Hell-Bent (23 page)

The nonoptional late-night movies do serve one purpose besides Bikram’s whim. They keep us awake and wear us down. The longer I am at TT, the more its operational principle becomes clear: cumulative exhaustion. No single day at Teacher Training is very difficult. Taking two classes a day is taxing, but by no means devastating. Similarly, the consecutive late nights are uncomfortable but nothing more awful than typical end-of-term frenzy at any university. The memorization takes effort, but it is literally
the only intellectual requirement for nine weeks and therefore probably actually serves to ward off decay.

But although no single facet of Teacher Training is remarkable in itself, the routine builds on itself. Class after class with no rest, and muscle strain grows from minor to wretched. The lack of sleep eliminates opportunities for repair. The subtle electrolyte and mineral imbalances that come from sweating fourteen pounds of water a class accumulate and then swing wildly as people overcompensate with supplements. The stress of memorization and endless public speaking suddenly becomes uncomfortable. Someone catches a cold, and the moist incubator of the hot room accelerates it into a plague. Suddenly, a daily routine that shouldn’t be too hard starts breaking people.

And boy do people break. Some just disappear: pack their bags and decide to forfeit their money for home. Others become aggressive. Others hyper-sexual. Others mournful. At least one man seems to be descending steadily toward a schizophrenic break right before our eyes. He started out cheerful, if perhaps a little overvoluable (memorably and oddly offering to write a poem with me after the first lecture), but by week four devolved into a muttering, withdrawn, increasingly paranoid ghost: perpetually pacing around with the hoodie of his sweatshirt tightly drawn, occasionally screaming out during posture clinic, signing in to lectures and then running off. Others are going through deep and regular emotional traumas.
The bushes outside the tent
after class always have at least a few people weeping into them.

Physically, the overtraining has other effects. To the horror of many women, despite doing epic amounts of yoga, weight-loss ceases: their stressed-out bodies hoarding nutrients and their heat-acclimated circulation retaining maximum water. In the reverse effect, many of the fittest men watch their muscles atrophy, the stress demanding too much energy to both repair and maintain their carved physiques. Without much time for meals, diet goes to shit. Protein shakes, supplement pills, shelf-stable products from Trader Joe’s, and the basically fast, definitely overprocessed food of the Town and Country’s theme restaurants dominate at the time when our bodies probably should be eating the healthiest, most balanced meals
of our lives. A stressed-out system allows latent problems to rise to the surface. I hear about a rash of ovarian cysts among women. Sunny San Diego produces at least one case of pneumonia. Bacterial rashes flare up. Acne is everywhere. I get a single pimple on my ear one week and then a ’roidal outbreak across my back and chest so intense, it looks like I’ve been napalmed. Diarrhea, fever, puking, and perpetually runny noses are so common, they almost don’t bear mention.

Emergency rehydration is delivered during almost every class.

But then the body adapts. It grows stronger. Suddenly by week seven, when all math and logic indicate that things should be at the very worst, you find yourself sprinting with joy.

That too is Teacher Training.

But ultimately, for me, all real joy from teacher training comes not from the yoga, but from the people. For nine weeks, the otherwise drab courtyards and poolsides of the Town and Country are transformed into a mixing ground for the amazing and bizarre. Burning Man has nothing on Bikram. I meet J.C., a yoga teacher who arrived weighing three hundred pounds and lost seventy pounds over the course of his nine weeks. I meet a man who sits in lecture, systematically eating a bag of popcorn with a spoon. I meet former heroin addicts, former meth addicts, former shopaholics, former alcoholics all using the yoga as replacement therapy. I meet, while folding laundry, a mother using the yoga to grieve the suicide of her son. I meet people with perfect bodies and such smooth, round muscles and tight bikini lines that they seem almost dissonant with the drab reality surrounding them. I meet people so skinny with such obvious eating disorders that staring at them evokes a similar if more queasy reaction. I meet a doctor from Utah, walking with crutches and wearing a wicked-looking knee brace, who tore every ligament in his knee wakeboarding, and whose own doctor told him that under no circumstances should his brace come off and under no circumstance should he kneel. Nonetheless, on his first day visiting training, he takes class with Bikram—who promptly, almost psychically, asks him to take off his brace and kneel to complete a posture. It is a command that the doctor obeys: slowly ripping off the Velcro then
the larger clamps of his brace while the whole room applauds. His daughter, a trainee, the reason he is visiting in the first place, is beside him, terrified at his movements. I meet Jeff, a junkie turned plumber turned yoga studio owner, who has such forceful calm that he quiets a room of forty people in seconds by standing in front of them in a T-shirt. The ropy veins on his forearms somehow signaling that he is a man to be listened to. When a woman screams hysterically from the balcony of her hotel room as a man sprints across the parking lot, a yogi takes off in pursuit. And when a half mile later, he catches up with the panting burglar and wrestles the woman’s computer away from him as the thief screams, “I have a gun!” the yogi simply bows to him and says, “but I have the laptop,” before calmly walking back toward our hot tent. I meet yogis working through childhood abuse, financial ruin, and all manners of abrupt midlife changes. And although at some point I realize that—of course—a yoga based around self-transformation is going to attract a lot of people who needed to transform, what all these amazing crime-stopping, self-transforming yogis teach me again and again is the process of witnessing, discussing, and reveling in personal transformation never grows old.

The best part is how it catches you unaware. I meet Denis when we are running late to a lecture. Each lecture at Teacher Training includes a sign-in sheet to ensure attendance. Given the exhaustion levels floating around, there is a huge biological incentive to head back to your room and curl up in your bed (instead of, say, staying up until four in the morning, listening to Bikram talk about how he doesn’t need to sleep). In order to thwart this temptation, trainees must sign in before each event. The penalty for failing to sign in—or for signing in even a minute late—is an additional class. Since, from the end of the first week onward, everyone is already exhausted, cramping, sore, and already taking two classes a day, nobody wants to be late and do an extra class. In fact, the entire idea of an extra class provokes a crisis in my brain.

Anyway, racing against that threat, Denis and I charge over to the tent. We make it, hastily scrawling our names at the sign-in table, and I look up to see Denis grinning. He tells me that was the first time he’d run since his accident. That it has been three years since he was told he was never going to walk again.

As we walk into lecture, he lets out a shriek. “I love this place! I love these people!”

On May 13, 2008, Denis decided not to wait for insurance before taking his new motorcycle out for a spin.

“I’ve always been a bicycle guy. But I got fascinated with the image of a motorcycle. The wind in my hair, being able to just pick up and go. So I bought one. … It’s funny, I bought a cruiser because I thought I’d kill myself on a sports bike.”

He hadn’t even had the bike an hour. He was living in Vancouver and had taken delivery of the motorcycle at the marina where he worked repairing sailboats. This was the start of a new life. He had quit a corporate job as a sales and marketing director, and started woodworking. The money at his previous job was good, but it wasn’t satisfying. He realized that without a family to support, this might be the only time he had to live his dream. The motorcycle was a key part of the dream.

“When it arrived, I just stared at it for a while. Then I called the insurance company, they gave me a price, and when we hung up, I thought, ‘I just want to take it out for a quick ride.’ There was a voice in my head that said this is not a good idea. But …” He spreads his hands. “I cruised around the parking lot. It was cold and windy. I remember the marina boats were rocking back and forth. Then I went against the feeling and left the parking lot.” Just as he was leaving, it started to lightly rain.

“I busted out of town, and this is Canada so it didn’t take long before I was at some beautiful scenery. I was taking it easy, maybe seventy—eighty kilometers per hour, but at a turn, I hit a little bump on the road. I lost control, I remember knowing that I was going to tip over, and as I was sliding, I looked up and realized a car was going to run directly over me.”

Which it did. Front wheels crushing over first his tangled legs and then his chest before coming to rest directly above him. He was in and out consciousness the entire time, his only lasting memory the light creeping from the sides of chassis. He lost 60 percent of his blood before he reached the hospital. His right femur was broken in three places. His right hip dislocated, with the knee shattered at the tibial plateau.

“One thing I do have a memory of is my leg sticking out at this crazy angle. You have forty-three percent play in your tendons—mine was ripped, just dangling at eighty percent.”

His left leg was in far worse condition, and when he arrived at the hospital, doctors wanted to amputate below the knee. Denis doesn’t remember it, but his tibia had snapped completely and the calf stuck out to the side like an
L
just below the knee. His scapula was broken. Then due to a head injury, his frontal lobes started swelling, robbing him of most memories for the next five weeks.

When he stabilized, they hadn’t amputated his leg yet. But his life as he knew it had been cut off. He entered into a convalescent’s limbo, where he was wheeled from room to room, where his head was always exactly fifteen degrees above his heart unless he used buttons to raise it, where he marked time in terms of surgeries rather than weeks or months. “Hospital was home. The nurses, they cared for you. They were my best friends,” he says. “God bless the Canadian health care system. They patched me up, connected all my broken parts together again.”

But the lubricant that would eventually get those parts moving in a normal pattern was Bikram: “The yoga didn’t save my life. That was the emergency response team, the surgeons, the nurses, and rehab specialists who waited with me as I learned my exercises and adjusted my medication. The yoga didn’t give me the drive to recover. That came from some place inside me. A place my amazing friends who would visit and bring me joy could tap into … What the yoga did is allow me to use the life I had been given back. … And what’s the point otherwise?

“It’s exactly Bikram’s favorite quote—‘Having doesn’t mean a thing, if you don’t know how to use it.’ What good are the blood transfusions, the hours on artificial respiration, if you live the rest of your life in pain? What good is having a body if you can’t use it? … And so three and a half weeks after my fifth surgery, bandages still around my tibia, I hobbled into a Bikram class on crutches to start using my body.”

Denis had practiced the yoga before the accident. He enjoyed it, the focus and meditation, reminding him of the clarity he achieved while woodworking. The heat and sweat appealed to his sense of rigor. But back
then it was at most a curiosity. An eccentricity that made good conversations with girls.

“I had no reason to do it before. It was exercise. It was a thing to do. But now I poured myself in. I put one hundred percent belief into it. I knew I had to do it if I wanted my body back.”

Every day his parents drove him to the bus station,
²⁸
where he slowly boarded, rode, slowly exited to transfer to a second bus, and then in a maddening lonesome exertion, hobbled off the bus through a train station to catch the train that would deliver him to his yoga studio. Altogether, including time in the hot room, getting to and from a single yoga class was an eight-hour block of time. But one that he viewed as essential.

“The thing is, it’s your body. It really comes down to the fact that it’s yours. You need to believe. You need to see it and fix it. … At first the pain in class was unreal. There were sharp pains like I was doing something terrible to myself. I am still not good at describing it. But eventually I learned to be good at handling it. … If I saw someone else with these injuries today, I’d probably tell them take it easy. I’d say, please don’t push yourself. But when it’s you, and you are inside the pain, and you believe in the process, there is a helpful denial. The denial allows you to push. And if you push enough, in the right ways, in ways where you see progress, eventually things change.”

One Hot Class

This was day one of week two. I positioned myself about three rows from Bikram, directly within his line of sight, directly underneath a heater. Bikram begins the class in an especially angry mood, picking on everyone
around me, but graciously saying nothing to me. “Ms. Boobs,
²⁹
why are you so lazy? I hate lazy people. You disgust me. …” Then, “Senorita”—spinning toward a rather lovely if chubby Mexican woman—“suck in that fat stomach. The only reason you can do this posture is your fat ass and fat boobs balance you out.” Then he spins back to Ms. Boobs. “Do your boobs speak English? What is wrong with you? How did you come to my training? You look like you never practiced a day in your life.” Possibly in response to these failings, possibly because it is his whim, Bikram holds our warm-up postures far longer than normal. My legs get quivery doing poses I have done thousands of times. The heat continues to rise.

The first sign that things tonight are headed for weird occurs when a man to my left simply drops from the first balancing posture like someone
cut his legs off. He hits the floor hard. One moment he is standing; the next moment he is down. Out. Two aides rush in from the back of the room and carry him out of the tent by the armpits. The class moves forward without even acknowledging the exit. It is a normal-enough occurrence, although this is certainly early. By the sixth out of the twenty-six postures, the weirdness has grown exponentially, the heat continuing its manic ascent. Already I can feel my field of vision narrowing. I manage to hold each posture but begin crouching between sets. This is my second sign that I’m struggling a lot more than normal. At the time, I assume I’m taking stress off the legs. Later I will learn that what I am doing is shortening the distance between my heart and my brain, making it easier to pump blood. By the eighth posture, I am crouching for a whole new reason. Standing is unstable. The small stabilizer muscles that I have been relying on my whole life to keep me upright are failing. Unless I concentrate on the act of standing, I lurch around like a drunk, my legs stamping the ground like a restless horse. So I go down. From my crouched position, I notice almost two-thirds of the room is on their knees. This is amazing. We are barely a third of the way through class, and the majority of this class of teachers is unable to continue. Bikram notices this too and gives us several opportunities to drink water. He is showing mercy. The heat continues its ascent, and I begin to wonder if the heater is broken. To prolong our rest, Bikram asks a woman, who I conclude must be incredibly strong to be able to do anything at all, to demonstrate a posture while the rest of the room watches. I look up at her posture for just a second. She is beautiful. The girl in front of me seizes on the gap to walk out. Two other people within my field of vision get up and stagger out with her. The postures continue. Then we hit the halfway point and move to the floor.