Hell-Bent (41 page)

BY Charleston: Meets Ghosh at five, wins first championship at twelve (
www.bikramcharleston.com/blog/2011/07/remember-bishnu-ghosh
).

BY San Jose:
Meets Ghosh at three, weight lifting accident at twenty (
www.bikramyogasanjose.com/bysj/faq
).

Bikram Yoga: The Guru Behind Hot Yoga
: Meets Ghosh at age six, wins first championship at thirteen, weight lifting accident at eighteen.

I apply scrutiny to this amazingly minor point only because with inspection, a wide variety of Bikram’s claims—the name of a medical conference where his research was presented, the extent of his knee injury, any number of his supposed accomplishments—have a similar slippery feel.

“His famous yoga sequence, the very core of Bikram Yoga, was actually not so much developed or designed by Bikram, but largely excerpted … from a longer series of ninety-one postures. …”:
For more details on the relationship between Bikram’s copyrighted twenty-six-posture sequence and the original Ghosh ninety-one-posture series, see Appendix I, online at
www.benjaminlorr.com/hellbent
.

“Of course, this hasn’t stopped the president’s library from expressing extreme skepticism that the two ever met.”:
From the supremely helpful Jon Roscoe of the Nixon Presidential Library: “This is a question we get consistently and we have yet to be able to confirm any of it. … We have almost a minute-by-minute accounting of the president’s daily life from 1969–1974 and there is no mention of Mr. Choudhury in any of the records, including trip files for travel in South East Asia and the Pacific. Nor, for that matter, is there mention of yoga instruction by anyone else, named or unnamed.”

“NASA has been unable to locate. …”:
BBC Radio 4, Jolyon Jenkins, “Corporate Karma,” London: BBC Radio, January 31, 2011.

“For every Jim Carrey, who has repeatedly and publicly thanked Bikram for his girlfriend’s butt …”:
Staff writer, “Bikram Butt Fan Jim Carrey,”
www.mElleCanada.com/gossip/bikram-butt-fan-jim-carrey/a/28022
.

“Here is Madonna talking about her yoga workouts. …”:
Johnjay and Rich in the Morning,
104.7 KISS FM, December 22, 2008.

“As for the Beatles, Bikram told the BBC he treated them in 1959. …”:
Exact same claim with impossible date repeated at Teacher Training Fall 2010; BBC Radio 4, Jolyon Jenkins, “Corporate Karma,” London: BBC Radio, January 31, 2011.

“It was once common knowledge among students that Bikram won an
Olympic gold medal. …”:
According to Jimmy Barkan, “Bikram would talk about his gold medal from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics constantly when I first started taking classes. … I always was a little suspicious. I mean, if Bikram actually won an Olympic gold medal, do you think he would ever take it off? He would wear it around his waist for the rest of his life!”

“He bragged constantly during the pre-Internet 1970s about the world records he set …”:
Just in case there is any confusion, according to both James Hilary Evans of
SportsReference.com
and the Olympic Official Report Records, Bikram Choudhury was not one of the three people selected to represent India in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics for weight lifting, nor did he hold any world records or Olympic records at the time of the 1964 or 1960 Olympics.

Footnote: “A brief sampling of a much lengthier list …”:

Jabbar:
John Morgan, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is hot for yoga,”
USA Today,
September 26, 2003.

Karnazes:
Dean Karnazes, “Dean’s Blog: Turning Up the Heat,”
runnersworld.com
, November 23, 2010.

Murray:
Helen Neill, “ ‘Hardcore’ yoga spurs Murray to victory,” BBC News, March 4, 2008.

Dr. Arnot:
John Morgan, “Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is hot for yoga,”
USA Today,
September 26, 2003.

Aniston:
Admin, “How Hollywood’s hottest bodies stay in shape,”
www.TheGlobeUk.com
, June 17, 2011.

Macpherson:
Staff writer, “Elle MacPherson’s Secrets to Staying Fit Over 40,”
www.CelebrityHealthFitness.com
, February 24, 2010.

McCarthy:
Staff writer, “Best Summer Bodies: Jenny McCarthy,”
www.MensHealth.com
, 2011.

“Right now in America, there are just over 1.1 million men, women, and children who regularly …”:
No doubt a conservative number, extrapolated from the fact that an estimated 7 percent of all American yoga is Bikram Yoga (Melissa Dribben, “Beverly Hills Yogi: It’s a Calcutta-to-California Tale of How a Vigorous Brand of Yoga, Called Bikram, Led to Great Wealth—and Litigation,”
Philadelphia Inquirer,
November 23, 2003) and the fact that in 2008,
Yoga Journal
estimated 15.8 million Americans practiced yoga (“Yoga in America Study,”
Yoga Journal,
February, 2008).

“He charges just under eleven thousand dollars … 1,700 studios open worldwide, filled with over eight thousand instructors …”:
The state of the Bikram empire in late 2011, it will undoubtedly be even bigger and more expensive by the time this book is published.

“From her office, Dr. Yeargin gives me a crash course in the physiology
of exercise during extreme heat. …”:
While primarily based on an interview and email follow-up with Susan Yeargin, Ph.D., the following texts and resources were invaluable in filling out this picture of exercise in heat and heat acclimization: Santiago Lorenzo. “Mechanisms of Heat Acclimation and Exercise Performance: A Dissertation.” Presented to the Department of Human Physiology, University of Oregon, 2010; Gina Kolata. “To Beat the Heat, Drink a Slushie First.”
New York Times,
April 27, 2010; Gina Kolata. “After Heatstroke, When Is It Safe to Exercise?”
New York Times.
June 6, 2010.

“Heat is not new to yoga. …”:
The links between
tapas,
yoga, and heat are explored in the following resources: Mircea Eliade,
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958; Georg Feurstein,
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989; David Gordon White,
The Alchemical Body,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

“The world itself is created by the god Prajapati. …”:
Aitareya Brahmana
as cited in Eliade,
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom,
1958.

“Georg Feurstein notes …”:
Feurstein,
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
1989.

“Practicing
tapas
gave the gods their immortality. …”:
Feurstein,
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
1989.

“Through heat the ascetic becomes clairvoyant. …”:
Eliade,
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom,
1958.

“To generate meditative powers, worshippers turn to Agni, the god of fire. …”:
Feurstein,
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
1989.

“Fasting, withholding respiration, intense concentration, and … vigils in front of fire …”:
Eliade,
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom,
1958.

“The ancients describe ‘cooking the body in the fire of yoga’ to make the body pure. …”:
Examples of the trope of yoga “cooking” or “baking” the body can be found in the
Yoga-Shikha-Upanishad,
the
Yoga-Bija,
and the
Svetasvatara Upanishad.

Footnote: “Reference points from my own practice …”:
All heart rate data collected from a Polar RS800CX, heart rate monitor recording RR heart rate data over the course of two months where I wore said heart rate monitor in class, under my shirt.

“Backbenders call it Third-Eye Blowout. …”:
The neurologist I spoke with ascribed the cluster of symptoms I’ve described as Third-Eye Blowout to a variety of different related causes. The seizures are probably the result of an electrical discharge that comes from overstretching a nerve. The wavy rippling room and slowing of time—similar to the “aura before a migraine”—are likely due to hypersensitivity in the cerebral cortex. The changes in sound and narrowing the field of vision are probably the result of hypoxia, or low blood flow through the tiny capillaries of those organs, brought on by all the previously discussed changes in blood flow due to exercise in heat. My questions about the full-blown hallucinations got a shrug. Acid flashback?

“And that’s sensible. …”:
Safety? Injuries? While those who backbend regularly will swear there are no long-term injuries associated with it (and to be sure, I never found any), I would submit that those anecdotals are beside the point. Backbending—unlike the Beginner Bikram Series—is an extreme endeavor, with participants looking to be exposed to an extreme experience. Risk of injury is not a meaningful way to judge it—even as I feel strongly that, relatively speaking, when compared to skydiving, free climbing, ultra-endurance running, participants face far fewer risks. One of the geniuses of Backbending in particular and Bikram Yoga in general is they take these truly liminal experiences of pain, exertion, and triumph—the scaling of the peak, the twenty-sixth mile—and bottle them up into ninety-minute classes available to a mother of three in the strip mall down the street from her children’s day care.

“How could you have Macaroni Art before Arturo Boolini invented …”:
Clarification for people who take things too seriously: There is no Arturo Boolini, nor did this fictional character invented by my fictional craft-Nazis invent the real mechanized pasta press in Chicago in 1853 or any other date.

“In his book
Yoga in Modern India,
Joseph Alter makes this point. …”:
Joseph Alter,
Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Science and Philosophy,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

“Yoga is a vast history. …”:
This section and the brief “pop” history that follows would have been impossible to write without reference to the excellent work by David Gordon White (
Sinister Yogis,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009;
The Alchemical Body,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007;
Kiss of the Yogini,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Mark Singleton (
Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Postural Practice,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Joseph Alter (
Yoga in Modern India: The Body Between Science and Philosophy,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Elizabeth De Michelis (
A History of Modern Yoga,
New York: Continuum Press, 2004); Ian Whichler (
The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana,
New York: State University of New York Press, 1998); Georg Feurstein (
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989); Mircea Eliade (
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); Gudrun Buhnemann (
Eighty-four Asanas in Yoga: A Survey of Traditions,
New Dehli: D.K. Printworld, 2007); Kenneth Lieberman (“The Reflexivity of the Authenticity of Hatha Yoga,” in
Yoga in the Modern World,
ed. Jean Byrne and Mark Singleton, New York: Routledge, 2008); and Stefanie Syman (
The Subtle Body: The Story of Yoga in America,
New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010). All praise to these serious scholars, all errors mine.

Footnote: “This penile-straw being
vajroli mudra
…”:
For more information on “urethral suction” see Eliade,
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom
and/or
chapter 3
, verses 82 to 89 of the
Hatha Yoga Pradipika.
(
Hathapradipika of Svatmarama,
edited by Swami Digambarji, Poona: Yashavant Mudranalaya, 1970).

“The Sanskrit verb
yuj,
from which our noun
yoga
derives, refers to the act of hitching or joining ‘a wheeled conveyance to a draft animal’”:
Quote from White,
Sinister Yogis,
2009; additional ideas on etymology come from Whichler,
The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana,
1998, and Feurstein,
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
1989.

“These proto-Sanskrit speakers were in the midst of a several-century migration. …”:
Feurstein,
Yoga: The Technology of Ecstasy,
1989.

“The earliest of these, the Rig Veda (circa 1500 B.C.E) …”:
If we want to get eager and go way back, approximately five thousand years back, archeologists in the Indus Valley have found stonework depicting various horned men sitting with awkward crossed legs circa 3000 B.C.E. Scholar David Gordon White has done an impressive job surveying these artifacts and points out the eminently reasonable fact that whether or not they constitute evidence of yoga depends largely on imagination. Certainly these were people from the appropriate area of the world sitting in manners that resemble postures taught today as yoga. Certainly there are people who have seized upon this as evidence of yoga’s ancient origins. But it is important to remember that these particular postures also resemble sitting. As there is literally zero textual evidence from that time to support interpretation one way or another, the debate becomes fairly existential fairly quickly.