Hell-Bent (24 page)

Rather than being a blur, the whole second half of that class has been seared in my brain, all static images, as if the heat in the room heated up every discrete moment of time like a brand and then plunged them into my brain. I can remember details of Bikram’s face—half concern, half determined—I remember him dancing crazed on the podium, hair in his top knot, like a devil, cheeks slightly sagging, gaining energy from our devastation. My water bottle, which had been filled with ice at the start of class,
is now warm to the touch. The lemon juice, honey, and salt mixture tastes gummy. During the first few asanas on the floor, I keep telling myself to move carefully and let the yoga do the work. When I lie on my stomach, my bladder pushes. A woman’s foot keeps turning bright yellow out of the corner of my eye. When I look at it directly, it becomes skin again. I need to pee and keep wondering if I have the muscular strength to hold it. Despite exhaustion, I am still terrified of Bikram correcting me. By the twentieth posture, the woman who had demonstrated the beautiful posture during the standing series lies motionless and then twitches. Bikram stops class a second time, and we all stare at her. This time, however, he demands that she get up. He is checking on her to make sure she doesn’t need immediate medical attention. When she doesn’t respond, a student practicing behind her dumbly walks over and prods her on the shoulder. She lifts her face sobbing, and Bikram is satisfied. She collapses back to her mat, twitching again in her sobs. My own postures are impossibly weak, legs barely lifting, body flopping. I realize from the way the smell won’t go away that there is a very real chance that the lean tattooed women near me has shit her leotard. The rest periods between postures have become more unbearable than the postures themselves. My heart beats even faster. This is a sign I’ve switched over to anaerobic exercise. My heart is trying to recover from the oxygen deficit created during the posture by madly pumping oxygen at the opportunity of rest. Then amazingly my brain empties. I am here. Very here. I fill with a mantra of persistence:
This is your posture. This is your class.
At some point, I slip out and wonder why I am chanting in the second person and began repeating more forcefully, This is
my
class, in my brain. Although I begin pushing very deeply into the postures, my camel backbend produces none of the usual energy, no crackling of electricity, no pain: just swollen heat. I feel my lower body go numb during the final stretching. My whole leg is pins and needles. This is shunting. It means all blood has been diverted away from my limbs and into my brain and heart to keep me alive. The nerves in my extremities are correspondingly shutting down. I used my arms to push my legs around manually to get back into savasana. My whole body feels feverish, a distinctly different sensation from the regular heat, meaning my core temperature is creeping upward. I
kept thinking of Backbenders talking about how they’d occasionally feel their entire field of vision black out. I remember reprimanding myself, thinking I probably would have experienced that if I hadn’t crouched down so much. During spine twist, somehow, Bikram produces a little blond boy. He’s maybe five or six years old in bathing trunks onstage. Bikram claps his hands, and the boy jumps into different postures. I think I am dreaming. Bikram places the boy in a perfect Bow posture and picks him up by the arms, twirling him around like a helicopter, screaming, “Look, look, look, at what I can do!” I keep stretching. The room is silent. Bikram is screaming about the boy. We move into the second side of spine twists, our very last posture, and I notice the boy’s mother has come onstage to retrieve him. I almost can’t believe I’m not hallucinating.

During final savasana, the class over, Bikram plays a song—about sadness, loneliness, and love—a monstrous, malicious decision. At Teacher Training, there is a rule: Out of respect, you do not get up to leave a class until the teacher has left, and teachers don’t leave until the final savasana is finished. The song Bikram plays is eight minutes long. Every single cell in every single person’s body in that room wants to run from the tent, and we are being held captive by a whining, oversynthesized Bollywood love song. My body feels hot and blurry. I can hear muffled sobbing on all sides of me. At a certain point, I realize I cannot lie still for even a second longer. I pull myself upright, and notice three-quarters of the room doing something similar. One man in the back of the room, whom I later recognize as a teacher and studio owner, is standing, pacing in circles around his mat, mumbling to himself. No smiles. No relief at being finished with class. I lie back down. The heat swells up again around my face. Eventually the song ends.

People stampede toward the doors. Bikram keeps yammering into the microphone about his sandals, but nobody seems to care that he’s still in the room, and we aren’t supposed to leave yet. People leave. Three-hundred-eighty bodies funnel through two small doorways, bumping into one another, falling. In the cool air of the shoe alcove, I look around at the faces of my classmates for the first time. They are sobbing, sober, red, drained.
It’s the sweetest relief I can imagine. It means I wasn’t alone. As I put on my flip-flops, a girl in a bikini top crumples at my feet. She says, “I’m sorry. I can’t stand anymore.” She lies motionless on top of five or six pairs of shoes. I grab my stuff and continue shuffling past her. Another girl sways and swoons, her knees buckling until she is deposited on the floor in prayer. We just step around her. All of us. A red cooler labeled FIRST AID lies empty on its side, everything resembling aid or rehydrating fluid raided.

Outside, there is a wreckage of bodies. People lie on the concrete. Splayed out. Leaning against the tent, shaking. A row of men sit on the curb, sobbing into their palms. I keep walking toward my room. I want to be away. Stalking steadily, picking up power from the cool air. My brain is returning. My thoughts begin rotating around recovery. Usually I make the mixture of grapefruit juice, seltzer, and ice that Lauren from Backbending taught me. But after this class, I am not hungry. I am hot. I want to plunge in a pool. Which, given the many sprawling pools of the Town and Country, is more than possible. But I am worried about rapidly cooling my heart. I once heard, or imagined a story about a marathon runner who cooled his heart too quickly after a race and went into cardiac arrest from the sudden contraction. As I walk, this terrifying idea replays in my brain like a song lyric I can’t escape. I ask the women striding next to me if there is a heated pool. She tells me that yes that was the hottest class she had ever taken. I agree it was hot and ask her about the pool again. She tells me she agrees with me that it was the hottest class she had ever taken and then begins crying. Another woman breaks into the conversation and keeps saying she doesn’t understand what happened. Repeating the phrase endlessly with an uplift like it is a question. I ask a third woman about the hot pool, and she looks at me like I am crazy. There is a pool, I am going, but it isn’t heated, I hope, she says to me. I follow her. We plunge in. I try to move slowly so as not to overwhelm my heart and cause cardiac arrest. But that is impossible. It feels so fresh and amazing. It is worth risking a totally implausible death. The pool is filled with bobbing yogis. Nobody is speaking except to occasionally say, wow. A boy with curly blond hair starts giggling. I get out of the pool, suddenly glad to have avoided cardiac arrest. I walk
to the elevators. Typically this is a huge bottleneck area. A giant clump of people serviced by two elevators. I almost always skip the line and walk. Today there is nobody. Both elevators are stationed on the first floor. No line, nobody. Bikram has killed us so completely that after thirty minutes, no one has made it back to their rooms yet. I press the button; the doors open. A group of crying women approaches, so I hold the door. One woman who is crying the hardest keeps saying to another crying woman that maybe she just needs to cry. I reach my arm to her bare shoulder and tell her to go to the pool. This is my only advice. I keep repeating, “The pool feels great,” as she keeps crying and repeating to the other woman, “Maybe she just needs to cry.” I get off the elevator on my floor and leave them. My skin begins to hum with heat again. This time a warm, almost lovely glow. It is a survival. As I walk to the ice machine to begin preparations for my grapefruit and selzer elixir—my body wrecked but dignified somehow—I keep thinking, Well at least I got my eleven-thousand-dollars’ worth. And for just this class, it is true.

The Seventh Siddhi of a Master Yogi Is the Ability to Project Himself into the Body of Another

The core learning experience of Bikram Yoga Teacher Training has nothing to do with yoga. At least as it pertains to postures or history or philosophy or therapeutic modifications or spiritual ramifications. It has nothing to do with pain. Nothing to do with flexibility or persistence over adversity.

Instead, the single defining feature of Bikram’s Teacher Training is memorization. Rote filthy memorization of the internal monotone, eyes-to-back-of-head variety, whereby student after student is expected to ingest words in and then spit them back up before an audience. Upon paying the approximately eleven thousand dollars to enroll, every proto-yogi is sent a copy of the official Bikram Yoga “dialogue.” A forty-five-page soliloquy whose grammatically moronic but instructionally precise English is the copyrighted intellectual property of Bikram Choudhury. It is the distillation of a single Bikram Yoga class as taught by Bikram himself, and the goal of
the entire Teacher Training enterprise is for every single graduate to go forth and recite the class exactly as copywritten.
³⁰

The single most common sight at the yoga training is the parades of potential teachers walking around with little booklets of the dialogue stuck in front of their noses, mumbling to themselves. The text becomes a constant companion: beside the plate at meals, on the thighs before a lecture, on a towel in the tent before class, and, of course, on the pillow, in bed before sleep. It is a bona fide rite of passage to discuss dreaming “in
dialogue,” an experience I never had, although I certainly often drifted off to sleep with the weird catchphrases uncoupling from context to echo in my head.

What’s remarkable about the dialogue is how much of it is intended to remain as unexplained catchphrases. The hows and whys behind the instructions are not for trainees. Not yet. And perhaps, not ever. In Bikram’s concept of a yoga teacher (or at least one trained less than five years), understanding is at best a tertiary concern. Which of course leads directly to the biggest truth of the dialogue: The goal of Bikram Yoga Teacher Training is not to make good yoga teachers. Nor is it to make teachers who are good at yoga. It is to train people called teachers to lead a good yoga class.

The distinction is crucial, to understanding both what happens within Teacher Training and also Bikram’s goals. It leaves many of the best students deeply unhappy with training and many other yoga traditionalists scornful of the process.

In Bikram’s eyes, the ideal instructor is a mouthpiece. They give instructions. They hold a standard as only a flesh-and-blood human can do (hence no actual tape recordings or video conferencing): but they do not actually teach. They never demonstrate. They never ever adjust. Instead they disappear behind a script. Mary Jarvis has her teachers stand in a back corner alcove, completely invisible to the practicing student unless they go searching for him or her. To the student, there is freedom in this disembodied instructional voice. The brain can focus only on listening, aligning, and adjusting to the blitz of commands. To the teacher, there is safety. After millions of classes, the imperfections and hiccups have been stilled. Instead of requiring critical thinking, the dialogue becomes a mantra of sorts, its drumming recitation a catalyst for teachers to slip into a different sort of meditation.

And of the text itself? There is poetry (“Open your chest like a flower petal blooming”), there is lovable but clumsy phraseology (“Grab your elbows each other”), there is precision (“Then left hand down, grab left heel, thumb outside, fingers inside”), and there are a myriad declarations that make no coherent sense within the confines of the English language (“I want three-hundred-and-sixty-degree angle backward bending for gravitation!”).
As a whole,
the dialogue reflects Bikram
’s genius for teaching a class that successfully gets inside the head of a struggling practitioner. It gives precise advice for otherwise minor-seeming details (the alignment of a grip, the tuck of a chin) that force major changes to overall muscle use. It is, in short, the distillation of a really good yoga class.

Which is, of course, explicitly the point. Bikram has a document that gives him both quality control and flexibility to expand. It answers his 1970s dilemma. He can spread his yoga with no screwups and with completely mediocre teachers. He can teach millions and ensure that at the end of the day, nobody ever knows more about the yoga than him.

And for that last reason, for the true practitioner, the dialogue pierces the industrial into the spiritual. It is the central transmission. The codification of the guru’s wisdom. Even foreign students who will never teach a day in English must learn it in English. Their mechanistic atonal recitations a testament to some need beyond the practical. Throughout the training, the actual text of the dialogue is referenced, dissected, and parsed for meaning in a tradition that would make the most midrashing of rabbi proud. Why we ask during this nightly lecture, does the dialogue specify kicking before stretching? What does it mean that the dialogue specifies one must “roll like a wheel” in a stationary posture? Repeatedly we will ask for clarification about the alignment in a specific posture, and instead of answering, even extremely experienced, otherwise personable and knowledgeable teachers will respond by simply reciting the words of the dialogue back despite the fact we have heard them endlessly before.
The need to adhere to Bikram
’s broken, often counterproductive phrasing becomes an end in itself, an effort to ensure a continuity of tradition, a seminal instinct: it is a gradient for the hierarchy to flow, of senior teachers over their juniors, of juniors over the newbies, and of Bikram over all—replicating himself ad infinitum, alighting like a Xerox flash in his followers’ brains each time they teach his class.