Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr

Author:Benjamin Lorr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

The Seventh Siddhi of a Master Yogi Is the Ability to Project Himself into the Body of Another

The core learning experience of Bikram Yoga Teacher Training has nothing to do with yoga. At least as it pertains to postures or history or philosophy or therapeutic modifications or spiritual ramifications. It has nothing to do with pain. Nothing to do with flexibility or persistence over adversity.

Instead, the single defining feature of Bikram’s Teacher Training is memorization. Rote filthy memorization of the internal monotone, eyes-to-back-of-head variety, whereby student after student is expected to ingest words in and then spit them back up before an audience. Upon paying the approximately eleven thousand dollars to enroll, every proto-yogi is sent a copy of the official Bikram Yoga “dialogue.” A forty-five-page soliloquy whose grammatically moronic but instructionally precise English is the copyrighted intellectual property of Bikram Choudhury. It is the distillation of a single Bikram Yoga class as taught by Bikram himself, and the goal of the entire Teacher Training enterprise is for every single graduate to go forth and recite the class exactly as copywritten.30

The single most common sight at the yoga training is the parades of potential teachers walking around with little booklets of the dialogue stuck in front of their noses, mumbling to themselves. The text becomes a constant companion: beside the plate at meals, on the thighs before a lecture, on a towel in the tent before class, and, of course, on the pillow, in bed before sleep. It is a bona fide rite of passage to discuss dreaming “in dialogue,” an experience I never had, although I certainly often drifted off to sleep with the weird catchphrases uncoupling from context to echo in my head.

What’s remarkable about the dialogue is how much of it is intended to remain as unexplained catchphrases. The hows and whys behind the instructions are not for trainees. Not yet. And perhaps, not ever. In Bikram’s concept of a yoga teacher (or at least one trained less than five years), understanding is at best a tertiary concern. Which of course leads directly to the biggest truth of the dialogue: The goal of Bikram Yoga Teacher Training is not to make good yoga teachers. Nor is it to make teachers who are good at yoga. It is to train people called teachers to lead a good yoga class.

The distinction is crucial, to understanding both what happens within Teacher Training and also Bikram’s goals. It leaves many of the best students deeply unhappy with training and many other yoga traditionalists scornful of the process.

In Bikram’s eyes, the ideal instructor is a mouthpiece. They give instructions. They hold a standard as only a flesh-and-blood human can do (hence no actual tape recordings or video conferencing): but they do not actually teach. They never demonstrate. They never ever adjust. Instead they disappear behind a script. Mary Jarvis has her teachers stand in a back corner alcove, completely invisible to the practicing student unless they go searching for him or her. To the student, there is freedom in this disembodied instructional voice.

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