McBikram’s:   An Indian yoga guru beats Americans at their own game
by Elizabeth Marglin
12/13/02

Take a deep breath, Starbucks. The fastest growing chain in America may be Bikram’s Yoga College of India, coming soon to a studio near you. There are currently estimated to be over 600 YCI schools around the world, and that number is expected to double in a year and a half. In Colorado alone, there are more than a dozen Bikram certified schools. Bikrams is one of the fastest growing forms of yoga, and Bikram Choudhury, the man who started it all, is shrewd enough to not let an opportunity slip by. After more than 30 years of hob-knobbing with the rich and famous in Beverly Hills, the “when in Rome...” attitude came easily to the man who started out teaching in L.A. for free. Bikram is now the first yoga teacher in this country to try to franchise his system of yoga. He has spent over $500,000 in legal fees trade marking his sequence of poses, the dialogue that he requires his teachers to memorize and recite verbatim in his classes, the name Bikram Yoga and just to be sure, the name Bikram Hot Yoga as well.

Yoga is starting to mean big dollars in this country. According to an article in the U.S. News and World Report, about 18 million Americans practice yoga. They are conservatively estimated to spend $1500 a year on yoga apiece. Do the math and you will come up with a figure that adds up to 27 million, a number that commands respect, even if yoga still doesn’t.

Bikram Choudhury was born in Calcutta, and for three consecutive years was the National Yoga Champion of India. He was also the youngest person to win the title. He then injured his knee during a weightlifting session. With the help of his guru, Bhishnu Gosh, he developed a therapeutic system of asanas that helped his knee recover completely. He came over to this country in the late 60’s and opened up his first yoga studio in Beverly Hills in 1973. Though he’s long been yogi to the stars, Bikram yoga has exploded in the last decade. He now trains roughly 600 teachers a year; in a nine-week teacher training that costs $5000. More than a third of the people who take the training will go on to open up Bikram studios of their own.

Franchising Yoga

As of now, teachers who teach in schools that bear his name are not required to pay a franchising fee. That will change in January, when the new franchising plan is made public. Under the new plan studio owners and teachers will have to be certified by Bikram himself, and are asked to have spent at least six months studying Bikram yoga at one of his schools. Affiliates of Bikram will have to pay him a monthly fee based on their studios gross monthly revenues. The best-selling book “Fast Food Nation” says “Almost every facet of American life has now been franchised or chained…a person can now go from the cradle to the grave without spending a nickel at an independently owned business.” Americans can now do their yoga at the shopping mall. In November, a YCI studio opened in the Flatirons mall. The school’s brochure says “Whether it’s before, during, or after work, before dinner and a movie, or just a day of shopping at the mall-participate in a Bikram yoga class to re-energize your day.”

Bikram’s system of yoga lends itself easily to replication. It follows a simple formula: Rooms heated to over 100 degrees, mirrored studios to allow students to check out their postures, a sequence of 26 asanas repeated twice and timed to the second, and a script that teachers memorize.

The class is a taught as a one-size-fits-all approach with a minimum of modifications given for age, injuries and pregnancy unless specifically asked. According to “Fast Food Nation”, the key to a successful franchise is “uniformity The book quotes one of the founders of McDonalds as saying, “The organization cannot trust the individual, the individual must trust the organization.”

The teacher training is a complete immersion in the system. It consists of two Bikram yoga classes a day, 300 people to a room. The teachers are tested on how well they have memorized the “dialogue.” This is yoga learned by rote, although there are a few posture clinics where teachers learn a few basic dos and don’ts of the asanas.

It is Bikram’s charisma that infuses the training with life. Shelley Kompel, who was the director of teacher training and still works at the Beverly Hills studio, is a student of Bikram’s although she hasn’t taken a class for about a year because she is too “lazy” she said. “His style is powerful, seductive, unexplainable. There are magical powers about his yoga and he’s tops in his field. He took a broken-down person like me in his classroom and made me feel important, appreciated.”

According to Bikram teacher Jenny Boeder, who did his teacher training in 2001, one of Bikram’s techniques is to make you feel broken down and helpless, so that he can step in and save you. He often says to students during the training, “You have junk bodies-how will you get a husband with all that cellulite?” Shelley, who described herself as very overweight, believes he speaks like that for the students’ benefit. “That’s how he is effective. He makes a statement and if that part of you is not settled you get offended, “ she said.

There are shades of fundamentalism in Bikram, as there are in a lot of forms of yoga. It is a question of degrees. Shelley states that Bikram yoga is the purist form of yoga, because it hasn’t been changed at all since its formation. “It’s so perfect it doesn’t need to be adjusted,” she said.

Closer to home, the belief that Bikram is the best is sometimes expressed defensively. When this reporter asked Radha Garcia, owner of Boulder’s Yoga College of India, is she could videotape the class for a school journalism project, Garcia initially said no. “You don’t know anything about Bikram Yoga,” she said. “I want you to take ten classes before you can shoot.” The reporter replied she wanted to shoot the class as a journalist, not as a yogi. Radha still seemed worried that the yoga would not be reflected in its most positive light.

Bikram: Man or Superman? Bikram is a man who makes no apologies and does not pretend to be an ascetic, although one of the basic principles of yoga is to not be greedy. He has a mansion with a swimming pool, a fleet of classic cars, and an estimated net worth of $7 million. He walks around his classes in a tight Speedo bathing suit and a diamond studded watch. His web site advertises his yoga as “glamorous,” and he loves to keep his students up to date with what celebrities are coming to his classes. The studio is covered with photos of Bikram with the stars, including Clinton, Mariel Hemingway, Kareem Abdul-Jabar and Christy Turlington. In widely published interviews he’s boasted that he sleeps one or two hours a night and eats insignificant amounts. In an article called “Yogis Behaving Badly” Bikram states that he is “beyond Superman.” When asked how he can make such wild statements, he answered, “Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

He, however, will f-k with people, if necessary. In the same article Bikram said he was blackmailed several times into having sex with his students. “What happens when they say they will commit suicide unless you sleep with them?” he said.

In the other infamous interview that Bikram did in the March/April 2000 issue of Yoga Journal, he made no bones about his superiority as a yoga teacher. “I and the teachers I certify are the only ones in the U.S. who teach hatha yoga. Other teachers are all a bunch of circus clowns.”

Norman Allard, who has been teaching Iyengar for over 20 years in Colorado and is also a chiropractor, found that remark humorous. “My wife and I had the idea to look up what kind of training circus clowns did because I have always been impressed how skillful they are, “ he said. “As it turns out, many of the circus clown trainings were much more extensive than Bikram’s.”

Bikram is certainly not the only yoga teacher to suffer from an excess of ego. But he goes further than most in many different directions, including health claims. His yoga series “has been proven again and again to cure chronic diseases of all kinds,” he writes in his Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class (Tarcher Putnam 1978). He includes heart disease, cancer, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis in the list of disease he’s treated successfully.

Bikram says the benefits are a result of a variety of factors.

The Heat Is On

The heat is one of the first things you notice in a Bikram class, which is heated anywhere from 100 to 110 degrees. Bikram specifically states that all of his franchises have heated rooms. He says that it is the heat that makes the body malleable and prevents injury. Although it takes time to get used to the heat, once people acclimatize they often get addicted to their newfound flexibility. The heat is claimed to remove toxins, such as carbon dioxide and lactic acid, which helps the muscles release energy. The heat is also said to speed up the breakdown of fatty acids, improves coordination, burn more fat and improve the function of the nervous system. The combination of heat, sweat, and asanas- Bikram refers to his studio as his torture chamber-seems to produce post-class euphoria. Perhaps this is in part because the class is over.

Jenny Boeder, a Bikram yoga teacher in Chicago, credits the heat with giving her back mobility in her hands and arms. A physical therapist recommended she try Bikram yoga to treat her severe carpal tunnel syndrome. Boeder had tried other yoga classes before but had found “too many of the poses were not available to me.” She said a few days within practicing Bikram she had twice the mobility in her spine.” The sensation in her hands came back, which she hadn’t been able to feel in weeks.

Bikram says the heat approximates the conditions of India. Kristin Laak, who teaches Ashtanga yoga at The Yoga Workshop, says that in a traditional yoga practice “You want to be able to build your heat internally and use it as a purification process, rather than have the heat as an external element.” At The Yoga Workshop the room is heated to around 80 degrees, just enough so that it feels “comfortable”.

Medical doctors have different opinions about the heat. Some say as long as people hydrate themselves, the heat is not dangerous. People have claimed tremendous healing benefits from the heat, from anemia to varicose veins. And Bikram yoga is being used as a regular part of treatment for hepatitis C at Bastyr Center for Natural Health. According to Leanna Standis,.N.D., Ph.D., who is the director of Bastyr’s Research Center, the heavy sweating that takes place in in a Bikram class may help patients battle hepatitis C by detoxifying the body.

Richard Miller, a former Bikram teacher, still thinks of Bikram as a good all-around practice, but cautions people who have sciatica not to do it. Stephen Reingold, of the National MS Society, warns that heat commonly exacerbates spasticity, weakness and other symptoms among people who have ms. Other medical experts say that people with heart disease or high blood pressure should be careful about exercising in a room designed to raise the body’s core temperature and heart rate.“Exposing oneself to high heat and exercise has risks,” says Jia Gottlieb, a doctor at Still Mountain Clinic in Boulder, “It’s one thing living in India, another to go from 10 degrees above zero to sauna like conditions and then do strenuous exercise. It’s a stress to go through that type of temperature change so suddenly.”

“The danger of the heat is that it creates a false sense of flexibility,” says Allard. “We often push the joints deeper into a stretch than we should.” Another concern for Allard is the heat overwhelms the body, making it difficult to focus on other sensations. “In a yoga pose you have to feel very meticulously what the knee is doing, what the shoulder is doing, how your breath is moving…the heat distorts perception.”In a glass, darkly

In his dialogue Bikram frequently instructs his students to look at themselves in the mirror. He uses the mirror as a way for students to focus and at the same time as a tool for auto-correcting their alignment. The experienced students are usually asked to stand in the front rows, and serve as examples. The teacher, who walks around or sits on a podium reciting the dialogue in a headset, doesn’t normally do the poses or give many physical adjustments.

In classes the students often seem mesmerized by their own reflections. This too is controversial. In most yoga systems, mirrors are specifically not used. Students develop an internal sense of alignment and sensation and are not distracted by how a pose looks. Bikram believes the mirrors act as feedback that will encourage the student to work harder to perfect her body. In his book he admonishes people who hide from the mirrors “because, in your leotard/bathing trunks…you are a distressing sight. The bulges normally hidden by street clothes are painfully revealed.” He often encourages people to lose weight and firm their muscles through his yoga.

Many Bikram teachers emphasize how the yoga helps people lose weight. Buster Radvik, a dancer, choreographer and yoga practitioner, dabbled in Bikram a bit before returning to his main practice of Ashtanga yoga. “The teachers I had reminded me of aerobic teachers in the sense that it was about trimming and changing your body, getting beautiful for the beach, getting rid of that fat and building that muscle,” Radvik said. He was surprised to find all the mirrors in the studio. “It reinforced by background of trying to improve my physical ability-to have perfect balance, a perfect body, a perfect breath, a perfect timing with the teacher, “ he added. “It externalized my attention, which brought me away from working with the sensitivity in my core. It made me tense up my muscles.”

Boeder doubts the efficacy of the mirrors to correct alignment. “If that were true, then all Bikram students and teachers would have perfect alignment. And they don’t,” she said. Katie Raemer, who teaches Bikram in Denver, also practices Ashtanga. She saw both sides of the mirror issue. “Mirrors can be both a hindrance as well as very helpful, “ she said. “They can allow you to accurately see your body position, but there are also body image conflicts that can come up. Then it becomes about the drama you are having with the mirror rather than about the practice itself.”

For Jeanie Manchester, an Ashtanga teacher at the Yoga Workshop, the yoga itself is the mirror. “It shows you the residue of your actions, “ she said. “Things will keep coming up until you look at them. Yoga works on you in ways you don’t even know…you arrive at being this changed person.”

Teaching Bikram: The Dialogue

The crux of Bikram’s teacher training is the memorization of the dialogue. The “posture clinics” consist of each student delivering the dialogue in front of the rest of the students, which these days are around 300. Boeder did the teacher training in 2001, when there were only 180 students. “The process of watching 180 people saying the exact same words the exact same way over the course of several days was totally mind-numbing, “ she said. “I did end up at a certain point just retreating to the back of the room with a couple of trashy magazines just to tune it out. There was a group at the back of the room that wore ear plugs.”

The intro to Bikram’s instructions states:

“This revised dialogue contains virtually all the dialogue you will need to successfully teach Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class…I require you to use only this dialogue, unchanged, adding nothing to it, delivering it clearly and concisely, as a condition of your continued certification, privilege and permission to teach Bikram yoga…You must be careful to not add any wrong information or dialogue, incorrect sequence of the dialogue, or overly creative ways of ‘interpreting’ or ‘translating’ the dialogue.

The dialogue itself, which has now been trademarked, is another point of contention. In fact it should be called a monologue, since questions are not encouraged during a Bikram class. Bikram’s cues, such as to lock the knees, are antithetical to the way most teachers in other systems instruct, in which micro-bending is favored over full extension. He tells students “to push their knees back as hard as possible,” and repeats the command to lock the knees around 22 times in his dialogue. He also tells students to lock their elbows.

Gottlieb, who practices yoga himself, was concerned about this type of instruction. “Locking joints or locking any part of the body is not a physiologically sound pattern to train,” he said. “Locking joints puts them at the end of their range of motion and creates a form of immobility rather than fluidity.”

Allard, who has experimented in weight training, Pilates and triathalon training, feels that yoga is by far the most dangerous because of the pressure on the joints. He points out that even if Bikram yoga feels great now, the body may tell a different story down the road. “Because the lining of the joints is not pain sensitive, you can be doing a lot of damage to the joint and for many years, often 5, 10 or 15 years, you feel like yoga is the best thing you are doing,” he said. “But slowly and insidiously you can be shearing your joints.”

The dialogue is filled with evidence of the “no pain, no gain mentality” which is actually counter to the philosophy of Patanjali, which hatha yoga is based on. In Patanjali’s yoga sutras, written 2000 years ago, it says, “Painful effects that are likely to occur should be anticipated and avoided.” For the back bending instructions, Bikram says “Your back is going to hurt like hell, don’t be scared.” Again and again he says things like, “make sure the hip joint hurts” and “elbows are supposed to hurt.” He instructs his students to push and push some more and push harder.

Some teachers like it as a starting off point; others don’t stick to it at all. Radha Garcia, who opened Colorado’s first Bikram studio in 1999, is happy with the dialogue. “The whole dialogue is put together very scientifically, “ she said. “There are reasons for everything.” She does find that she has to add a bit of breathing instruction, which the dialogue doesn’t provide much of.

Brandon Cox, who is part owner of Boulder’s unofficial Bikram studio, finds the dialogue an effective tool. “You use the dialogue as your foundation,” he said. “But over time you create your own spin on it and you bring in what’s true for you. Clearly if you take a Bikram class with different instructors, even though it’s the same 26 postures, you will have a very different class.”

However, both Raemer and Boeder find the dialogue “abrasive” and don’t use it when they teach. They prefer to use language from the other systems of yoga they study, which they find to be more precise. Ellen Boeder, Jenny’s sister, has practiced Bikram but prefers Ashtanga. She found Bikram’s cues “very basic.” “He talked about vague actions”, she said, “and nothing about how to make them happen.” Jenny Bader found that the dialogue “chokes the teacher and deadens the students.”

The dialogue creates a class in which there is little modification of the poses. Age, injuries, flexibility, mood, time of month, time of day, season and a variety of other conditions are not accounted for. Bikram thinks the series, if taught according to his dialogue, suits all people and all body types.

Laak, who has been teaching Ashtanga for over 15 years, vehemently disagrees with this one-size-fits-all methodology. “On any given day you can have a wide variety of bodies come into the room with different needs and requirements, “ she said. “In order for students to be able to tap into an experience that’s deep and facilitates their body, it’s important that you tailor a class for them. You don’t want to shove a body into a form. It doesn’t honor the differences in each of us.”

“I go to a yoga class for the creativity and individuality of the teacher,” said Trisha Lamb Feuerstein of the Yoga Research and Education Center, a Santa Rosa-based non-profit that tracks yoga trends. “I don’t go to a class to get the same exact thing each time, like going to McDonald’s for a hamburger.”

Jenny Boeder does point out that one of the good things about the Bikram class, especially for beginners, is that they know what to expect. “It can be terrifying, especially if you are sick or injured, to go into a yoga class and think the teacher might have you standing on your head if you have glaucoma,” she said. “There is a dread of always having to ask for exemptions and alternatives.”

Both Iyengar and Ashtanga yoga rely on props such as blankets, bolsters, blocks and straps to make modifications in the poses. Bikram does not allow the props to be used in his classes. Raemer finds this to be one of the core problems in the practice. “Support really equals release, ‘ she said. “If the body isn’t supported, then it’s displacing tension. It’s a disservice to students because they are not getting their needs met.”

Allard adds that the problem in all schools of yoga is that students practice too “aggressively.” He believes poses should come with warning signs that say ‘Don’t do this without proper supervision.’ “The beauty of the Iyengar system is the way he developed the use of props,” he said. “A prop allows a student to do the pose according to their capabilities and changes the amount of intensity in the pose. That way, a student is not overwhelmed into going too deep and too fast in a pose.”

Learning the McBikram Way

Making adjustments and understanding when props are appropriate takes years of practice. In the Iyengar system, students are not even considered beginners till they have been practicing for five years. Allard pointed out that one of the drawbacks of yoga’s new found popularity and financial rewards is an increase of teachers with less and less training. He was alarmed by the proliferation of two-month teacher trainings, in Bikram particularly, when often the student is not even required to have practiced for any length of time. Bikram is now changing that to require six months of previous Bikram practice.

The range and depth of experience that a teacher needs to safely and effectively teach a class cannot be underestimated, according to Allard. The teacher needs to “recognize how the skin moves, how the muscles balance, how the joints align,” he said. “Without that kind of experience, the potential for injury is staggering.”

Jenny Boeder was deeply upset by the teacher training, in fact, “heartbroken.” She knew that Bikram could be harsh, but she expected him to have so much too offer, in part because he was Indian and therefore would have a closer connection to the roots of yoga. She found him vulgar, inflammatory, and suffering acutely from delusions of grandeur. In the end the only insight she gleaned was what can happen to a person when they get too much fame and notoriety.

She called the training a “rip-off.” She described feeling completely anonymous and at the same time overtly intimidated into a certain kind of behavior. “There was a feeling that you had written this massive check for five grand and at any moment you could be ejected from the training if you did something that they didn’t like, or you complained too much, or you didn’t recite the dialogue properly,” she said. “Once a week we had a regular reaming that there were people in the training who weren’t going to graduate or get their certificates and that they knew who those people were. We all lived in terror.”

Obviously, living in fear that showing your doubt and discontent could get you expelled from a teacher training, sounds more like the work of the mafia than an Indian yoga guru. One of the core yoga principles is discrimination, and that applies to all things: alignment, breathing, sensations, emotions and the quality of one’s relationships with others.

Boeder still enjoys the Bikram practice, but wishes it could be separated from Bikram’s personality. “I wish that we could disconnect the practice from this cookie cutter, assembly line way of teaching,” she said. “I don’t think it has to be this way. I don’t teach it that way.”

Keeping it real

It’s not about pointing the finger and saying this yoga is good, this yoga is bad. All systems of yoga have a shadow side, and students need to use all their discrimination when evaluating a method and a teacher. Bikram is just an extreme version of what is happening in the yoga world, and in fact the world at large, when a distinct group becomes convinced of its own superiority. Rigidity, arrogance, and fundamentalist behavior creep in, along with a lack of tolerance for other forms.

In general, one of the main dark sides of yoga is how it is often taught as a form of glorified exercise. Originally, hatha yoga was a small part of the big picture of yoga. The postures were intended to as a way of preparing the body to sit still comfortably in order to meditate. America has given yoga its own spin, creating forms as out there as Disco yoga, Elvis yoga and even Stiff White Guy yoga.

In so many of new offshoots, the essence of yoga as an internal practice has been lost. Now it’s more about the yoga butt than it is about yoga bhav, a Sanskrit word for conviction and attitude. When yoga is taught on this level, it becomes a “form of cultural imperialism, which essentializes India as an ancient traditional place, frozen in time,” says Elizabeth Kolsky, who teaches the history of South Asia at Pratt University. “Not only do you make a profit, but you also crystallize a world view.” Kolsky is troubled by the way India is perceived in America and says that most schools of yoga perpetuate the “colonial tendency to exoticize the so-called orient.”

Allard is optimistic about the way yoga is evolving. “I think that as more people are hurt through sloppy teaching and become more aware, yoga will come back to earth and become more realistic in terms of its goals and purposes,” he said. “Yoga is one of the most beautiful things to practice and when done properly it will bring a lifetime of joy, continually opening up new vistas of insight.”

Richard Freeman, who is the director of The Yoga Workshop and also a Sanskrit scholar, translates the yoga sutras and Indian philosophical texts in ways that resonate with a more contemporary experience. He gives a lecture on Sundays at his studio when he is finished teaching his class. In a recent talk, he explored where the practice of yoga can take someone who can let go of all the preconceived ideas they have about who they are and what they are doing. “You experience the world through your body and your senses,” he said. “When sensations are seen as sacred, then you are full of nectar and you have a nectar-like world. At that point you are seeing the self in all beings and all beings in the self. No separation.”

This feeling of connection to something sacred is the juice of yoga. It can be found in any school of yoga, as long as the teacher has the intention and ability to communicate this aspect with her students. Ellen Boeder had this advice to give to students who wanted to deepen their experience of yoga: “What I would say to any student of yoga would be to encourage them to be inquisitive about themselves and what they are learning. It’s an awesome opportunity to grow and to find a teacher and a practice that promoteds that in a genuine way. It’s a rare thing but it’s also out there.”

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