Postcards From The Heat, bad neighborhood
Moving to a Better Neighborhood
Bikram teachers in New York have mythologized a teacher who has moved to another city now. This much-quoted yogi is reputed to quip, “Get out of your mind, it’s a bad neighborhood.” I feel that way a lot these days. My mind is in the gray fog of the blues. Sometimes when a bad thought [...]
Loosey-goosey and Limber
I finally managed to get to the hot room for several consecutive days for several consecutive weeks. During the school year in New York City, I practice six days out of seven and take for granted the level of flexibility in my muscle and looseness in my joints. In the summer, I move to a [...]
Stirrup
To my mind, standing-head-to-knee pose is not a ne plus ultra: It lacks the intimate hug of eagle, the grace of dancer, the lilting tilt of balancing stick. I do standing-head-to-knee because I must. It’s a chore, like the lung exercises or taking out the garbage (those are similar, of course). But because the pose [...]
A Piece of Nature
These days, I practice mostly on an ancient dock on a country lake. It’s not as ancient as yoga, of course, it’s but old enough for the local government to have granted it a special dispensation to exist—it is a grandfathered structure of a sprawling type now forbidden. During my mornings on the dock, I [...]
Beat the Devil . . . er, the Heat
I am of pure Russian descent, which means snow pleases my heart whereas heat wilts me. Blizzards find me traipsing through snowdrifts; summer afternoon suns never find me. But I love the extreme heat of the Bikram studio because life in Manhattan’s hot concrete desert is cooler after I practice. The New York Times reported [...]
Teaching Yoga to Socialists
I summer with socialists. Seriously: in a community dreamed up by utopians back in the thirties. Everyone is less radical now, but volunteering to share our skills to enrich each others’ lives is still very much part of the scene. One person teaches watercolor painting, another leads a poetry-writing class, another runs a pottery studio [...]
Blossom
I have the least range of motion in floor bow, in part due to a recalcitrant injury. I am also often very tired by that point in the practice, and lying down tempts me to rest. So bow has often been an unhappy or motionless moment. Then I discovered a new and sensual way to [...]
Grey Pores, Skanky Sweat, Etc.
The vagaries of life kept me away from the studio for six days recently. I practiced the series several times during that time, so I did not loose all flexibility. And I did enjoy that tranquil feeling I always feel during practice. What I missed was the cleansing of the sweat. By the last of [...]
Yoga Body, Yoga Mind
Okay. Another confession. Despite my cellulite-free quads, I am not a real yogini. Not by Bikram standards. Because Bikram says, “Healthy spine, healthy life.” Well, my spine flexes nicely enough, but my mind is far from positive. I wouldn’t call my mind healthy other than that I practice almost daily for reasons I don’t even [...]
The Insomniac’s Yoga
The other night I woke up wide awake at 1:07. Insomnia plagues me these days, and I never again sleep on these nights. As I face that usual, suddenly one of those yoga geek thoughts sparked: Why not practice a little? I took liberties, I hope you’ll forgive me. I began with a slow, only-half-trying [...]
On Broadway, a Different Kind of Scene
Yoga and Times Square. How un-alike can two things be? Calm and commercialism really do not mix. Yet mixing it up is always invigorating. Just so, the Bikram yoga class on 46th and Broadway last Monday, on a sweltering day just past high noon, was so much fun. Organized by the Times Square Alliance in [...]
Tall, Dark, and Handsome
Another confession. I have a hopeless crush on a fellow yogi. Hopeless for many reasons. Start with: he’s younger than me. Add: He is tall, dark, and handsome, and those guys are just not that into me. Plus it is plain that Mr. Hot has been severely burnt by the romantic fires of those who [...]
Make the Ideal Real
Bikram teachers give endless instructions for each pose: how to enter it, how to hold it, what its perfect form is, which components are form and which are depth, and which are first in importance. It can get confusing. In posture clinic a few weeks ago, I learned that many of these instructions–called the dialogue–describe [...]
Cold Case
I recently had a cold for five days. However humdrum that may seem, it is man-bites-dog news. For two and a half years, I have been practicing five or six days a week, and not a single germ has colonized me. In the bad old days, I suffered four colds a year, one in each [...]
Means to an End
I belonged to a hifalutin Manhattan gym for a few years, and the trainers there, as a rule, thought of themselves as gods and goddesses. Which indeed they clearly resembled. Among Bikram yoga teachers too, one is more spectacular than the next, but they cop no attitude. For many of them, as for many students [...]
Blood, Sweat, and Skin
I first noticed it when I nicked my finger making dinner. My blood had a pink undertone instead of the usual rusty one. Maybe this is due to drinking some three litres of liquid a day for months and months now. Or maybe it is the sweating, removing all those vague metabolic end products. In [...]
If You Can You Must, and Vice Versa
One of Bikram’s stranger aphorisms is, “If you can, you must.” Teachers spout this one at standing head-to-knee pose, meaning, “If you know that you CAN kick out, you MUST kick out. Don’t be scared of falling and embarrassing yourself before the hottie on the next mat. Don’t coast in an easier version because of [...]
On Silly Putty, Orange Juice, Lamborghinis, and More
A woman at the studio practices twice a day, almost daily. Her body seems as mobile and free as that of a child. Constant practice washes away the injuries and insults of life, reversing time, and it conditions the muscles, ligaments, and fascii, maintaining them in the elastic state of the young. The particularly flexible [...]
Method to the Madness
Insane. Ridiculous. Extreme. OMG! Typical responses to Bikram yoga and its 90 minutes of 105 degree heat, its strenuous postures, its stringent limits on talking, fidgeting, and when to drink water. But method underpins the madness, and as with the commonality with vinyasa yoga noted last week, many aspects of the practice share principles with [...]
The Vinyasa of Bikram and the Ocean
The word pose is a misnomer. The “pose,” or the holding-still part, is only the middle third of an asana; entering and exiting the stillness is just as much part of a full yoga practice. Every pose is in and of itself a sequence, a vinyasa, a flowing from this arrangement of limbs to that [...]
Toe-stand Redux
All I think about is toe stand — yet another obsession taking a turn as paramount in my practice. I just spent weeks falling down most of the time a few seconds after raising my hands to prayer. But then I started to make controlled exits, and I became sure of the platform I was [...]
Looking for Perfection
On a picture-perfect Saturday afternoon, some forty people pursued perfection, me among them. The event was “Posture Clinic,” a discussion and practicum on the 26 poses in the Bikram series. Led by the studio’s two owners, the program began by soliciting stories from participants about why they had sought out and fell in love with [...]
Sitting on Air
I have always found toe-stand pose astonishing. It looks like levitation, implausible, absurd. Then a friend eased into it her first class, rising to prayer hands on both sides and exiting gracefully. I was and have been in awe of her. The pose was long unattainable for me because of torn meniscus in both knees. [...]
Let’s Get Superficial
Enough profundity. It’s time to talk about thighs and their destinies. Take mine. The saddlebags have long since disappeared. The pocky cellulite on the quads has melted. I may need years to undo what has been wrought of my derriere by my previous couch-potato life, but I am not complaining: There are muscular hollows below [...]
Willing Stillness
The paradoxes in yoga are starting to obsess me. Class sometimes feels like a funhouse hall of mirrors, or a series of posed koans. A few weeks ago, it was breathing and the oddity of controlling a reflex (Feb. 15 posting). The latest paradox for me is the two-minute savasana. When teachers warn that it [...]
Walking the Bikram Walk
Approaching my usual studio, I play a guessing game about the pedestrians ahead: Are they going to class or elsewhere in the big city? Will they turn left at the studio? I can not see their faces, nor can I peg them by style–the bare Bikram minimum people wear in the studio bears little relation [...]
Madonna’s Advice and Bikram’s Yoga
“Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it,” Madonna advises, but she has practiced Bikram yoga, so she knows it ain’t so in the studio. If you strike a pose quickly, the pose may strike you back and knock you down. And there’s never nothing to it. Poses built carefully, respectfully, piece by piece, gesture by [...]
Singing
So what did I get out of doing 30 consecutive days of Bikram yoga? I’d love to report that I lost ten pounds, found rivers of willpower to ride, achieved inner peace, or now always manage a full minute of standing bow. Other people do. But the fact is, I’ve practiced so regularly for so [...]
Bikram 30-day Challenge: My Progress Report
Doing a 30-day challenge is like taking a language-immersion course, learning a year’s worth of, say, Latin, in a six-week, six-hours-a-day blitz. I did that once. It was so hard I would relax by harvesting raspberries in their prickly July thickets. Actually, the 30-day challenge is as tough as both Latin and raspberry picking. At [...]
Bikram Practice: Advanced Breathing
“Make your breathing muscular,” a teacher remarked, revealing a paradox about breathing in yoga: that we subject the automatic to our control, take charge of a reflex, breathe by will. Breathing has always been difficult for me. I have already confessed in this scroll about struggling with it for more than two years, and the [...]
Yoga, Football, and The Fan
Fitness makes strange bedfellows. Take football and yoga. Training to throw pigskin today includes rolling tires, schlepping logs, wrestling with punching bags, amping up on ultra-modern machines, and doing six-thousand year-old stretches. Yoga is now mainstream in football training. Players admit its benefits, sometimes defensively. One swears it rehabilitated his knee. Another is sure it [...]
Bikram Practice: All Together Now
We New Yorkers are individualists, eccentrics, iconoclasts, and know-it-alls. The snappy comeback, after all, was invented on a corner in Brooklyn. The New York minute originated here, well duh. So what happens in the Bikram studio to the New Yorker steeped in speed and variety and doing it all her own way? She vanishes. The [...]
Bikram Practice: Twice is Nice
“Do over!” children shout when they flub it. In the Bikram studio, we do most postures twice. The reasons are many but all come down to the desire of the child to get it right–or righter, anyway. Immediately repeating a posture allows you to go deeper. If you have stretched a muscle once, it stretches [...]
Official Yoga Geek, Of the Bikram Variety
When did I rise to the status of–or sink into the abyss of–being an official yoga geek? I first became aware of it a few weeks ago. I gave my toenails a French manicure and trotted off to class. Where I discovered that my picture-pretty tootsies looked fake and obnoxious during standing forward bend. I [...]
Those Voices in My Head? Bikram Teachers
I hear voices in my head telling me what to do, when to do it, how, and why. But don’t rush to cart me away to The Happy Farm: It’s only the voices of my yoga teachers. I invite them to take the floor in my brain. I like their telling me what to do. [...]
The Front Row and Bikram Yoga Etiquette
On a recent evening, a teacher greeted a student, “in the front row now. Progress. Good for you.” The woman beamed. The front row is for people able to do most of most of the poses, teachers explain, to demonstrate for people still trying to put them together. One studio even had a sign posted [...]
Postcards From The Heat, Sunday Morning In The Studio
Bikram Studio: Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Once upon a time I lived in three places at once. Well, not “lived” exactly: I bivouacked like a gypsy, camping out indoors, traveling with little more than my toothbrush, my dog, and my yoga mat. Under those circumstances. I needed my Bikram more than ever, so I practiced in three far-flung studios. My practice [...]
Yoga Practice: Welcome to Planet Bikram
I love watching newcomers wander onto Planet Bikram. That is how I thought of the studio for years: as another world. The very atmosphere is different: hot, humid, dense. The attire differs too: Everyone is barefoot and most are dressed for a swim, right in the middle of Manhattan. There are customs to acquire. Shoes [...]
Kicking Back, A Bikram Practice
“The kick drives the posture,” is what teachers say about standing bow-pulling pose, called Lord of the Dance in other hatha yoga practices. This archetype of grace we do fifth in the Bikram series. Standing in balance on one foot in any pose is magical, of course. To be still and serene on a single [...]
Bikram Practice: Extreme Multitasking
Arduous aerobic exercise improves brain activity, according to scientific studies recently described in The New York Times (9/16/09, “What Sort of Exercise Can Make You Smarter?”). So brawn leads to brains, sweating to smarts. It’s one more reason to get to the Bikram hot box, one more entry on the list of benefits of this [...]
Bikram Yoga, Macho Yoga
More men practice Bikram yoga than the other types that I have practiced, and I hail each and every one as a brave soul. The odd male dancer or massage therapist may find his way into any old yoga class, but only in Bikram studios have I consistently seen many and diverse men. There’s a [...]
Yoga Practice: Leap from Mat to Mind
Finally, I took cold hold of my hot rage the other morning as my teenager behaved like a teenager. The most important–and most elusive–benefit of Bikram yoga is calm, staying in the eye of the storm, whatever the storm, on the mat or off. Staying in the eye–might that be the third eye?–and seeing what [...]
Yoga Championship: Room with a View
I learned so much watching the recent Bikram yoga championship. Competitors were to be judged on grace and execution, and at first these terms seemed vague. Their meaning emerged as I watched 35 people performing the same postures 35 times. Far from being bored, I was mesmerized as the “repetition” revealed enormous differences and a [...]
Yoga Competition: Perspiration and Inspiration
Harrrumph! was one response when I wrote here about my awe at seeing amazing postures during a recent yoga competition. “Can you win at yoga?” the blog YogaDork sniffed when Yoga Lily waxed rhapsodic about October’s 7th Annual New York Regional Yoga Championship. Yoga Lily would like to go on record as saying that every [...]
Bikram Practice: Rest Period
“Now you can stop efforting,” the teacher said as she began the two-minute mid-class rest. That long savasana evokes my elementary school, where we were ordered to rest after lunch. We placed our heads on our desks, within our folded arms. Commanding a child to rest makes about as much sense as commanding a cat [...]
Bikram Competition: Who is a Champion?
A yoga competition? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t yoga about the union of body and spirit, heart and mind? Yes. But Bikram Yoga is also about striving for mastery–of the beautiful postures, of the body, of the self. The audience at a competition is treated to poetry in motion. The competitors–their skills, focus, and love [...]
Bikram Benefit: The Party of Opposites
So how was the party? Well, if yoga celebrates the union of opposites, the 10th anniversary celebration of the Bikram Yoga NYC studios on October 15 was just right. Guests could indulge in gourmet kale or gooey cupcakes, lime-scented oxygen or vodka. The program offered silliness and wisdom, slapstick yoga routines and wrenching tales of [...]
Bikram Benefits: Healing, Day by Day, Cell by Cell
Each injury is a journey, the woman sighed in the locker room, commiserating with my pain–er, temporary limitation. She praised an herbal ointment. We dished about heat pads, ice packs, Chinese rubs, drugstore pills, and the healing benefits of Bikram yoga. Rehab results, according to this curriculum, from the “tourniquet effect”: compress the scarred tissue [...]
Bikram Practice: Mirror, Mirror
To see yourself suffer is why mirrors line the front wall of the Bikram yoga studio, or so I have often heard. But the other day as I was suffering through a particularly hard class, the teacher phrased it in the reverse, with kindness, “Sit down. Look in the mirror. Watch yourself recover.” So I [...]
Yoga Practice: Saturday Night’s Alright
Saturday night, and what did I make a reservation for? A chic café, profound play, maybe an avant-garde extravaganza? No: I committed myself to sweat through Bikram’s beginning yoga class at 7 p.m. I know. A few weeks ago, I bragged in this blog about looking good, and now I spill the sorry fact that [...]
Bikram Benefits: When the Worst Class is the Best
For seven weeks I did not get to the hot box for practice, so I was dreading my first class back. I picked an off hour, a mellow teacher. She had mercy. Still. I did not tremble. I rattled. My bones clattered. My very atoms ached trying to stay together. I did not sweat. I [...]
Yoga Lessons: String Theory
I bring an invisible friend to class–nothing as dramatic as an oversize bunny named Harvey who burbles with karmic wisdom. It’s a simple prop: a string. Up, down, or sideways, it guides my practice. Sometimes the invisible string is vertical, like a surveyor’s plumb line–the weighted cord that divines the center of the earth. The [...]
A Bikram Benefit: Picking Wild Raspberries
Agility enabled me to pick wild raspberries this summer. That, and wrapping myself up chin to toe, against poison ivy, thorns, slugs, bugs, and sun. Forget idyllic summer morning, I wore hiking boots, high socks with heavy jeans tucked in, and a shirt with cuffs to my knuckles and the collar to my ears. Only [...]
Eagle Afloat
I do not know if an eagle can glide like a swan or perch like a water lily on the shimmer of a pond. But my eagle has grown buoyant. This may be the natural consequence of practicing on water. I have done my yoga these past few weeks on a quaint country dock, an [...]
Different
If circumstances prevent reaching the hot box, Bikram suggests practicing in heavy clothes for heat. This summer, unable to get to the studio regularly, I practice in a plush sweater and thickly-knit pants. I have no mirror nor teacher to guide me. My practice is amazingly different. No surprise that my muscles refuse me more [...]
Fountain of Youth
Okay, I am going to brag: The other day, college boys were struck into silence when I climbed wet out of the pond onto the dock. How old am I? Old enough to be their . . . old enough so that if I were to say I am 39 years old, you would be [...]
Breathe
I am finally learning how to breathe. Time was, during the lung-opening warm-up, I gasped when I tried to squeeze out every last molecule of air. I choked when waiting to inhale, then got dizzy when I finally managed to. Sometimes still, I weave and waver as I breathe, and must tense my thighs to [...]
Just Ten Seconds
“Balancing stick is a ten-second pose. You can do anything for just ten seconds.” I laughed the first time I heard a teacher say this, and even now that I’ve heard it hundreds of times, I still sometimes laugh. Even if it’s only just for ten seconds, can I really do anything? Sing like Aretha [...]
Playing Favorites
I have my favorite poses, as do many yogis. Usually it’s a fancy one–camel or toe-stand, standing-bow or spine-twisting. What makes a favorite? Anything, really: the entrance to the pose, sensations while holding it, how challenging or cool it seems, even the way it looks. After the bliss of camel became reliable, my favorite was [...]
Put the Horse Before the Cart
People are sometimes embarrassed or frustrated when they “can’t do the posture.” But the point is not to do the posture but to let the posture do you. Practice is not about a “perfect” posture. It is about your own body and improving your own body by improving the posture, working carefully toward its full [...]
Yoga Minus One
Turning a doorknob hurt. That’s how debilitated my right arm was. So I did my yoga without it. Throughout, I thought of the musician’s tool, Music Minus One, which is a recording of a piece of music that is missing one instrument. It gives the practicing musician perfect accompaniment with which to practice. My right [...]
Don't Throw It Away, Postcards From The Heat
Don’t Throw It Away
“Don’t throw it away,” say the weight-lifters. Lifting is only part of the job. That 500-lb. barbell should be lowered slowly to get optimum bang for the muscular buck. This maxim is also true in yoga. The pose itself is only part of the practice. Getting in and out of it comprise another. In half-tortoise, [...]
Cleaner than Cleaner than Clean, Postcards From The Heat
Cleaner than Cleaner than Clean
“Yoga glow” only begins to describe the distinctive lustre of skin polished by habitual Bikram practice. A paleface like me develops a peaches-and-cream complexion. Mediterranean skin has the rich sheen of olives. Pacific-rim skin has the translucence of mango, and the darkest African skin has the radiance of onyx, or chocolates still warm in the [...]
My Why, Postcards From The Heat
My Why
Now, and its imperatives for practice: I am frail so strive for strength. I am tense so seek peace. I live in New York City so scavenge for quiet. I am alive so indulge in living. I am aging so seek meaning. I have children so make energy to fuel them. I fear the rigid [...]
Call and Response, Postcards From The Heat
Call and Response
Call and response is a common form of prayer, resounding in limestone synagogues and clapboard churches. There’s no religion in a Bikram studio, though a new student may pray for class to end pronto, or one who overindulged in ice cream or vodka might beg a higher power to smash a window. But call and [...]
Only in New York
I often practice on West 72nd Street, home to half a dozen studios. Swing a cat on the subway platform, you’ll hit a yoga mat. Swing a mat on the platform, no one will look twice. I’m just guessing about that; I haven’t tried it. The route to this studio has unique New York quirks, [...]
‘T’is a puzzlement
Every pose is a puzzle, like one of those sets of bent segments that nestle this way and that to make a smooth cube or cool car. I love assembling the parts of a pose: one day more strength here, more stretch there another, a new torque of the hip–I strive to make the ancient [...]
When I Did My 30 Day Challenge
When I Did My 30 Day Challenge
I recently practiced for 30 days in a row, partly for the weird fun of it and partly to try to heal my knee. A teacher had shilled her daily practice as the magic that ended her torn-meniscus issues. It worked for me too: For the first time, I can do tree, get tush to [...]
Sunday Morning In The Studio
Some Sundays I drive in to the city for a 7:00 a.m. class, which may seem crazy but has its charms. For one thing, the streets are empty— no cars, no people. It’s quiet and eerie, like a country road or an enchanted palace. For another, I can park my clunker right in front of [...]
Sparkle!
After I practice in the mornings, I fix myself parmesan-dusted eggs, bacon, buttered toast, and fierce coffee with hot milk. No more new-age rations for this glowing lotus: My body craves robust fare, far better fuel for the studio’s heat. I also down juice by the quart and coconut water from a frozen mug. In the [...]
Got Back Up? Love Camel
I love camel but have kept that secret. Most people dislike or even fear this backward bend. Most teachers dwell on its anxieties and aftershocks, but one teacher uses the word “euphoric.” For me, it is. I love being upside down, my head swinging free, neck elongating, brain re-orienting. The gentle dizzy of a long backbend [...]
Knock Yourself Out
The hands-down most profound gift of Bikram Yoga? It’s exhausting, and exhausted people are not plagued by nervous insomnia. Mr. B may discourse endlessly on how this arduous practice develops equanimity, fortitude, and all that jazz. But it ain’t so hifalutin. A daily 90 minutes of hot hard work, and I am simply too tired [...]
Bikram Yoga NYC opened its doors in August 1999 and became Manhattan's first Bikram Yoga Studio! Owners Donna Rubin and Jennifer Lobo had both been avid practitioners of Bikram Yoga in other cities and knew that no city needed Bikram Yoga more than New York! Check out our Locations and Schedules here.
Our blogger, Yoga Lily has been practicing intensively in our studios for more than two years. She was inspired to begin this blog by the myriad benefits the yoga brings her. Yoga Lily lives in Manhattan with her two daughters, an oversized German Shepherd, and a Russian Blue cat.
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