DRAMATIS YOGINI
Bikram Choudhury
‘Boss’ / ‘Inventor of the Original Hot Yoga ™’
Undeniable master of hatha yoga, unashamed owner of 40 Rolls Royces, screamer, ranter, singer so sweet you might actually start crying unbidden, braggart so deranged you will question his grasp on reality, control freak, comforter — suffice to say, if Bikram didn’t exist, America would probably have had to invent him.
Quote from book: “I’m Bikram, a gangster like.”
Courtney Mace
Yoga Champion
Winner of the 2009 International Asana Championship, young body, old soul, and the author’s personal favorite yoga teacher of all time.
Quote from book: “People seem to like that phrase a lot [‘the battle between the ego and the soul’ which she used to describe competitive yoga] and I realize I said it so it’s out there, but I hate it. I hated it the moment the words left my mouth. They simply do not express what I mean. Pitting the ‘soul’—a word so ambiguous, I loath to use it—against the ‘ego’ only serves to strengthen the idea that these two aspects are separate. Worse, it suggests that the ego can be vanquished. That is not my goal in yoga. That is not my goal ever…I’m looking for union, harmony between the ego and the higher self…We are human. It’s not possible or desirable to abolish an essential part of who we are.” (From endnote p.306)
Chad Clark
Heat Artisan
A consultant to ‘hot’ yoga studios across the world, Chad designs custom heating systems and troubleshoots existing ones when they fail. After meeting Bikram, Chad was invited to L.A. to run his facility and asked to carry around a weird man-purse stuffed full of the guru’s cash.
Quote from book: “Once he discovered me, Bikram wanted me to do everything… I drove him around like a personal valet…I would come out and do personal repairs at his house…And let me promise you one thing, you have never been in a place with more mirrors…I mean can you imagine the mind that lives there? Gold. Fake gold. Platinum.… And everywhere, everywhere mirrors.”
Dr. Santiago Lorenzo
Scientist Researching Heat Acclimatization
Affiliated with both the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at the University of Texas and the Human Physiology Lab at the University of Oregon, Santiago Lorenzo is researching the effects of prolonged exposure to heat on athletes and examining mechanisms by which it might produce competitive gains.
Quote from book: “I wouldn’t be surprised if someday lots of athletes use heat as a training tool – just like athletes use altitude training now… We saw seven percent increase in performance. Seven percent is a gigantic gain in competitive cycling.”
Denis Dronjic
Yoga Instructor
Hours after getting delivery of his first motorcycle, Denis took it out for a spin. When going around a soft corner, the bike slipped out from beneath him, a car ran directly over his legs and chest. He lost 60% of his blood and all concrete memories for the next five weeks; doctors told him he would probably never walk again.
Quote from the book: “The yoga didn’t save my life. That was the emergency response team, the surgeons, the rehab specialists…The yoga didn’t give me the drive to recover. That came from some place inside me…What the yoga did is allow me to use the life I had been given back. And what’s the point otherwise?…What good is having a body if you can’t use it?”
Tony Sanchez
“Greatest Creation”
Tony Sanchez found Bikram at 18 and lived with the guru as family, becoming Bikram’s most accomplished student, “greatest creation,” and close friend. In 1984, threatened by Tony’s growing independence, Bikram met with Tony and demanded he break up with his girlfriend. When Tony demurred, Bikram fired him.
Quote from the book: “When I first met Bikram, he was a wonderful person. He was very new to L.A., and he would literally take the shirt from his back and give it to someone who asked for it. He didn’t have so much money back then, but he was always giving…We used to do the Advanced Series together, sometimes eight hours in one day. Bikram had a beautiful practice at that point, and we would just lose ourselves in the yoga. He was strong, eager, and patient. It made him a fantastic teacher…When we were done, he would drag me off to the movies. If it was a Saturday, we’d stay all day—three movies back to back. In between, when the lights went up, we’d talk yoga.”
Janis Bazevics
Roommate at Teacher Training
A successful Latvian businessman, with a penchant for adventure and extreme sports, Janis attended the 2010 Bikram Yoga Teacher Training on whim, hoping to lose weight and heal a series of old hockey injuries.
Quote from book: “Janis is the very last cadet to arrive at teacher training. He arrives without registration. He arrives without a room. He arrives unable to balance on one leg and unaware of what most of the postures are. And most important, he arrives not caring about any of that nonsense.”
Eleanor Payson
Therapist
Author of The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists, licensed marital and family therapist, Eleanor Payson helps the author understand where the line between healthy self-love and destructive narcissism lies.
Quote from book: “A narcissistic relationship is a one-way street,” Eleanor explains, “Once you engage the narcissist, the dynamic increasingly takes place on his terms—each encounter dictated by his moods and whims, and inevitably serving his agenda…”
Jimmy Barkan
Founder Barkan’s Hot Method
Bikram’s “most senior teacher” during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Jimmy Barkan has used the yoga to train top athletes including members of NFL, NBA, NHL, and PGA tour. Jimmy fondly remembers a guru dedicated to healing anyone he could, desperate to share his yoga with the world, and yet so besieged by demands that he had all but stopped practicing his own yoga.
Quote from book: “The absolute maddest I ever saw [Bikram], and actually this was a bit frightening at the time, was when someone who was a regular student skipped class without telling him…The yoga, having integrity to the yoga, it was everything to him.”
Sarah Baughn
Yoga Champion
Earnest, wholesome, and powerful: a quiet demonstration by Sarah Baughn convinces the author to try and take his yoga practice to the next level. Later, when they meet again, she reveals very different aspects of the yoga.
Quote from the book: “As she poured herself from posture to posture, this woman, standing on a towel on a mat in a slightly stinky room, took on a dimension I had previously associated only with natural phenomena, the stuff of Sierra Club calendars: rock walls and ice chasms, somehow distilled into the body of a twenty-one year old.”
Solomon Prophete
College Friend
Undisputed great friend, master at making the people around him feel comfortable, Sol, like many of us, has allowed life’s responsibilities to distract him from his health. After emergency surgery – obese and exhausted by the simple trip up to his second floor – he agrees to try the yoga for 60 days straight in an effort to re-invent his life.
Quote from the book: “The night before the sixty days were about to kick off, Sol’s wife Ashley called me around midnight. “Look, this is great. And I am behind it one hundred percent if it’s going to help Sol. But I want you to be careful…I’m going to pull the plug on this if it gets too extreme. Do not kill my husband with your fucking yoga.”