Hell-Bent (47 page)

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“My father showed me what it means to love by taking care of me in a way only he knew how. He would bathe me. Push my commode chair to the bathroom and prepare me. Take me to appointments. He would do all this plus more and never complain. … We talk about what it means to love, care, and support in yoga so much. I was witnessing it firsthand, and it has made the accident the greatest gift of my life.”

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It is impossible not to take a moment to dignify Ms. Boobs aka Ms. Vancouver, a woman who aside from hailing from Vancouver and having truly enormous pie-tin-sized bosoms, represents something hard to quantify but extremely important about Teacher Training: the difficulty of understanding where exactly on the four-axis scale of love, discipline, ridicule, and sexual weirdness Bikram’s crosshairs fall at a given moment. Ms. Boobs was instantly singled out by Bikram for her sloppy postures and for being oddly resistant to any corrections—her nickname branded onto her by the end of the very first class. As someone who frequently practiced next to Ms. Boobs, I can attest that her deafness to correction was truly stunning; Bikram would tell her exactly how to move her body, and often she simply wouldn’t change a thing. This frustrated Bikram to the point of rage and he would, in turn, demean her day in and day out, identifying her only as Ms. Boobs and saying really truly hurtful things to her about her intelligence, appearance, sexual hygiene, to say nothing of her abilities as a yogi, comments that she would bear with a nobility and facial expression that resembled a Hindu cow, but that in me at least continually produced a personal gut check, Asch conformity level of self-reflection, in that Bikram’s comments were decidedly funny in situ but bullying and transparently mean-spirited in reflection. Yet, every day in a room with over 380 people, Ms. Boobs made the conscious decision to position herself directly in front of Bikram. She definitely felt some critical relationship with him. She made few friends. She wore tighter and more revealing clothing. Bikram, who would often show affection to people he insulted, especially outside of class, had nothing but disgust for Ms. Boobs and her determination to persist in the face of his anger. For instance, in the middle of one lecture, apropos of nothing but her existence, he stopped the lecture, turned to the room, and said, “When you get a person like her, you don’t worry. Don’t spend time. Take the money and go. They are expendable,” before returning to the rambling topic at hand. He hurt her, she hurt him, and the level of bile he threw at her and the level of silence she threw back were raised to such uncomfortable levels that at the end of the training, during a routine announcement that brought up her name, everyone else gave her a spontaneous five-minute standing ovation in acknowledgment of the weird determined sad place her position taught us about the Bikram crosshairs. An applause that decidedly and cowardly occurred while Bikram was not in the room.

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Bringing up a topic that I’d be remiss in not covering, since everyone except me seems to think it is fascinating: Bikram has a copyright on not only the words of the dialogue, but also on the actual sequence of yoga. He believes his beginning yoga class is his intellectual property and uses a battalion of lawyers to enforce his claims. When it first came out in 2002, this decision prompted epic controversy in the yogic world, especially because Bikram promptly began suing former teachers who were using his name. Yoga teachers everywhere began rending their spandex and shrieking in mantra that Bikram was trying to own yoga. Personally, I’m not bowed over with sympathy for these claims. In fact, for the most part, I find them disgustingly self-serving. The urge to copyright or trademark comes from the typical capitalist corporate mentality that we all have to bend over for once in a while. I’m not here to laud it, but I rarely hear the open-source yoga community rallying in opposition to the brand names on their sexed-up bikini bottoms. Bikram has never tried to copyright the individual postures. In fact, he has gone out of his way to point out these are universal and eternal movements, “gifts from the gods,” physical expressions to the body-whole as music notes are to the vocal cords. Copyrighting the postures would indeed be perverse and folly. But when someone comes up with a unique arrangement of musical notes (or words or images or movements of the body as in a choreographed dance), we honor it. More important than the social ethics, however, barring some 1984-style Big Brother development, Bikram’s copyright is never going to interfere with you as an individual practicing his yoga series in the privacy of your home. It is enforceable in a reasonable sense only with those studios who choose to teach it to large groups of people for money. So if your understanding of yoga precludes selling it to make money, then Bikram’s copyright will not affect you; it affects only people who do as Bikram does. Further (now that I’m wound up) as someone who does not think Bikram’s series is magic or holy or perfect, and who very much sees it as a human product, developed by Bikram and his guru within the limits of their time and place, I fail to see why these persecuted studios/teachers can’t improvise from it to express either their individuality or to address some of the sequence’s weaknesses. The fact of the matter is that Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class
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is a fantastic yoga class, a wonderful starting point for anyone looking to become more physically fit and spiritually whole, but it has some noticeable flaws. It doesn’t strengthen the arms, chest, wrists or ankles terribly well. It doesn’t feature internal bandhas or offer overt opportunities at meditation. It isn’t an AIDS drug being withheld from the third world or a surgical procedure reserved only for the rich. It is an innovated yoga sequence, which in the spirit of Courtney Mace–style yoga competition, will hopefully inspire some of his best, most knowledgeable students to create enhanced innovations of their own—that is, once they grow a pair and get out from under their guru’s shadow.

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Reference point to the emotionally vulnerable place we were at during teacher training: That night, three other people also burst into tears delivering dialogue. Follow-up point to Katie and her massage: “It was so weird because it was so normal. I went up to Bikram’s suite, which was just a larger version of the crappy suite we are all staying in and sat next to him, massaging his ankles and calves for two hours. It was completely unremarkable, like a college hangout, people walking around eating, visiting teachers schmoozing with each other. Eventually Bikram decided he wanted to see a Bollywood movie, and half of the room exchanged glances and left. … What was amazing was being so close to him, watching his effect on people. Big, tough, tattooed, agro-looking guys coming up to him and just staring in his eyes and saying, “I just love being around you. I just love being in your presence.”

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In addition to the electric stimulation belt, by week five, Janis will have bought: two Brookstone electric back massagers (for exchanging massages after class) two MiFi WiFi devices (to circumvent the T&C’s terrible Internet), a second MacBook Pro laptop (no clue), a third camera (this one waterproof), a cool-looking electric thermometer to track the heat fluctuations in the tent, a heart rate monitor, a scale, a sixty-dollar bracelet with magnets that he was told would help with balance, a giant red bouncy ball for additional postclass abdominal crunches that never really happen, and, in a fit of fear after this freakout Posture Clinic, a tiny Bluetooth earbud that Janis decides he can use (with a confederate at a remote location) in lieu of memorizing the dialogue (plan never enacted). Note also that the above clutter doesn’t count the legions of supplements, pills, algae, herbal joint remedies, protein powders, and horribly stinky liquid whole-food vitamins, all whose desperate purchasing speaks to the pain and exhaustion he, like everyone else, is going through. The greatest of which, in size if not sheer awesomeness, is his gigantic canister of X-Treme Lean Black Label Weight Loss Diet Pills purchased to ensure he wins his bet, but which he dares take only once—albeit in double dosage—because “Two hours later, I worry I never sleep again. Heart becomes very funny. Hard to walk, only want to run, run, run.”

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The gifts that people use to worm their way back into Bikram’s graces have their own special absurdity. I have heard a senior staff member grievously instruct a terrified young woman to “approach Boss carefully. Give him space. Then when he has cooled off, find something that he’ll like, you know, like ruby red hot shorts, a leopard print something or other, a gold cap, and present it to him. Then tell him how much the yoga means to you, how much you love what he has done, take his class, take a seminar, and usually it will blow over.”

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As the prevalence of
maybe
s below makes clear, this isn’t based on any one person. But the group of women whom it is based on might be forgiven for thinking I am taking personal details from stories they told me in confidence and making them public. That is understandable. But sadly, I heard the same story again and again and again.

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At least that is how it turned out for most of the women I talked to. They also all seemed certain it turned out differently for other women.

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Bikram always says that “yoga makes you, you” a claim I have never found accurate. Instead, I have always felt my essential nature—my sense of self—has remained fairly consistent through my yoga practice. Almost like a song melody that contained my most personal characteristics. Yoga never altered this song, never even tweaked the notes, but what it did do—and what makes it, in my opinion, fairly incredible—is act as a tool, raising or lowering the volume. It can amplify my ego as it already exists. Or humble me to my knees. One of my best friends at training, Anna, always said, “I don’t know how the yoga works, but I do know that I started practicing and I grew a pair of brass balls. I kicked my alcoholic husband out of my life. I got a better job. It’s a power tool for taking responsibility.” I couldn’t agree more. Like all power tools, however, if used improperly, it can be dangerous. And as a community, we need to step up and realize that when this aspect of the tool does not get addressed, it gets abused.

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Love! And a word about its use herewith:
I am sure the more socially aloof have been snickering along with my heavy-handed use of the term. I certainly know that between the time I first arrived at Backbending and when I left, my cynicism was just as bruised as my backbones. But the experience of love—the euphoria, the cravings, the earnest sincerity, and full-bore absorption—is an extremely real part of the whole yoga experience. Among new couples, new mothers, and the freshly fucked, significant attention has been paid to the release of a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neuromodulator intensely associated with both the maternal instinct and sexual bonding. (Hello, Freud.) An injection of oxytocin to a mother boar will cause her to bond to an orphaned young piglet regardless of providence. Similarly, when at play, oxytocin levels increase with arousal and crest at orgasm. A sudden injection into a rat will cause a sudden erection. Both yoga in particular and vigorous exercise in general have been shown to flood the brain with oxytocin. The rapt emotions Sol feels toward the yoga are neurologically probably not too different from the rapt emotions he felt toward his wife Ashley when they first started courting. Important too is the growing understanding that a major role of oxytocin might be to
decouple
neurological links (i.e., when you fall in love with someone, it is actually very helpful to first fall out of love with your previous partner, lose all those old memories and associations). Thus the blast of oxytocin during a yoga binge might actually be a key part in the self-transformation process: the powerful feelings of love erasing old neural connections and decoupling those ugly relationships (to food, sex, drugs, pain, sleep, etc.) that aborted so many other nascent health kicks in the past.

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All spelling and grammar mistakes here are from the original; and although there is no way to know for certain, I suspect it means Bikram pecked this particular note out with his own two fingers. Silent testament to Esak’s place in the community: for this killing, Bikram had to do the wet work himself.

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When Rajashree is asked the same questions, she takes several seconds longer to answer before offering the exquisitely parsed: “I think our marriage spreads yoga. I think of it as a universal marriage for our students.”

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There is also no skin. His students are all dressed in T-shirts, leggings, or baggy shorts. “This actually produced the most fighting the first few days on the training,” Tony tells me. “People did not want to give up their yoga gear. But I’m a man. With a wife. I don’t need you bending over in front of me in something skimpy. I don’t need a roomful of young men clenching their abs, trying to show their six-packs to each other.”

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The nuance and depth in Tony’s teaching are quite simply unrivaled in the Bikram/hot yoga world. My jaw dropped when I watched the routine manner Tony’s students approached postures like One-Armed Peacock, Mountain, or Dancer. Postures I had been taught took years to master and were simply unavailable to the 99 percent. His ability to step inside your personal body and analyze your approach—which feels absolutely supernatural as it occurs but which is actually the simple result of his four-hours-of-daily-practice-for-forty-years hyperconsciousness about all things related to the human form—allows him to teach extremely daunting movements to rank beginners. Moreover, Tony teaches the meditation, mantras, breathing exercises, kryias, and other components of hatha yoga that Bikram once taught but no longer shares with his students. They give an intellectual succor to his training that the Bikram community is craving. Most tellingly, Tony explicitly teaches the limitations of yoga. “Most yogis believe yoga is a total solution—that yoga will cure all their problems. If you tell them that you run or lift weights, they’ll act like you are betraying them. … This is utter nonsense. … Actually, it is worse, it is fraud and will end up harming people. Yoga is a system for maintaining one aspect of your health. I have practiced for almost forty years and I have pretty good postures, but I would never rely on yoga alone. Bikram certainly never did. Even when his postures were in top form, he would go lift weights at the Santa Monica gym. Most of our students in those days—especially the actors and athletes—had other exercise programs to supplement as well. … Selling anything as a total solution is unrealistic. And buying it is a sign you have stopped questioning and learning and decided to give those qualities over to someone else.”