Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing

One of the principles by which Bikram encourages all of his students to govern themselves has lately been dancing in my head. The last time I heard him lecture, albeit half-asleep from practicing a killer class in the dry heat of Palm Desert with 350 of my closest yogi friends, a few pearls of his limitless wisdom stuck with me: "Knowledge is nothing unless you know how to use it.' This is why we're peeps, Bikram; we get each other, on a cellular level; deeper than the level of grey matter most people use way too much of to function, failing to remember the importance of the fist-size red matter a foot below it. Inside out, bones to the skin, fingertips to the toes, I understand the necessity of mushing the grey and the red stuff together and coming out with a pink matter; a perfect marriage between what we know and what we think we know.

It's always fascinating observing the ways in which instructors and practitioners take the knowledge they are given and choose to use it. Some of the newer students of Bikram try it, love it and immediately seek out a faster, cheaper alternative. They'll head to Moksha (who, FYI, was a student of Bikram, from whom he ripped off the eerily similar but less challenging brand of yoga upon which he built his own empire) and once they are practicing hour-long classes with varied sequences of postures in balmy temperatures, they shy away from the smokin' hot, 90-minute, set-posture sequence of Bikram's torture chamber; thus, they shy away from total transformation, the kind that occurs on a cellular level and lasts a lifetime. These newbies think they know better; they have taken the knowledge we gave them, found it overwhelming and forgotten one of Bikram's most infamous teachings, "You have to go through Hell to get to Heaven."

Lately, it seems as though a number of teachers have also forgotten why Bikram calls his class the "torture chamber." In some of the classes I've taken, I've heard no more than a few words of Bikram's dialogue, let alone the precise script instructors are trained to follow. I've experienced rooms below the standard temperature, silent classes, candlelit classes, no carpet, students coming and going as they please. The dialogue is a script, intended to be read exactly as it is written; the room is hot, humid, bright and carpeted; the ambiance is one of disciplined focus. Every aspect of the class is designed to decrease distraction and increase meditation; if the continuity is broken, the mediation is lost. As Bikram would say, "Think of it."