Day 21: Bow (Dhanurasana)

There is hot yoga, and then there is Hot Yoga, and Bikram’s regimen is clearly the latter. The extreme heat (really, the combinations of extreme heat and high humidity) is the fulcrum of the practice, but also its most divisive point. There are people who feel 105 degrees veers from the hot into the potentially dangerous.

I’ve been felled by the heat. Frequently. I’ve seen extremely fit looking people knocked flat by it. (I'm not talking about passing out, but being stopped in your tracks.) The hot room imposes conditions that the fittest athletes would struggle with. But as Wee Willie Shakespeare said those many moons ago, “Though this be madness, yet there be method in it.”

Bikram describes the process as akin to shaping a sword. You don’t take a cold piece of metal and start hammering it. You heat the metal up until it’s malleable, then you take the hammer to it. In this case, your body is the metal, the hot room is the forge, and the dialogue and your ability to act on it is the hammer.

Could you potentially pull or tear something by going too far? No—provided you do the postures the right way.

And there’s the catch. The right way is essentially, “buyer beware.” Bikram thrusts the responsibility on you, the practitioner. You better be listening with all three ears and doing exactly what the teacher tells you to do. If you get hurt, it means you weren’t following along closely enough. None of this reflects on the expert guidance and teaching of the Boston Bikram instructors. It’s simply the Bikram way. But it’s good to know that before you walk into the torture chamber.

Because of the extreme conditions and the fact I’m not what you’d call a natural athlete, I probably entered the hot room the first time in a state of extreme caution. Likewise, every teacher will tell you when you start to do what you can, take breaks when you need to, and watch what the experienced students are doing.

Trust me, there have been days where I thought the hot room was a Mac truck, and I was a fly on its windshield. During the 30 day challenge, I’ve had a rotating set of aches and pains. One days, it was a little soreness in my Achilles; for two days, a rib cage muscle that didn’t seem to be quite in its normal place; and off and on, little aches in the back, knees, shoulders and ankles.

In every case, I do what I can with what I have that day. I strive to follow the dialogue as closely as I can and come as close to doing the poses the right way as I’m able. Ultimately, responsibility for my practice and well-being fall on me, and that’s a good thing. But keep that caveat emptor in the back of your mind should you ever decide to try out Bikram’s yoga. When you enter the hot room, you’re taking your body for a test run in an extreme environment. Drive carefully.