Is It Hot Yoga Or Just Balmy?: TIME's Lise Funderburg tells us
how she came to love the once-hated Bikram yoga
By Lise Funderburg
TIME magazine
Sunday, April 15, 2001
The parking lot outside my health club is, as always, dog eat dog, and by the time I find a spot, I'm sure I've lost out on prime classroom positioning. I may end up next to the Grunter, which would, I have to say, harsh my mellow. But in the spirit of the yogic tradition I choose not to view my exasperated state as a negative thing. Instead, I congratulate myself for my good judgment in getting to this yoga class on a Sunday morning at the godless hour of 9:15.
I
am a conscientious but nondenominational exerciser, and coming to Bikram
(a.k.a. "Hot")
Yoga began more as a scheduling convenience than devotion to its unvarying regimen
of 26 poses (asanas), each performed twice and held for what can seem like forever
over the course of the nearly two-hour class.
Yoga comes in almost as many guises as there are yoga instructors, but
most classes build on the same basic foundation of poses performed sitting,
standing and lying down. Although some, like the Sun Salutation, consist
of a progression of steps, more often the goal is to work gradually toward
a single ideal shape: the bow, the triangle, the cobra. My needs are simple:
I want supervised, intensive stretching, and every yoga class I've ever
attended offers at least that.
The truth is, I hated this Bikram class when I started. At first I returned
only because I was desperate — the victim of a muscle-kinking bout
of business travel (cramped airline seats and strange beds). Our teacher,
Leah Weisman, seemed to talk incessantly. The room was always full, from
30 to 50 people. And the space was intentionally overheated.
True Hot Yoga requires a room temperature as high as 105°F, supposedly
so muscles warm up quickly and stretch more easily. This gym's drafty old
studio achieves only Balmy Yoga — about 81°F — which is
just as well. I've experienced optimal Bikram temperatures just once, and
frankly, that's way too much bodily fluid shared and dripped and flicked
around among a bunch of people who know one another in anything less than
a biblical fashion.
But the thing I hated most about the class was that at the very end, while
everyone was resting for a few minutes in the stillness of Shavasana, the
corpse pose (designed to quiet the mind), Leah broke into song. Classroom
scuttlebutt is that she has been known to sing On a Clear Day, You Can
See Forever, but I've only heard her sing verses from New Age-y folk tunes
that mention planets spinning around the sun and the Earth Mother calling
her children home.
Why torture myself so? Simple: love triumphs over hate. As it turns out,
Leah is an excellent teacher. Week after week she goes through the same
routine without ever falling into autopilot. She is very "present
in the moment," as she might describe it. Leah offers cautions about
overexertion, suggestions on how to do each pose at various levels of challenge,
and great good humor. Last week she talked about a meditation seminar she
had attended and called the impromptu lecture her "sermon on the mat."
As a gasping heater blows lukewarm air around the room, she intersperses
practical instruction ("Pull up your quads as you pull down your hamstrings")
with abstract concepts ("Remember, you're burning new neurological
pathways") that I take or leave, depending on my mood.
Leah wanders among the students, propelling the class forward even as
she stops to adjust an arm angle here or perform a thyroid-massaging chin
tuck there. She urges noncompetition, with oneself ("However you do
the posture today is how you should do the posture") and with others
("How can you compare yourself to your neighbor? You don't have the
same body!"). Her monologue becomes a mantra, returning my oft-wandering
focus back to the pose I'm attempting. Where is my center of balance? Can
I feel my spine stretch if I imagine my head and tailbone pulling in opposite
directions? How does my alignment shift when I turn my foot three degrees
to the right?
Some people criticize Bikram for being too arduous, but as with all yoga,
much of the responsibility falls to the individual. I welcome this opportunity
to eschew faster, higher and stronger in favor of deeper. In this regard,
the simplicity of Bikram's poses is one more way to avoid being distracted
from myself.
To spend this much time slowly and gently stretching is a luxury that
I enjoy nowhere else in my life. At the end of the class, after Leah has
thanked us for letting her teach and told us to congratulate ourselves
for getting up so early, I feel calm and loose and energized. Muscle kinks
have dissipated. I feel more powerful, and for the rest of the day standing
straight is a relief rather than a discipline.
As for the singing, I still wouldn't mind complete silence in those final minutes of rest, but I'm starting to see it as Leah's goodwilled send-off into the day. And every week I find myself eternally grateful that at the very least, Leah can carry a tune.