secret bikram love

Bikram was my first sequence.  My first teacher, Christina Mcleod, is the kindest gentlest woman I have ever met.  She would whisper the instructions with so much tenderness and care that you hardly noticed you were packed into a 110 degree room with 30 other people sweating buckets.  I walked into her studio, Yoga Source,  in Palo Alto my senior year of college and as far as I knew I had discovered yoga.

A new Bikram studio just opened in Ventura.  One of the first "green" Bikram studio, the owners have gone to great lengths to produce a warm and humid delightfully moist environment in which to practice.  There is no massive heater blowing at you in the corner.  The air feels good and easy to breath.  There is lots of natural light, a bamboo floor with a natural fiber carpet on top.  They specified beautiful bathrooms and showers and offer everything you might need.  It's the cleanest Bikram studio I have ever been in.

Bikram was also the first series I ever taught.  I never trained with the man himself, rather I just started subbing at the local Bikram places.  Learning how to teach with a set sequence is really helpful.  You start to get comfortable standing n front of people almost naked calling out cues, learning "right" from "left", "bend" from "twist", without also worrying about your sequence.  So I never learned "the script."  Rather, I taught from my own experience and Christina's and Kent Bond's (Willow Glen Yoga) guidance.  And eventually started to tweak the sequence here and there to make it more accessible to the range of peeps that were showing up.

The sequence is popular.  Here are some of the main reasons.  One: because you do the same 26 posture and 2 breathing exercise all the time, it connects with our sense of progress.  It is amazing how fast you start to be able to go from no balance to standing on one leg for up to a minute.  Two: it is mostly physically focused like us.  You lose weight fast when exercising in a steam room for 90 minutes and you stare at yourself in the mirror almost the entire time. Three: there seems to be one way and a right way to do it, which taps into our sense of order and correctness. 

A classic and more usual Bikram class involves a teacher standing on a pedestal auctioning off instructions at such rapid fire pace and intensity that you could not possibly grasp a third of it. So tonight as the instructor, clad in a black speedo rattled off craziness I tuned him out and dropped into an old home.  The sequence is so simple and sweet and the postures are not ones I gravitate towards in my own practice.  They are pretty easy to master and so I do not feel pushed.  I love the heat.  I love the pauses.  It's like comfort food. 

He spoke of eating raw food after class and keeping your body pure.  I ordered take home Indian food from the Taj and sucked on a beer, delighted to have a hot humid corner in Ventura to check into when I need to hit.