Things I Learn about Bikram Within the First Three Days of Teacher Training that Will Make the Rest of This Book Make Sense
That Bikram is a man without a vocabulary for moderation. That when he says, “Every yoga in the United States is fake yoga,” realize he is also the same man who in the next breath says, “You know the most repulsive creation ever made in the West? That thing called blue cheese dressing.” For Bikram, no idea of his is not the greatest, no acquaintance is not “my very best friend,” every punch could kill someone, every rich man is a multi-multibillionaire, and any random thought that might come out of his mouth could be “the most brilliant sentence ever created in the English language.”That he will make you believe that charisma is a physical quality of the universe. That it can actually radiate off someone.
That you are not immune to his charms. That’s how real charisma works. You may decide you don’t like him or that you find him cartoonish and silly, or you may decide you love him and want to run away to join his circus—it doesn’t matter. When you are around him and actually experience him, unless you are jaded to the point of a clinical pathology, you will be surprised. Impressed by his variability, aware of his attention to the present moment, his ability to pick up and react to the people around him. He will, in short, undermine your expectations whatever they are and make you curious about what exactly will happen next and then convince you that this quality of curiosity and unpredictability is authenticity.
And that it was none other than Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh, the proudly deviant, ultimately monstrous force of twentieth-century charismatic wisdom, who famously decreed that “authenticity is morality” just prior to diving right off the high board of sanity into the deep end of withdrawn madness, eschewing his life as a yoga guru to become a Valium and whippet addicted, ubermaterialistic, sexually abusive fiend slash international bioterrorist who was exiled from twenty-one countries. And that although nobody except Rajneesh who thinks about the implications of the statement “authenticity is morality” can rationally accept it, it does subconsciously align with our most self-righteous notions of self and is very helpful in understanding why Bikram can appear warped, egotistical, and charming at the same time.
In other words: he’s got it figured out for himself (even if that means the rest of us are fucked).
That he does not tolerate the color green in his presence. That he will occasionally recognize that this is illogical and no matter what, never try to defend it, but will, depending on mood, fly into caustic rage if you momentarily forget and accidentally wear green in his presence or bring a green object into a room he is occupying.
That by the end of the third day of Teacher Training, he has announced he “invented the disco ball,” “was responsible for launching Michael Jackson’s career,” “brought Bruce Lee to America,” “is number one in the world in hits since the computer started,” “cured Janet Reno’s Parkinson’s,” and was “best friends with Elvis.”
That he dresses only in complete outfits, never the discrete suburban options I grew up with, whereby pants, shirts, and socks were pulled from separate drawers.
That his sartorial style might best be described as a concerted effort to make disco balls cloth.
That beyond disco ball as cloth, Bikram limits himself to the colors of orange, red, and black. That, without irony, he wears shirts with tigers and flames. That he loves fedoras, pocket hankerchiefs, and wing-tipped shoes.
That, again on the clothing, he never wears anything restrictive enough to prevent immediate removal should an opportunity present itself for him to strip down to brown flesh either to show off the preternaturally preserved condition of his body or to literally give the shirt off his back to a deserving, demanding, or mildly confused man who happens to be standing in a room full of people Bikram wants to impress.
That I have personally stood behind him when he thought he was off-mic and heard him muttering to himself over and over that he is “Bikram, a gangster like Cagney, like De Niro, like James Caan, like my most favorite Mr. James Caan, Sonny Sonny Sonny Sonny Boy” while rubbing his hands and cackling to himself. That I have no qualms about revealing these essentially personal mutterings, because I have heard Bikram mutter an identical rant of gangster comparisons to an audience of hundreds while on the microphone. And that this merger of public and private mutterings is just one example of a gigantic merger that occurs when you elevate into the truly weird sphere of being a full-time guru, where private and public selves by necessity must be blurred into one because that nonduality is precisely the product you are selling.
That when it comes to yoga, he is foremost a servant. That he is compulsive in his desire to help people achieve benefits from his postures. That this is perhaps the greatest reason for his success.
That he truly believes yoga will change the world, and his love of money and glitter and gangsters aside he will do anything to further this goal.
That he is a man who has been so successful at this goal that he once got in an argument with the adjacent passenger in his first-class seat of his Delta Airlines flight back to Los Angeles over his own identity. An argument where the adjacent first-class passenger insisted politely that there must be some language problem because it was impossible for his seatmate to be Mr. Bikram of Bikram Yoga, because there was no single Mr. Bikram, thereby encapsulating a belief widely held by those not in the know that Bikram Yoga is one of the ancient systems, a lineage passed down by the generations, a lineage where it is assumed that the Bikram in Bikram Yoga is either the name of a long-dead sage or, more likely, is some yuppie-appropriated Sanskrit word of the type now thrown on jeans or soaps or ergonomically branded office furniture. That the argument in the first-class bay escalated—as the man continued dribbling inaccurate details about the yoga into the conversation, details that he knew for a positive fact because his niece was deeply involved in this ancient Bikram yoga—and was settled only because by chance the Delta inflight magazine was doing a story on the sensation of Bikram Yoga, which featured an imposing picture of the real and nonancient Bikram in exactly the same fedora he happened to be wearing at the moment.
That although that is what Bikram relayed to us and it seems probable, as there have been many stories about Bikram written in many in-flight magazines, I have no idea whether it is true. That Bikram routinely mixes stories that are definitely true (“I kick Roberta Flack and Shirley MacLaine out of class for being late!”) with stories that could very well be true (“Ronald Reagan called me for advice about his daughter,” Patti Davis, who was a serious student of Bikram’s and who went on to marry one of his most senior teachers) with stories that are almost certainly not true (“I get Bruce Lee his role in Enter the Dragon!”) with stories that are false and told tongue in cheek for laughs (“Best client, Statue of Liberty. Hundred years she stands without bending the knee. Tough cookie.”)
That he is the greatest example of sage-as-child I have ever come across.
That as sage-as-child, he skews toward the awkwardly horny, early- teenage child, who has just discovered masturbation and exaggeration but who is still really, really excited about video games, instead of the perhaps more wholesome wide-eyed and innocent child who fingerpaints and runs around in grass whom people tend to imagine when imagining their sages as children.
That he certainly has those wide-eyed and innocent moments too.
And that really, when you think about it, there isn’t that big a difference between those two versions of sage-as-child, since the salient quality isn’t exposure to sexuality or running through grass but the degree of wonder and curiosity and energy that occurs when an ego that hasn’t been bashed aside yet by the wearies of maturity, the responsibilities of caring for oneself, and the learned boredom of sophistication is left to explore a universe it believes it is at the very beating center of.
That his understanding of America and what it means to be American has largely been formed by the Beverly Hills elite of the 1970s and ’80s and their corresponding mannerisms in Hollywood movies. That because of this, he shares the same weird cultural warping you see in Japanese rock stars and/or Scandanavian jazz and/or hip-hop’s adoption of Italian mafioso mannerisms, in that he’s grasped a small, essential, and extreme part and used that part as a lens to frame the whole.
That the result of this sociological synecdoche is a Bikram who believes Las Vegas is the apex of American culture, thinks that name-dropping is a valid rhetorical strategy, and has trouble believing that his students are motivated by carrots beyond money and self-aggrandizement.
That he really believes it when he says he loves himself so much because it allows him to love you.
Both because he really, really loves himself and because he really, really loves you. As long as you stay as you a concept and don’t morph too much into you an individual with needs that may conflict with his own.
That his love for you as either concept or individual will never, ever, under any circumstances allow you to outshine him.
That he was by his own admission a virgin until the age of twenty-eight, whereby he experienced his first orgasm when several women brought him to climax against his will. That who knows what that particular series of events does to someone’s neural pleasure center, but that developmentally and behaviorally at least it resulted in him promptly going on an early-thirties sexual binge whereby he explored this new sensation to its utmost with many of Hollywood’s leading ladies and many of his most devoted acolytes.
That he is the type of man who thinks that announcing in public that he has had “seventy-two hours of marathon sex, where my partner has forty-nine orgasms, I count” makes him appear more, rather than less, virile.
That he is incredibly, achingly lonely. That he can’t stand to be by himself. That he misses India. That his need to be surrounded by people begins with senior teachers but quickly extends to essentially unknown newbie practitioners should senior teachers desire to go to sleep or otherwise have some personal space. That he will tell us not once, but hundreds of times from his throne, that he believes “loneliness is the number one punishment in human life” and/or that he can endure any amount of physical pain, “but put me in a room by myself, and I will kill myself.”
That one of his most senior teachers describes his teaching method as “he takes a pin and finds the softest part of you, and he will prick you again and again at that point, never actually penetrating, never hurting you, until that part of you is the hardest place on your body.”
That already in just a few days, one of his most junior teachers can see that although his instinct for finding the softest spot on people is unerring, almost genius level, he occasionally and very definitely misapplies the whole pricking part—and has ended up hurting people very badly.
That even among people who feel hurt, cheated, or injured —the people who seek me out as writer with grudges and curses and to expound on the reasons he is dangerous—even these people will typically have a moment when they think about him and their eyes grow big with memories and say, “but it’s true, you know, the guy broke my heart, and I love him anyway. I can’t help it.”
That he never drinks alcohol. Abhors cigarettes. That there is something very touching about the way he is saddened when people close to him use those substances.
That by all indications, he does not practice the yoga class he is famous for creating. But that he clearly does exercise in other formats, including, bizarrely, doing thousands and thousands of stomach crunches in the sauna.
That he possesses an absolutely transcendent singing voice. That Quincy Jones wanted to record him, at a time when Quincy was at the height of his creative powers, in the mid-1980s, having just put out Thriller with Michael Jackson. That Quincy found himself crying when Bikram sang to him at the end of their classes together.
That Bikram can be both kind and terribly cruel in the same moment to the same person. That this push–pull is his métier and essential truth. That it operates on fragile, needy people like a drug.
That he is in no way anything but a human. And a particularly small human at that. That he is a man who through great personal effort has whittled away his humanity into a small, sharp point. That as with many great men, this has left him both mesmerizingly effective and totally and completely imbalanced. That it could be perceived as irony that yoga would be the skill that led to this imbalance, but that implies a misunderstanding both about the type of yoga Bikram is teaching and exactly what it takes to teach and spread yoga to millions and millions of people.