A student who has been practising for years on and off and has started to come back once a week said after a class this week that he had noticed he’d gained some weight over the past few weeks. It obviously wasn’t something that overly concerned him, rather just something he had observed during class. We got talking about the value of doing something that is always exactly the same so it becomes a sort of physical and mental check-in with yourself whenever you do it. “I have a friend who does other kinds of yoga and she says always doing this means your body becomes conditioned to only do this. But,” he shook his head, not needing to add anything else.
One of the many things I hated about Bikram when I started was doing the same poses each class. I was so dismissive. How hard could it be? Now I see that it doesn’t matter how long I keep doing it, there’s always going to be another layer to peel off. A really experienced student also told me this week that she is still always finding something else new to explore in the practice. (I still feel like a beginner after doing it for eight years.)
Doing a consistent sequence, I’ve found, gives you less to be distracted by as you practice (What’s the teacher going to do next? I wonder if we will do more backbends today. God I hate it when we do this…) , so you can either lose yourself completely in it or, because it’s simultaneously so complex, mindfully explore it.
One of the easiest ways, I’ve found, to spot a beginner is by how earnestly they move into standing head to knee. Not how perfectly they execute it, mind you, but by how they try to smash their way into the full expression of it and don’t listen when you tell them to only kick out if their standing knee is locked. I have noticed, conversely, some of the most experienced yogis, if they have something that they are exploring or have an injury, think nothing of just lifting a knee. So much to explore by doing that! Where is the weight in each of my toes? What’s going on with the arch of my foot? How is my calf engaging as I shift the weight forward a little? What happens when I engage my standing inner thigh just a little more?
And this brings to mind a book I have been reading this week: Rich Roll’s Finding Ultra: Rejecting Middle Age, Becoming One of the World’s Fittest Men and Discovering Myself. Roll was a star swimmer in college, became an alcoholic, went to rehab, ate badly for years, did a fast / started running / turned vegan / became a hugely successful Ultraman/Ironman. He mentions a quote from David Goggins (another endurance athlete) about how “when you believe you’ve reached your absolute limit, you’ve only tapped into about 40% of what you’re capable of. The barrier isn’t the body. It’s the mind.”
I don’t like running (I hate it, ha!), but I love reading about running (part of Ultra). And I’ve noticed many parallels between what I’ve gone through mentally in the hot room and the descriptions I’ve read about the mental challenges of running.
Running: It’s the same damn thing, step after step after step.
Bikram: Same damn sequence, pose after pose.
I walked out of my first 30-day challenge (back when there were only 90-minute classes — 60-minute classes are mentally nothing in comparison) and burst into tears. It was the most difficult combined mental and physical challenge I’d ever done.
Haruki Murakami writes in his beautiful What I Talk about When I Talk About Running:
For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day, to raise my own level.. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.
Same in the room. Did you not sit out any poses? Did you not drink any water? Did you stay mindful of your breath the whole class? Did you come out of awkward pose early again? There are myriad goals to choose from.
(As an aside: In Finding Ultra, I’m just up to the bit where Rich is hopping a flight from Kaui to Oahu in Hawaii to start five days of five different Ironman contests. I picked up What I Talk About to find a quote tonight and on the very first page, where’s Murakami? Kaui. Reading synchronicity: So satisfying.)
Benjamin Lorr covers the challenge of Bikram versus extreme sports in Hell Bent, his excellent book on Bikram yoga.
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.
* Lorr’s talking about Esak Garcia’s Jedi Fight Club backbending practice, a whole other phenomenon.
Bikram, like running, is simultaneously one of the simplest and most difficult things you can do, physically and mentally. Like running, it’s a check-in. It’s addictive. And there’s always more to learn, because every time you show up, you’re a different person while the practice remains stubbornly the same.
(FYI: Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run: The Hidden Tribe, the Ultra-Runners and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen is another fantastic book about running.)
Reading
Rich Roll’s book is, well, very earnestly American. The perfect counterbalance to it is Wellmania: Misadventures in the Search for Wellness, by Australian Brigid Delaney. I’m still in the first third where she embarks on a 101-day fast (things aren’t looking good at this point). So far it’s honest, refreshing and hilarious.
Rebecca Solnit, Our First Black Woman President is Here.
Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest short story.
The Need to Touch. “Touch is physically and temporally proximal, in that it means ‘we are close to each other and we are here now, together’. Unlike other senses that can be digitalised, such as seeing someone’s face and talking to them over Zoom, touch requires you to be in the same place, at the same time, with another human being.”
This is beautiful, no matter what your lockdown status has been:
So is this: