Hell-Bent (25 page)

Problems versus Weird

And this is Posture Clinic. We are in a tiny room in the Town and Country. Bland green Town and Country carpet on the floor. Oil portrait of feverish girl on the wall. All us trainees crammed in the back, all sitting on the floor, knees bent up and hunched over, mumbling at the copy of dialogue between our legs. In the very front, just like a low-budget
American Idol
audition, a panel of certified teachers sits with a giant binder. One by one, students either volunteer or are called up. They take a last look at the section of dialogue we are performing for the day, stand in the center of the room, and then spit up the words they have just been studying. As they recite, three students demonstrate the postures in accordance with their words, providing visual feedback. Many times, those demonstrators become those poor demonstrators, left dangling in between movements, trapped in a difficult posture while the presenter’s mind goes blank. Their legs quiver; their legs fail. When it is over, the panel of certified teachers makes various cryptic notations into the binder. Then they offer feedback on delivery. Then the next presenter is called.

Tonight, after dispatching with the first two-thirds of presenters, we go off on a tangent about the problems typically faced in the yoga room.

“The biggest problem is that men are gross,” a female teacher says.

“I’ll second that. Lot of balls … Soccer shorts with no underwear is not proper yoga gear, gentlemen.”

“Biggest problem I see is maintaining your own practice. … If you are teaching ten to fifteen classes a week, that is a lot of time in the hot room. It takes a physical toll.”

“Yeah. And the first thing to go is your own practice. You become one of those: the undead, the yoga teacher who doesn’t do yoga.”

Someone in the audience asks what the weirdest thing is they have encountered.

“Everything is weird! This is Bikram, darling.”

“Your first fainter will be weird.”

“Or how about the people who show up and then absolutely refuse to do anything you ask them. They are weird.”

“Oh god. How about the people who sneak cell phones or watches. It’s ninety minutes, darling, you can make it.”

“Or the couples that try to hold hands during the floor series. Weird.”

Then the lead teacher in the room inserts herself. “You will see a little bit of everything. Teaching is a great big perspective shift. You are going to see things from offstage instead of being one of the actors. It is a new yoga for you to do. You will begin to understand why people come to class in the first place. You will understand how fragile people are and how important this can be for them.”

She continues: “I’ve had a seizure during class. That was weird. … The girl had these great big googly eyes, then she stumbled. I knew it, I could see it happening, and so I stepped up and caught her. She went into a seizure in my hands, and I just kept on with Eagle posture dialogue, holding her. The girl just needed to shake. Not so many people in the class noticed.

“And I’ll tell you what, my mouth kept moving the whole time, I knew the dialogue that well … which is where you need to get to. … When it was over, she lay on her mat. I crouched down to check on her, and she said: ‘Please, please, don’t make me leave.’ She was desperate. So I said okay. And she continued to lay out. When she got back up, she did the best Standing-Bow in the class.”

There are a few follow-up questions on the seizure and the fainting. But this is the fourth week of Teacher Training, so we are well inured to the possibilities of fainters, seizers, criers, yellers, and other potentially extreme reactions to the yoga mainly because we have seen them all in the hot tent. So we drift back to reciting dialogue.

More trainees rise and recite, another and another. Everyone goes back to studying their dialogue.

Finally we get down to the last few presenters. At this point, the volunteers have stopped. The lead teacher scans a list of names in the binder and calls people up at random. These are the unprepared, the ones who never volunteer. They are made equally of people who are chronically anxious,
foreigners who can’t speak English and are essentially memorizing a series of sounds, and people like me, who simply suck at memorizing anything.

A name is called and a shaky woman I have never met before gets up. She has long brown hair and softly says her name. She is in her forties, certainly older than the majority of the room, but not atypical. The lead teacher asks her to repeat her name louder and with more confidence. She repeats her name identically and before she can be interrupted goes right into reciting her dialogue. It is halting, slow, atonal, and therefore totally par for the course. Then she stops in media res. Her arms are limp by her sides, but her fingers are chewing against her palms.

The lead instructor interrupts the silence. The abbreviated performance was not good enough, and so she asks the woman to begin again. This time, she suggests, the woman should smile more while she is speaking the dialogue. The lead teacher tells her this will make her more confident even if she doesn’t feel more confident.

The woman begins again. But instead of smiling, she starts crying. The words of the dialogue are coming out in the same halting manner, but are half swallowed by sobs. Most of the room is still staring at their dialogue, trying to memorize the language they’ll need for tomorrow’s recitation. The lead teacher stops her again and asks her to start from the beginning again. The woman stays frozen. Her palms are open and shaking like jazz hands.

Then she starts really crying. A younger teacher from the panel gets up to offer a hug, but the lead teacher stops him.

“Why are you crying?” she asks the woman in a calm voice.

The middle-aged woman continues crying, shoulders hunched, arms still oddly straight by her sides. I find it terribly moving, like watching the secret life of my mother.

“Why are you crying?”

At this point, everyone in the room has looked up from the dialogue and is watching. The woman has her head turned down, staring at the floor. She wipes her hands against her cheeks, but keeps crying. The silence grows and I’m convinced the teacher is about to ask for a third time, when suddenly the woman chokes out: “You know the yoga saved my life. … I just
don’t want to just go through a posture without knowing it. It’s disrespectful to the yoga.

“What’s that?” The lead teacher asks almost hungry, “Who saved you?

“The yoga saved my life,” the woman repeats, wipes her cheeks. “You know doing the yoga, coming every day.”

“No, who did this? Who saved your life?”

“The yoga,” the woman begins.

“Who?” says the lead teacher.

“The yoga,” the woman begins again, but by this point the audience, now completely engaged in the scene, is shouting out, “You!” and “Yooooooooo!” and “You you you!” The lead teacher is smiling but insistent.

“Me, I guess. I saved my life. Me and God.”

“No. You saved your life. You did it.” There is a pause. “Not God, not—”

And then from the back of the room, a lone guy shouts out: “And
Bikram
!” Everyone laughs, and a chorus of affirmation ripples around the room.

When the laughing dies down, the woman who is no longer crying but kind of smiling and sniffling says, “I mean yeah, God or Bikram, it’s all the same. …” Then she sniffles a few more times and laughs and then bows to us weirdly.

Just as I am processing it all, imagining a future twenty centuries ahead where history has given Bikram his most fondest wish and he’s been deified, the door pops open. It is the head aide of teacher training. He pokes just his head in the room. “Good news, bad news, people. No late-night lecture tonight. But I need one of you to massage Boss. If I can get eight people to agree to massage Boss in his room, then the rest of you can go to sleep.”

He looks around the room. “Any takers? Just a massage?”

“I will!” It’s my friend Katie in the back of the room. She is raising her hand and leaning forward like she just won the lottery.

“Perfect.” The head aide looks relieved. “Don’t worry, I will be with you the whole time.”

He closes the door to move down to the next room to canvass for more volunteers.

Then, with the sniffling-crying-smiling woman still standing in the front of the room, arms still straight by her side, hands wringing against themselves again, we go on with our night.
³¹

I quickly discover that although Janis will never tell me that class is difficult for him, his stress levels are directly correlated to his spending habits. When things get really bad, Janis goes shopping.

I come back from Posture Clinic one day to find him laid out on the bed, surrounded by open tins of wasabi nori crisps, computer propped on his stomach, eyes zoned out on the currency fluctuations of the ForEx market. He barely acknowledges my arrival.

“What’s wrong?” I give him a long glance.

“Too many idiots,” Janis mumbles.

Apparently, Janis got in a confrontation during his Posture Clinic. He was reprimanded for not knowing the dialogue. Then asked to recite a passage again and again, which he felt was designed to humiliate him and his poor English. He cursed the room, stormed out, and headed to the mall.

For the first time during our stay, I sit down on the edge of
his
bed. I agree that there are too many idiots. I tell him about my troubles with dialogue. Janis’s mood rebounds considerably. Soon he has put aside the ForEx market and is standing on his knees on his bed.

He pulls up his shirt to reveal a weird electronic bandage. “I buy! The best!”

The bandage is a Slendertone belt, which seems to bridge the surprisingly narrow gap between late-night TV and the Sharper Image catalog. It
electronically stimulates the muscles in the abdomen, causing pulses of contraction and relaxation. Janis pulls a little dial from his pocket. He twists the knob, and his face contorts into a grimace of concentration and pain. Then it releases. He sighs in relief.

“Really, really good. Much better than sit-ups, I think.”

I wave off his offers for a test run and go to study dialogue on my bed, listening as Janis sighs rhythmically every ten to fifteen seconds.
³²

Later that night before going to sleep, he tells me: “This is very good. But I think it is too much. We overtrain. The women here are not very good quality, all broken. Otherwise, why they here? Bikram is very, very smart. But I think only smart for idiots. Do you see them staring at him during lecture. Like dogs at food … I do not quit now. But I think I make mistake. I miss my Latvia, my women, my clubs.”

Many Sides of the Diamond

The Advanced Demonstration arrives to remind us how little we have actually learned. This is the very last week, when we are the most exhausted, but also finally feeling a bit triumphant.
The demonstration consists of
ninety-one postures performed at a breakneck pace. These postures
represent the entire Bikram–Ghosh universe, the sum total of the lineage’s postural offerings. Within them you find the twenty-six postures that Bikram selected to make his beginners class, but also postures that no beginner could ever even attempt. The biggest reason the Advanced Demonstration reminds us of our collective ignorance is that aside from the twenty-six beginning postures that we have repeated ad nauseum by this point, most of us have never even seen the bulk of the advanced postures, much less been given the opportunity to bend into them. They are largely off-limits, not only to beginning students but also to beginning teachers.

For the demonstration, the best of the best—or at least those best who can afford the time and expense, or those best who need validation or favors from the guru—fly out to Teacher Training to perform for the trainees. It is a stunning opportunity to see where the yoga can go. Without lecture and Posture Clinic, it is also a vacation from the grind—and the mood among us cadets is beyond upbeat. It’s like the circus has come to town. Cameras are out in force. Gossip about who will be attending is circulating. Jaws are ready to be dropped. Adding to the intrigue, the Advanced Demonstration is the only time during Teacher Training where Bikram actually performs his own yoga. Instead of teaching, he practices in the group alongside everyone else while Emmy leads the class.

The actual setup is yoga in the round. A little after noon, everyone crowds into the hot tent, and we trainees ring the smaller cluster of advanced demonstrators in the center. In the center of the center is Emmy, eighty-three and leggy, in one-piece leotard with a headset microphone. Standing on the sidelines as the heat rises, I am amazed how disgusting the room feels. It is sticky and stinky, the plastic carpet hairs filled with raw-looking crud that has exuded from our bodies over the last eight weeks. There are ants. There is a filmy layer on the tent siding. When you practice the yoga, all that is blocked out, extinguished by the meditation; when you sit around as a spectator, it is just kind of gross. The whole place evokes the hygiene of a worn-out Band-Aid.

Finally, after everyone else has assembled, Bikram arrives, striding in to join Emmy at the center. There is no swagger in his entrance, it is a beeline purpose, a hyperserious intention, like he has girded up his loins for this
event for a while now, and wants to broadcast that gravity to the room. His mask of intensity is completed or undercut (probably depending on whether you are Bikram or merely one of us watching him) by a singularly goofy headband he has chosen to wear. The headband bobs as he walks, reinforcing, to me at least, the image of the middle-aged athlete, weekend warrior charging out to do battle in a pickup basketball game. Regardless, for the first time all training, Bikram is absolutely and completely silent despite wearing his own headset microphone.

The crowd, of course, goes completely nuts at his entrance.

With Bikram at her side, Emmy begins the advanced series by initiating a rapid breathing exercise. Bikram stands next to her, bobbing his head in the hyperrhythms of the respiration, clearly game to the fact that this is Emmy’s show. He follows her instructions, accepts her corrections when she offers them, and isn’t cracking endless jokes.