Hell-Bent (40 page)

“My one goal was to accurately try and capture my experience …”:
This book is the product of hundreds of interviews, detailed handwritten notes, audio recordings, extensive follow-up conversations, and cross-referencing through multiple sources. It is also, like all nonfiction, the product of memory and word choice. For that reason, I want to reiterate the obvious, and make clear that this is just the record of one person’s experience, not a bead on the Truth of Bikram (whatever that may be), or an attempt at a statement on the beautiful, chaotic, confounding community that has grown up around him. To protect privacy and condense narrative, a very few names have been changed and a very few details altered—although in no way do I believe these changes effect the material truth of the story or the integrity of my recollection.

Prologue: Bombproof?

“Prologue: Bombproof?”:
A reference less to the epigraphic quotes below, or Bikram Choudhury’s famous description of his yoga (“I make you bulletproof, waterproof, fireproof, windproof, money-proof, sex-proof, emotion-proof. Nothing in the world can take your peace away”) but rather to an offhand remark by Linda, “L-Like Linda,” two minutes before she trailed off in speech during our interview (
p. 193
)—a moment that was very much on my mind as I stood staring out at the darkness from offstage and a moment
that speaks to the almost definitional hatha experience, where an event can be both devastating and life-affirming at the same instant—an offhand remark where Linda explained, while visibly trembling from the memory, that she released herself from Bikram because all of a sudden she found the yoga she loved exploding all around her.

“If the radiance of a thousand suns …”:
Oppenheimer quoted in
The Decision to Drop the Bomb,
produced by Fred Freed,
NBC News,
1965.

“I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. …”:
Quoted by Paul Keegan, “Yogis Behaving Badly,”
Business 2.0,
Sept. 2002, and repeated by eager trainees at every Teacher Training since then.

Part I: It Never Gets Any Easier (If You Are Doing It Right)

“This story expresses, I think, most completely his philosophy of life. … He thought of civilized and morally tolerable human life as a dangerous walk. …”:
Bertrand Russell,
Portraits from Memory and Other Essays,
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956.

“The Man in the Mirror (Aka What I Learn about Bikram from the Internet”:
To be sure, this includes information from more sources than simply the World Wide Web; however, what distinguishes it is the self-referential, unverifiable nature of the material—almost exclusively originating from Bikram himself, either via lectures, autobiography, or retellings from senior teachers. And although I list the sources for which I came across this information, it is important to note that this is in no way meant to affirm its truth any more than it is meant to affirm the funhouse-mirror way information gets bounced around when it can be used for self-promotion.

“By the tender age of three …”:
For confusion about dates of Bikram milestones in the Bikram world, see endnotes for page 30. Dates in this portion of the text are those given at Fall 2010 Teacher Training or his official autobiography. (Bikram Choudhury,
Bikram Yoga: The Guru Behind Hot Yoga Shows the Way to Radiant Health and Personal Fulfillment,
New York: HarperCollins, 2007.)

“A guru himself so powerful … he would stop his own pulse, allow an elephant to walk across his chest, or bend a bar of iron with his throat”:
Descriptions—and even images—of Ghosh’s yogic “parlor tricks” (in the words of Tony Sanchez) can be found in many places on the Web, most prominently
www.ghoshtrustfund.com
.

“Ghosh demanded total obedience from his disciples … subjecting those who did to screaming fits and Brahmanical tantrums. …”:
Biswanath Ghosh,
Tribute to My Beloved Father Byayamacharyya Yogindra Bishnu Charan Ghosh,
Bishnu Charan Ghosh Birth Centenary Committee, 2003.

“The easily distracted Bikram … when Bikram lost focus, Ghosh burned the preteen with incense. …”:
Repeated at Fall 2010 Teacher
Training. According to Bikram, Ghosh would also “chase him with a sword” and “refuse to eat until I had performed a posture to his satisfaction.”

“At the request of head judge … B. K. S. Iyengar …”:
Staff Writer, “Yoga Masters Unite: B. K. S. Iyengar Blesses Bikram Choudhury,”
Yoga Tree,
January–February 2011.

“He ran marathons with no training. …”:
Todd Cole, “Some Like It Hot,”
Australian Yoga Journal,
2011.

“He became a competitive weight lifter. …”:
Bikram Yoga: The Guru Behind Hot Yoga Shows the Way to Radiant Health and Personal Fulfillment,
2007.

“Slowing his heart rate until he could be buried alive …”:
A claim Bikram has repeated in numerous forms at recent trainings, typically with reference to a news organization that supposedly documented the event. I could find no evidence of Bikram proper carrying out a live burial; however, there are examples of other yogis using meditation to slow their heart rates to imperceptible levels and submit to live burial. It seems more than possible that Bikram, inspired by their example, decided to appropriate their talent as an aspirational lie of sorts. (For examples of documented live burial, see James Braid,
Observations on Trance: Or, Human Hibernation,
London: Churchill, 1850; or John Ding-E Young and Eugene Taylor, “Meditation as a Voluntary Hypometabolic State of Biological Estivation,”
Physiology,
1998.)

“Around this time, Bikram learned he didn’t need to sleep. …”:
While Bikram Choudhury circa 2011 clearly sleeps, and probably does so more now as a sixty-five-year-old than he did as a younger man, interviews with people close to him repeatedly validate the idea that he relies on much, much less sleep than the average person: perhaps two to four hours per night throughout the 1970s. Back then, when even his most die-hard acolytes would conk out at 3 or 4 A.M., Bikram would continue toward sunrise, making long-distance phone calls to family and friends in India, watching another late-night movie by himself, or heading off to the all-night disco to indulge in his passion for dance—always to arrive bright-eyed and bursting with energy for the class he was scheduled to teach the next morning.

“Bikram slipped and dropped a 380-pound weight on his knee. …”:
This is the essential origin story of Bikram Choudhury, master of yoga therapy. It has been repeated in many forms in many ways. The details here come largely from Bikram’s autobiography cited earlier. It is interesting to note that at least one longtime observer, Tony Sanchez, doesn’t believe it’s the Lord’s truth—and that the story, which in some retellings includes the doctors urging amputation—has been wildly exaggerated. “You know who else injured their knees?” Tony asks. “His guru. Bishnu Ghosh badly injured both knees after a motorcycle crash. It prevented him from walking late in life. And it doesn’t appear that he could use yoga alone to heal himself it, does it?” While there is no way to know for certain, I will say Bikram’s description of his injury
definitely fits an ugly pattern I observed whereby practitioners exaggerated old injuries in order to justify/sell/inspire outsiders about the power of the yoga.

“Ghosh made Bikram swear an oath: ‘My guru took my hand and told me …’”:
All quotations from
Bikram Yoga: The Guru Behind Hot Yoga Shows the Way to Radiant Health and Personal Fulfillment,
2007.

“There, in the wealthy Shinjuku district …”:
Peter Sklivas, “Hot Yoga in America,” from
Yoga in America,
edited by Deborah S. Bernstein and Bob Weisenberg,
Lulu.com
, 2009.

“Mirrors were added. …”:
This is an inference made from several sources. Rajashree has said mirrors were not used in Ghosh’s Calcutta school to teach yoga (“I hated them when I first came to America”), but were used to teach weightlifters form. Many older teachers have affirmed the presence of mirrors in Bikram’s first Los Angeles school.

“When word reached the president about the young yoga master …”:
Nixon story as told on CBS’s
60 Minutes
(
60 Minutes,
2005, Mika Brzezinski, “ ‘Hot’ Yoga Burns Bright,” New York: CBS News) and repeated in
Bikram Yoga: The Guru Behind Hot Yoga Shows the Way to Radiant Health and Personal Fulfillment,
2007.

“The president issued an open invitation. … Bikram … arrived on a chartered plane … welcomed on the runway by a phalanx of high-ranking administration officials. …”:
Overlapping versions of this story were told on
60 Minutes, Wonders of Yog
blog, and Teacher Training Fall 2010. (
60 Minutes,
2005, Mika Brzezinski, “ ‘Hot’ Yoga Burns Bright,” New York: CBS News; Ram Godar, “Yogi Raj Bikram Choudhury,”
Wonders of Yog
blog,
http://wondersofyog.blogspot.com/2011/03/yogi-raj-bikram-choudhury.html
.)

“In India, gurus prescribed individualized posture sequences. … But that wouldn’t be necessary here.”:
Richard Leviton, “How the Swamis Came to the States: A Comprehensive History of Yoga in the U.S.,”
Yoga Journal,
March/April 1990.

“You all grew up in California on a king-size waterbed. … If you feel dizzy, nauseous, you must be happy”:
Both classic Bikramisms, repeated during lectures at Teacher Training Fall 2010 and on his audiocassette class,
Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class.

“The more Bikram came to appreciate the miracle of the heat, the more the thermostat in his studio started sliding up: from 85 degrees F to 95 degrees F one week, to 100 degrees F the next, ultimately climaxing at a scalding 110 degrees F”:
This evolution of the heat has been confirmed by a wide variety of early practitioners. Bonnie Jones Reynolds Jr., Tony Sanchez, L-Like Linda, and Jimmy Barkin all recalled the temperature in Bikram’s original studio as a mildly warm 85 degrees F, and all recall it maintained by a few space heaters. By the late 1990s, the temperature had skyrocketed
into the heights of today, kept in place by industrial-strength furnaces. While there is no set temperature, most studio owners I spoke with aimed for 105 degrees F plus or minus ambient humidity. The “climax” I mention in the text of 110 degrees is almost certainly low, as studios that opt for a drier heat have been reported to crank things up into the Death Valley 120-degrees-plus range. All fitting with the attitude I have heard expressed by more than one studio owner: “I asked Bikram about the heat, and he said, ‘You cannot get it too high.’ ”

“Shirley MacLaine took the guru aside and explained …”:
Bikram Yoga: The Guru Behind Hot Yoga Shows the Way to Radiant Health and Personal Fulfillment,
2007.

“By forty, Bikram … let a motorcycle ride over his chest on the evening news. …”:
A stunt repeated multiple times and which did not end well on the final attempt. The motorcycle was driven by the morbidly obese son of Bishnu Ghosh, Bisu Ghosh. Tony Sanchez, who was in attendance, remembers being horrified as his guru was knocked unconscious, head cracked against the pavement, and believes his personality was permanently altered by the incident. Jimmy Barkan remembers that Bikram’s back was “full of black holes for months after that.” “It was real and he was injured,” Barkan says. “Bikram told me he had been in Beverly Hills too long at that point. That he hadn’t really prepared and didn’t have the concentration.”

“By forty-five, he had saved Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s NBA career, rejuvenated John McEnroe’s tennis game, collaborated with NASA … and massaged a pope. …”:
All claims repeated by Bikram at Teacher Training Fall 2010 and many, many other places.

“Stashed close to forty Rolls-Royces in its garage …”:
Clancy Martin, “The Overheated, Oversexed Cult of Bikram Choudhury,”
Details
, February 2011.

“In some accounts he started training at three, sometimes at five. …”:
For differing ages of Bikram milestones, see the websites below (as accessed in March 2012). To underscore the point that I think these discrepancies are less a matter of a sloppy webmaster, and more a matter of Bikram’s cavalier attitude when telling or retelling details of his autobiography, I will note that at both Teacher Training Fall 2010 and in his first, now out-of-print book, he repeatedly used the age four for meeting Bishnu Ghosh, an age that differs from the assertion in his most current autobiography that he didn’t meet Ghosh until he moved to Calcutta at age six.

Bikram Yoga Park Slope:
Starts yoga at three, meets Ghosh at five, wins first championship at eleven, weight lifting accident at twenty (
www.bikramyogaparkslope.com/bikram/about-bikram-choudhury/
).

BY Encinitas:
Starts yoga at four, wins first championship at thirteen, weight lifting accident at seventeen (
www.bikramencinitas.com/about_ocn.htm
).