Hell-Bent (28 page)

Oakes goes on to explain that the combination of those three characteristics creates a personality profile of individuals who tend to be “headstrong and compulsive,” delighting at the defeat of their rivals, and lacking in self-restraint. They are often overtalkative: humorous but self-dramatizing. Individuals viewed as “entertaining but aggressive,” who are comfortable expressing their hostile feelings directly, “and prefer not to delay gratification.”

All of which is to say, Bikram is less of an anomaly, than cut from the charismatic cloth.

Our word
charisma
comes from the Greek goddess Charis. Charisma was Charis’s gift—the transmission of her grace to a human. To possess it, in the original sense, was to be touched by the divine.

This meaning of
charisma
speckles the Bible, both New and Old Testaments. It is typically used to describe a person “full of God’s grace,” “radiant with divine light,” and/or figuratively plugged in and glowing. The biblical embodiment of this charisma is Jesus on the mountaintop amidst the trans-figuration, bright halo of light spreading from his back, a visible merger of human nature with heavenly spirit.
The Romans had a similar concept
, using the word
facilitas
to describe a hero’s ability to lead;
facilitas
too came as a gift from the gods, empowering a speaker, issuing out from the body as a force.

And while the religious origins have slipped off our modern usage, the
feeling of an intense, almost physical talent remains. In modern descriptions, charismatics are imposing. They operate with an inverse square law like gravity.
The aging, reclusive George Washington was
dragged to the Constitutional Convention because the Framers believed his physical presence was indispensable. It wasn’t enough that he sign off on the results or send a representative on his behalf. The organizers were relying on his body, on his largely silent but terrifically dignified presence to prevent infighting and squabbling by imposing its virtues on the scene.

The flipside to this charisma—like all things divine—is devotion. And here the physicality of the charismatic’s appearance is matched by the physicality of his effect on others. And so we have 130 women fainting at a single Michael Jackson concert in Vienna—hyperventilating in tears as he walked onto the stage.
We have a mere touch from Bhagwan
Rajneesh described as incomparable bliss by a follower, “addictive as the strongest drug,” compelling the lucky fellow who was brushed “to go back for more to try and regain that feeling of harmony and being at one with the universe.”

Or consider the example of Mata Amritanandamayi—referred often as the “hugging guru.” Mata Amritanandamayi’s rites consist of a brief ceremony followed by hours of the guru simply hugging participants. Thousands attend, each patiently waiting as the Mata wades from participant to participant, giving a brief, emphatic hug.

If it sounds like harmless, if needy, nonsense to you, you are not alone. But consider this description from a real-life, stony-faced, balls-out investigative reporter, Lis Harris: “I was doing a story on a corrupt healer and wanted to ask the Mata to verify information pretty much only she could verify. My plan was to wait in the hugging line and then, when I got up to the front, ask her as many of the questions as I could, instead of getting my hug. … This, of course, proved totally absurd. … I mean, here is this little old lady, she barely spoke at all, let alone English, surrounded by a few thousand people all looking for hugs. So there was no way I was going to get anything like an interview. But by the time I realized this, I had already waited in line for a couple of hours, so I decided to stick around for my hug. … It was curiosity, nothing more. When I got up to her—honestly, I don’t know what happened. … I felt this enormous energy all over me. My legs felt like
they bent up into the splits from underneath me, all I could hear is her whispering ‘ma ma ma’ in my ears. Tears were everywhere. I was crying so much, my cheeks were slick. When she moved on, I was a mess, totally undone. Naturally, her handlers immediately swept down on me and stuffed all sorts of books in my hands. I mean, they knew they had a live one.”

On this level, charisma operates almost as a lovers’ bond. One man’s guru can be another man’s boiled rice. Pathetic. Transparent. But when it clicks, when personalities align and the moment is right, someone else invades us.
It creates a powerful, almost anti
-intellectual instinct toward surrender. We doubt it until it happens to us. And often when it happens to us, we deny it out of embarrassment.

The first attempts to study this interaction focused directly on the power dynamic. The great sociologist of capitalism, Max Weber, saw charisma as a revolutionizing force.
To Weber, the energy between charismatic
and follower was a social fuel. Unlike traditional forms of authority, the charismatic’s “superhuman” qualities inspired an intimate form of obedience, a call to service in his followers, a “mission.” Moreover, because this obedience was rooted to a single individual, it was unconstrained by the checks and balances and conservative anchors attached to institutions. It existed as an extension of the leader’s whims—beyond ethics, aesthetics, or intellect—and accordingly offered a pathway for radical social change.

Weber saw charismatic leaders continually testing their followers, challenging them with feats of commitment and strength. He saw them rejecting economic and material goals in favor of humanistic and spiritual aspirations. He saw them as risk takers, blazing with confidence, often moving rapaciously forward without fear of failure. But ultimately Weber, firmly the sociologist, was never interested in exploring personality traits. His study of charisma was fixated on the relationship between follower and leader. The actual essence—the compulsive force, the divine gift—would remain mysterious for the next seventy years, until a rising star in the psychoanalytic community named Heinz Kohut found himself forced to deal with it.

Heinz Kohut did not set out to
study charisma. Instead he spent most of his career grappling with a group of patients known in the 1960s as the narcissistically
fixated. Many of these patients were semifunctional in the outside world: brittle, shallow, little men; the tyrants of petty authority; compulsive boasters; and snooty contrarians. Their condition was for the most part crippling—and under examination, many revealed lives of intense loneliness and sadness. These were men and women whose persistent need to be correct prevented them from asking for assistance or seeking advice. Whose insistence on being dominant prevented them from caring for or loving another person. Whose delusions of grandeur prevented them from admitting they were wrong even when presented with direct evidence to the contrary. Their behavior isolated them. In fact, many appeared for analysis only because they had been forced: they were often exhibitionists who engaged in fraudulent and sexually deviant behaviors.

But Kohut was struck not by
the pathos each patient eventually revealed. He was stuck on their first impressions. And at first impression, many of these individuals enchanted. Despite knowing exactly who and what he was dealing with, Kohut found his narcissists could make him doubt his clinical diagnosis. Their confidence was infectious. They were often extremely clever, well read, and funny. Their powers of perception, especially when it came to reading him and his moods, were uncanny. And their conversational style—persuasive and assertive—made them appear not just competent, but extraordinary.
They glowed
.

But the charismatics Kohut was dealing with were deeply ill. There was no mistaking who they were. And so suddenly, after five thousand years of description,
a link was made clear
that in hindsight looks absurdly obvious: The magnetic exterior of the professional charismatic can be stripped away to reveal a desperate need for attention, a cold core of narcissism.

The Darkest Place Is under the Lamp

The story below is not the result of combining sources, but it might as well be. It is based on the specific words one person told me, although I heard variations of it so frequently that, at a certain point, it almost felt like a ritual of my interviews.

This was at a training. … Someone told him I had disrespected his yoga. Why? I don’t know. Someone always wants to get closer, and Bikram rewards that. … Of course, the idea that I had disrespected the yoga is crazy. I have devoted my life to spreading his yoga. I own a studio. I teach free classes for the community. I had just flown, at my own expense, thousands of miles to see him because I loved the yoga and I loved him. I practice six days a week. When I go home, I bring my parents to practice with me. But suddenly it didn’t matter. Someone had told Bikram I had disrespected his yoga—that I talked bad about it—and that was that.

The way it actually went down was this. … He finds me right before a lecture and pulls me out. I think the whole time he is going to thank me for flying out to see him. Instead, he pulls me outside and points at a chair: “Sit down!” So I sit down. … He puts his finger in my face and starts shouting: “You piece of shit. You scum. I heard what you said.
Remember me! Remember who I am! You think
I don’t know everything! I know everything! I’m Bikram! Now, get the fuck out of my face. I never want to see you again.” Anyone else on the planet I would have walked away and called the police. But this was the man I had devoted my life to. I loved his yoga. I still love the yoga. And so I sat there, totally blank, frozen, and listened as he just kept repeating it: “I never want to see you again! Get the fuck out of here!” Eventually he spun around and left. My eyes welled up. I called my partner, I couldn’t speak. I had no idea what I would do, not just that moment, but with my life.

From here the stories diverge. Where one person slinks off, an erased member of the community, another will lurk on the periphery until they are reabsorbed. Sometimes the anger simply vanishes as quickly as it came, and the next time the person sees Bikram—sweating with apprehension, an apologetic greeting well rehearsed—they are met with an immediate hug. More often, a groveling process begins. Gifts,
³³
charitable donations, direct
payments, indirect apologies, and their continued regret-filled presence at official events finally result in an opportunity to get back into good graces. For others, it is to no avail: I spoke to one studio owner who found himself abruptly cut off from the entire community. People he knew for years refused to acknowledge his presence.

There is a cruelty to many of these interactions that goes beyond the anger. A senior instructor deliberately kept around so he could be fired on his birthday. A studio owner who was invited over to dinner at Bikram’s house—who flew into town for this dinner—and who arrived excited and honored, only to have Bikram use that occasion to publicly exile him. Bikram enjoys the setup. Balancing the vulnerable on the tee.

Or from my training, the story of Brian.

Brian was a tall, muscular, hyperfriendly, yoga-teacher-to-be. I loved hearing him give dialogue because—even more than the mechanistic blushing Japanese or the goofball Australians—his thick whaddaboutit Queens accent reminded me how diverse the yoga was. That it could cut across economic worlds and undermine every obvious stereotype. Brian was in my group for Posture Clinic, so I got to know him fairly well over the nine weeks. Which is relevant only because otherwise I would very likely never have heard any of this. It would simply have vanished like so many other interactions with Bikram.

On the very last day of Teacher Training, right before the Timeless 4 A.M. Movie Club, Bikram called Brian up to his hotel suite. Everyone else was off celebrating, discussing where they were going to teach their first class, sleeping past 9 A.M., or even skipping a class or two.

In his suite, Bikram asked Brian to sit. Then he announced Brian was not going to be allowed to graduate. That he would not be allowed to teach and that he would not be given his money back.

Brian asked what was going on.

Bikram spoke slowly and calmly, like everything was perfectly obvious.
Brian watched the hotel suite begin to blur into nonsense. Before coming to San Diego, Bikram explained, Brian had taken classes at a studio that also offered other forms of exercise. Regularly taken classes there. This studio was unsanctioned, Bikram explained, illegal, a cheat, stealing his money and his property, by which he meant his yoga. This was written into the contract everyone signed at Teacher Training, and Brian knew this. As punishment to that studio owner, Bikram had decided he was not going to allow Brian to graduate from Teacher Training, he was not going to allow him to teach his yoga, and he was not going to give him his money back.

Brian said: “Boss, I have done everything you have asked. I have followed every rule here. I have nothing to do with that illegal studio. I just took classes there. It was near my house.”

Bikram explained that was beside the point.

Brian said: “I have never taught at that school and I will never teach at the school. I will walk away from everyone I know at that school. And I will do it for you.”

Bikram explained that he had made up his mind. That the rogue studio owner had forced his hands. He explained that if Brian wanted to blame someone, he should blame the studio owner. A studio owner Brian barely knew and did not like. Then Bikram smiled at Brian and informed him once again he would not be refunding his money. He explained he had known about this problem from the beginning of training but waited until the final day to tell Brian. Then he asked Brian to get out of his suite.

And so no Brian at graduation.

And finally there are the women. You don’t need all the salacious details to understand, so I won’t belabor the point. Just to link it to everything else.

When I first got to training and watched him play favorites, it was hard not to be amused by how silly it all was. This was Bikram of a thousand dirty jokes. Who never misses an opportunity to push up his sleeve to show off a diamond-encrusted wristwatch. Or who offers to let a cute girl try his on if she’ll let him wear hers. Who tells a stammering but statuesque girl delivering dialogue that she was perfect, just after ripping the heart out of a stammering but scrawny boy. Who discusses how slippery men can be
and how it is a wife’s responsibility to prevent her husband from cheating. There was something so transparent about it that it was disarming. He was a world-class ham, a flatterer, overt to the point of insecurity. But as training progressed, I learned that is what makes Bikram so potent: Authenticity is morality. Being open and funny is his method. Or as he might say: “The darkest place is right beneath the lamp.” Bikram would eye the prettiest, blondest women in front of all 380 of us. He would begin from the very first moment he stepped onstage. He watched where they sat during lecture and how deep their practice was during class. He joked about them, teasing them on his headset microphone. His favorites were the big women, thoroughbreds, who hit the archetype of feminine hard, with long hair, proud legs, perfect figure. But if the big women were too proud, too married, he also knew exactly where to look next. The slightly smaller version. Still beautiful but two or three steps more insecure. The one who always made prolonged eye contact with other men, who made a point of sticking around and watching movies with him, who was always wearing short-shorts, and who was already so exceptionally comfortable with her body that it made you wonder what exactly happened to make her learn to be so comfortable. Bikram can pick out a weak ankle twenty years after the injury. Do you really think he can’t pick out the few needy young women who believe his yoga has saved their lives and will do anything to prove that to him?