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.

The End to the Yoga Anxiety Dream

For almost 10 years now I occasionally have had a "Yoga Teaching Anxiety Dream".  The dream involves my trying to teach a yoga class in impossible situations.  Some examples include:

- Two movie theaters simultaneously 

- In house with everyone in different rooms

- Several ballrooms in a hotel

- In an office with everyone in cubicles

And other such scenes.  All the dreams involve people coming and going as I am trying to offer the class.   The anxiety came from the worry that they aren't connecting to the yoga and worse, that they weren't connecting with me.

As I have shared in more detail in my other blogs, I have been in a effortfull cycle of trying to will love for my entire life.  Teaching yoga is a pretty good choice for someone as needy as I was.  People feel better through yoga  and they associate that high with you.  As a teacher you benefit from this false transference of affection.  So, naturally, if this is part of the motivation, even if its unconscious as it was for me for a long time, it will tighten your conditions of love.  You will have little tolerance for situations and people that do not allow for this transferance.

So last night's dream started out similarly.  I was scheduled to sub a Bikram class.  I show up and it's happening in a large stadium like bar.  Girls are setting up their mats on bleacher like slabs of concrete.  I start to introduce myself to them and they are super rude and bratty.  In the dream I knew it was not about me.  I felt relaxed about their moods and who they were showing up as.   I continue towards the front of the room and encounter a group of guys drinking beer.  I ask if they are going to be taking the class and they say yes.  And while I am surprised, I feel soft and open towards them.  The dream continued with my subbing Bikram in several different awkward locations like a parking lot and a pool area.  The scenario was the same with people coming and going and not paying attention and all was fine.

I feel delighted.  I have not yet published the writing I have been doing around this recent unraveling.  Something I have been calling "Loosening the Conditions of Love".  But the results are being revealed to me in my dreams.

Monday, April 2, Practice 6:30am

Huge Yellow Full Moon Setting
Sun just starting to come up

Constraints:
Woke up thinking about the Bikram sequence.
Wanted to maintain at least a 6:9 breath
And focus on the play using hip rotation and tailbone action to create length on the inside and outside lines of my body.
So resulted in a slow deep investigative practice with pedestrian postures.

Tadasana
Breath
1/4 Suns
1/2 Suns

Lunge Salute Pattern 1
Low Lunge with Arch
Pyramid Variation
Twisting Lunge

Dog
Plank
Several Chaturangas
Sphinx
Rocket Cat
Dog

Opposite Leg Forward and Repeat Lunge Pattern
Step Forward

Bikram Half Moon Sequence
(Long time in the forward fold)

Repeat Lunge Pattern 1
(with some variation in foot placement and Locust Pose instead of Sphinx)

Repeat Half Moon Sequence

Bikram Awkward Series

Lunge Salute Pattern 2
Step back to Warrior 1
Warrior 2
Side Angle
Twisting Lunge
Pyramid Variation

Dog
Plank
Several Chaturangas
Upward Facing Dog
Dog

Step Forward with Opposite Leg and Repeat Pattern.
Stepping Forward and Rolling up to Standing.

Bikram Standing Head to Knee Pose
Dancer's Pose
Warrior 3

Bikram Style Pasarita Padotanasana
Bikram Style Parsvotanasana

Squat
Lie on Back
Knees to Chest

Navasana
Lolasana Practice

Ana Forest and Jill Miller Style Abdominals

Bridge
Spinal Twist

Coffee instead of Savasana

Sharing Sequences

The sequences that actually get taught in class are almost always the result of who shows up. This includes me and my latest curiosities within my life and practice as well as all the practitioners. It is a familiar story among teachers to arrive at class with an idea of what you might do, only to be greeted with a set of circumstances that require the ability to spontaneously pull something totally new and unique together. But spontaneity takes practice and the willingness to not know what is going to happen.

When I first started teaching, I was lucky enough to be teaching Bikram in a Christina McCleod's Yoga Source in Palo Alto. I was able to practice leading people through the bends and twists without the additional burden of creating the sequence. Slowly, however, I began to tweak the postures and offer my own take. I started to notice injuries and have ideas about how to modify the shapes. I was also starting to be exposed to other forms of yoga and I eventually took the leap and started my own vinyasa classes.

At the time, I had a full time job and was teaching on the side. But I would spend hours at my "real job" preparing for my yoga classes, writing out sequences and talking them through in my head. When I got to the class, I had my sequences down. And of course, they would get tweaked a little, but not much. I relied on my ability to flow the group though the postures at a pace that would leave almost no time for questions. While ultimately limiting for me, this way of teaching allowed me to develop sequences that I still sometimes pull out. Like favorite recipes, it is super helpful to have reliable combinations to fall back on.

It was not until I moved to Ojai and began teaching full time that I started to really notice the actual needs of the community coming to class. My ability to weave and spin a creative vinyasa sequence became less interesting as exploring the possibility of actually teaching someone how to feel Yoga.

I started a class called 'Stiff White Guys Yoga' that drew a group that required that I create and learn an entirely new approach. I now allow my teaching to be awkward and exploring. Sometimes the sequence is clumsy. Sometimes brilliant and inspired. I seem to work in 3 week arcs. Meaning, I will hone in on idea, a technique, or theme and explore it across my classes in different directions.

In starting this particular blog, it is my intention to practice sharing these sequences. To share the creative process that is not always "successful", but always keeps the teaching fresh and new.

xo
k