment was about an hour. That meant if Sol skipped class, he was essentially standing me up and would hopefully feel tons of guilt. Which was perfect, as far as I was concerned.

The project built from there. We stayed up late, discussing hydration strategies. I explained the cycle of pain he was likely to face. I told him in advance which parts of his body would hurt like a muscle ache and which parts of his body would hurt like he had done something so bad, he should see a doctor. I asked Esak for advice, and his one-sentence response became our mantra: “Take it easy once there, but get there every day.” We decided to spread out in class, so we could both pretend the other wasn’t there. We made vows never to leave the room, no matter how much it hurt. Then we got the rest of our friends involved.

The key to the effort was sustainability. The more people who knew, the more people invested, the less Sol would be tempted to cheat. I created a spreadsheet, and friends of ours volunteered to come and bend for a week with Sol and me. They were our pit crew, an unexpected face in the locker room, ready to give support to help turn this life around. As word got out, the weeks filled up. We had friends coming in from out of town, we had friends volunteer who swore up and down that yoga was for sissies. There was great momentum. Everyone was excited.

Everyone, that is, except Ashley. She knew her husband. And she knew all about Hector’s stroke and why exactly I was writing the book. The night before the sixty days were about to kick off, she called me around midnight.

“Look, this is great. And I am behind it one hundred percent if it’s
going to help Sol. But I want you to be careful.” There was genuine fear in her voice. “First, I want you to promise to stay nearby after class. He can barely make it up the stairs without resting. I don’t want Sol coming out of class so exhausted he slips and hits his head on the curb or passes out with nobody around. Second, I want you to know I’m going to pull the plug on this if it gets too extreme. Do not kill my husband with your fucking yoga.”

Part III
Not Dead Yet!

Descartes’s Pain Pathway

If we take man as he really
is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him … If we seem to be idealist and overrate him, and look him at high … You know what happens? We promote him to what he really can be. So we have to be idealists in a way, because only then do we wind up as true realists.

—VIKTOR FRANKL

Mary

I will forever think of Mary Jarvis as a blessed human for this: ripping apart her nori-wrapped vegan burrito and smuggling the contents onto my plate. “Shhhhhh, don’t say anything, just take,” she says, and hands me a clump of the burrito’s raw squash and fermented cabbage innards. “If I don’t like, I’m passing to you.” I shovel her offerings into my face as quickly as they come, careful not to let anyone see. Mary, I think, is being secretive because she is being polite to our hosts. I, on the other hand, am merely worried other people might find out there is more food available and ask me to share.

I have briefly joined another two-week Backbending session, eager for the opportunity to meet up with Mary, and after only one day, I am delirious for calories. Somehow Esak has convinced the owners of a local raw restaurant to cook us a group dinner “as service,” and out of the kindness of their raw little hearts, they have obliged him. Like most things during Backbending, I don’t know exactly how or why this is happening. It both makes sense (raw, vegan, altruism) and is totally inexplicable (service to self-indulging
yogis? in the form of food that is essentially noncaloric?) But either way, after ten hours of yoga, we arrive en masse at their adorable sunflower-covered café to sit down for our first meal of the day. Sweaty. Aching. Bewildered. And, in typical Backbender fashion, bursting at the eyeballs with energy.

The energy radiating out of their bodies is almost oppressive. I feel like a grumpy grown-up being assaulted by a six-year-old with a camera. All around me, human flashbulbs are popping. As soon as we get settled—introductions and thank-yous made—the restaurant fills with the chattering, laughing gossip of a high school cafeteria. It’s hard to reconcile the giggling with the fact that just an hour ago, the same group of humans worked themselves to a point of absolutely depletion. Sweating and crying and struggling to keep their knees from crashing into the carpet.

I, unfortunately, am still depleted. And as each course comes out, tiny, delicate, and looking far more ornamental than culinary, I start freaking out. We get kale leaves folded like gluten-free origami, then a half cup of cashew soup, then a single cigar-sized roll labeled “burrito” by the waitress. While everyone else is praising the nuances of flavor and freshness, I am gauging whether or not I can fit the entire meal in my mouth at the same time. This is my first raw experience, and while I am finding the meal delicious, I have no idea if that has anything to do with the food. Spam’s delicious if you’ve been hiking all day.

And so Mary Jarvis will forever be sacred to me. While I am self-digesting and desperate, while everyone else around me is rejoicing at their prissy bounty, Mary is taking her big fingers and ripping apart her highly nuanced food to give me the morsels she doesn’t care for.

Mary is one of Bikram’s most senior teachers. She attended his first official training program, received his wisdom back when he was dispensing it one on one. On top of that, depending on whom you ask, she is also: a bona fide saint, a healer, a scientist of compassion, a slut, and/or “a really pushy bitch.” Those last two were Mary, by the way, appreciating Mary.

Young Mary was a lioness: blond, strong, and lean. She started taking yoga classes with Bikram beginning in 1984, before his formal training program. “There was no brand back then. There was no hot yoga,” she says.
“Now, it’s so weird—people talk about Bikram like it’s different, like it’s a brand like Kleenex or Xerox. Back then, it was just yoga.

“Everyone was family. We just hung out and practiced. Nobody really knew anything—it was just fun and you felt better. And then every once in a while, Bikram would come by with this enormous surge of energy, and he would sit and talk yoga for eight hours. … He had this incredible message to deliver and couldn’t rest until he had passed it on. Believe it or not, he talks less now. At this point, he doesn’t have to convince anyone.”

During that period, she remembers “one, maaaaybe two compliments” buried in between far more insults, admonishments, challenges, and lectures on her deficiencies. “If you want to understand one thing about Bikram, understand this: He is the standard bearer,” she says. “He will always be out there holding higher expectations for you than you hold yourself.” That was how she learned her postures, and that is how she decided to teach.

As a result, Mary knows the physical aspect of the yoga with an intimacy very few senior teachers can match. If you want to perfect your practice as it exists, there are many teachers who can correct your technique. If you want to push your practice further, become the type of yogi you never thought you could become, then Mary is the person to see. She has been there, and she has trained others.

Which is why eight years ago, when Esak began to train for the competition, he sought Mary out.

“Esak asked Bikram what he should do to prepare for the competition,” Mary tells me. “Bikram thought about it and said, ‘Mary. You want to be champion, go see Mary.’”

Which was a huge disappointment to Esak. He didn’t know Mary, he didn’t live near Mary, and he didn’t love the idea of being coached by an older woman. But he dutifully followed Bikram’s advice and showed up at Mary’s studio, hoping to convince her to let him apprentice with her.

“He was so cocky back then,” Mary says. “All the girls adored him. Everyone was telling him how good he was. I just remember thinking, ‘Jesus’—and he had Jesus-length hair back then, by the way—‘who does this guy think he is?’”

Meanwhile, Esak remembers wowing her. “I was in class, going into Standing Bow, just really feeling great, kicking into it. And I knew she was watching. And sure enough, she opened her mouth and—”

Mary cuts him off. “—I said, ‘Esak, that is the worst Standing Bow I have seen.’ And it was! He was totally crooked, but you know, everyone had been telling him how great he was.”

Esak stuck around and listened. “He did everything I asked. Never complained once. And he worked hard. I knew he was in pain.”

“Oh, yeah,” Esak says, smiling. “I thought I did permanent damage to my back. It hurt so bad. I remember walking just dumbfounded that I could have let myself do this to my body.”

If young Mary was a lioness, old Mary is more of a fairy godmother.

Her home studio, Global Yoga in San Francisco, is a shrine to her twin principles as coach: exacting technique and motivation. The walls are covered like a crazed yoga scrapbook with images of flawless postures, news clippings of incredible human achievement, and weird homemade banners with slogans like 202 CLASSES IN 101 YOGA DAYS! The postures and pictures are often labeled like
Monday Night Football,
with arrows and circles, indicating vectors of force and areas of muscular contraction.

Compared to many of the newer studios, Global Yoga is unique. It sweats to the heat of its own furnace, as it were. There is a bathroom in the hot room. The studio might have a shower, but I couldn’t find it. There are no lockers in the locker room. And Mary doesn’t sell water. Which, for a hot yoga studio, is like a movie theater not selling popcorn.

I imagine the decision probably does similar things to her revenue stream. When I ask Mary about it, her answer is quick.

“Don’t need it. Not in class. It’ll sit in your stomach like a pastrami sandwich. Have a green juice instead. … And drink it later, when you’re not practicing something that requires stillness.”

Mary sits behind the desk at her school, elbow deep in the worn-out index cards she keeps student information on. It’s a precomputer holdover, hopelessly more complicated than necessary, the type of system that in Mary’s hands ends up both creating debates over whether a student’s package
has run out of classes and then instantly resolving those debates by her offering a free class.

“Just come today,” she says. “We’ll figure it out next time. … Love you.” Mary’s use of the L-word falls just short of the pathological. Students are greeted with it when they walk in and then universally a second time when they stagger past her desk on the way out. Old students whose names she has long forgotten get it when they stop by to say hi, strangers on the street get it if Mary notices them doing something nice to someone else. Often the exchange is initiated by the student: “I love you, Mary.” If you get missed, it’s only because there was a more substantial conversation taking place. This is the exact polar opposite of the corporate
buh-byes
and service thank-yous we’ve become culturally inoculated against; each “I love you” from Mary sounds unique and sincere; it is no doubt a practiced art. Mary pauses and smiles, and you can feel the statement build in her smile. Standing next to her, as a mere mortal who has trouble signing emails to his parents with the word
love,
it is also bewildering.

There is a point in every Mary Jarvis seminar, after everyone is good and tuckered out from the yoga, sitting on their mats, sipping on coconut waters and other restorative concoctions, when Mary brings out the pictures. These are pictures of practitioners in their prime, practitioners she coached personally, in postures everyone admires but can’t quite imagine themselves embodying. She takes each picture out of a folder carefully, admiring it as she tapes it against the mirror. When she is finished, she pauses for a minute to take them all in.

“No matter what, I always start by thanking Bikram.” She pulls out a final picture and puts it up in the lower corner.

This is a picture of a young Indian man in a baseball cap and sparkling black and red T-shirt. He is staring away, looking carefree in the way a boy running out of the house to meet up with his friends is carefree.

Mary paws the picture. “So thank you, Bikram. Thank you for coming to America, thank you for bringing this yoga. Without Bikram, there would be none of this.”

Then she looks away for a moment. “Some people confuse this by
thinking you need to always be near him. They think that surrounding him makes them important yogis.”