Rebecca

Tonight at class I heard someone mention muscle pain and “lactic acid.” So I Googled lactic acid muscle pain, and it looks like the theory of lactic acid buildup is not the most up to date. Apparently the pain can be caused by micro-tears in the muscle, caused by overexertion, and these tears result in the pain response. Maybe resting up and scaling back would indeed help.

That’s a frustrating one. My studio supplies a stack of washcloths and I usually pick one up on my way in and use it for giving my arms and elbows a quick dry-off in this pose. I suspect it’s really important to keep striving to reach the elbows. Gripping them seems to give way better compression across the abdomen.

I’ve had some more thoughts about this subject.

Bikram, and yoga, are from India, a country of intense and varied spiritual approaches to life that can result in intense and varied experiences, of the kind that we in the West usually work hard to avoid: chaos, inefficiency, in-the-moment thinking, and blurred definitions of everything from cleanliness to justice.

In the “West,” we are prone to a more rigidly-inspected approach to everything we do, resulting in over-analysis, questioning, and extrapolation. Plus we may be more likely to have vague feelings of guilt about spending money on ourselves, staring at ourselves in a mirror, and focusing our entire attention on our bodies and ourselves for an hour and a half on a regular basis!

Especially if we are women, we will have been “taught” through societal and perhaps religious conditioning that our purpose is to nurture others and ignore our own needs (and hence ourselves).

I am a female AND a left-brain thinker type, so I get the double-whammy. The very first time I walked into a yoga class (Iyengar, not Bikram) and started to follow the instructions, I began to cry, then laugh, then laugh and cry simultaneously. Why? Probably because the yoga was bringing the right and left sides of my brain together, causing an intensively emotional, healing experience.

There’s a penultimate irony here! Despite its origin in a deeply poetic, chaotic and unstructured country, yoga proceeds along the same lines as does solving an equation in math: whatever you do to one side of the equation (or the body), you do to the other as well, resulting in The Answer.

It’s possible that in this concept lies the solution to our issues with the repetitive nature of the Bikram dialog. Its very order and predictability introduces the discipline necessary to pull our two brain halves together in a setting where the instructions eventually become so automatic that we are freed to experience the experience.

I read your post with great interest, Sarah. There is a lock-step aspect to the Bikram method that has kept me on alert for some time, and probably always will. It’s something that we all need to aware of, I think.

In the yoga, it has seemed to me that we ARE to focus on our own bodies and reactions, and act accordingly on an individual basis (e.g., to lie down if we feel as if we’re going to pass out). This is a much different thing than soldiering on when we are in great pain. I’ve never felt encouraged to do that by my instructors. They say in every session to feel free to lie down if we feel we need to. There is a low-grade current of expectation that we will not “modify” the poses, but from this forum and also from fellow classmates’ experiences I have seen that much modifying is being done, while still benefiting from the yoga. The instructors will usually say to go to the point of discomfort, try a little further, and then back off. The theory being that in time we will be able to untighten and stretch more.

I see your point about gas prices … kind of like the frog-in-a-kettle story? Sellers, however, have always claimed prices as high as markets will bear. For years we have known about our dependency on oil and should have started working far sooner on viable alternatives. Even Bikram probably sets his studios’ prices about where he knows you will hesitate but still pay if you feel like you’re getting some value.

I do agree that it seems the instructors are simply mouthpieces for the Bikram phrases and philosophy. I don’t think it’s that much different, though, from any yoga video or tape that we might use again and again, if we stop or modify when we feel it necessary. With any input to our mind, it’s our job to filter and come to our own conclusions.