i heart bikram yoga

let the beauty we love be what we do.
there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. ~rumi

"let go of your expectations. they will not serve you here." my bikram yoga instructor tells us as we stand in the middle of our mats, toes and heels together, arms at our sides, ready to begin our class.

i try to let go of what i think the next 90 minutes are going to hold, let go of what i think i should be able to do, what i think i should feel or how i should look.

the room is heated to 105 degrees. we begin with pranayama breathing, sweat our way through 26 asanas (postures) and close with kapalabhati breathing. the routine never changes, but as the instructors keep telling us, our minds and our bodies are different every day, so each class is a unique experience. and because each class is different, it's crucial to listen and pay attention to our bodies in the moment and how far we can go into the posture. it's a discipline in paying attention and being present, not only for our body's sake, but also for our mind and heart.

i've been practicing bikram yoga for 5 months now, and i'm hooked, although it's one of those love/hate relationships. some days i think i'm going to die in that hot room, that the next class after mine will come in and find my boiled corpse in, well, corpse pose (savasana). there are days when i pray to God that i can make it back to my car all the way up the street and up the steps of the parking garage. but i keep coming back to it, and i'm pretty sure it's because there's something restorative happening. . .on a number of levels.

the physical, of course. there are many potential health benefits of bikram yoga. i feel stronger, better. more at home in my body. i'm having fewer back and neck problems, and the bursitis i've had in my foot for almost a year is finally healing. but the healing goes even deeper than that.

this past summer, i issued a cease-fire in the war between my body and me that i've been fighting for almost as long as i can remember, fighting against size and shape to fit into a culture where one of the highest honors possible is for a girl/woman to be called "little." i can still hear those feminine voices, thick with southern accents and with admiration, saying (and never about or to me), "look how tiny she is!" or "you are just the littlest thing, aren't you?" i'd imbibed the message that little = good down to the dregs.

while I truly enjoy physical activity (and participated in gymnastics, cheerleading, soccer in my teens), along the way, i turned exercise into a battle against flesh and blood, rather than treating it as something pleasurable and important to my overall well-being. and then my obsessive, compulsive eating got all tangled up in my obsessive, compulsive exercising. it was a hamster wheel, and i was running around in the same ol' circle and getting nowhere.

this past summer right around my birthday, i read geneen roth's book called women food and god in which she simply said, "drop the war with your body." I replied, "yes. yes, i will! i'm turning 37, and for the love, it's time to accept what the good Lord gave me."

my struggle with my body-image, as for most women, is a long story of shame and self-hatred and one i won't detail here. acceptance doesn't happen overnight, but it can and does happen, and it starts as most things start--with small, halting steps. one of those steps, for me, is changing the way i relate to food, and another one is practicing yoga.

i started bikram yoga in the fall at a great little studio downtown. not for the faint of heart, it is an intense practice in a bit of an extreme environment (a girl fainted in one of my classes last week!). but right away, i loved that in this form of yoga, you work hard, sweat buckets, but you also learn to rest, to be still, to breathe, to honor your body rather than punish it.

you also have to look at yourself in the mirror the whole time. in skin tight yoga clothes. there is nowhere to hide. turns out that this is a good thing. that first month, as i watched myself move in and out of the postures, i could see and, for the first time ever, be so grateful for what my body was capable of doing. also, there are lots of people of every size, and many of them wear itty bitty yoga clothes, like little swimsuit-sized items. and it. is. no. big. deal.

bikram is about opening your lungs, opening your heart and your body for the purpose of well-being. i love that this practice feels congruent with who i want to be in this world: living with intention and simplicity and openness, with kindness and acceptance toward myself and others. and as robert benson writes, "it is a life lived at attention that i seek."

and i love that this discipline has become a strange and wonderful kind of prayer for me. thomas merton wrote that meditation is "the idea of awakening our interior self and attuning ourselves inwardly to the Holy Spirit, so that we will be able to respond to his grace." while i'm not really meditating in the classical sense as i'm practicing my yoga, i am making use of the space and time for my physical and my interior self to be attuned to the spirit of God. my outward posture matches my inward posture as "i lift up my heart and my hands to you, o God."

it's a beautiful thing.



p.s. there's a whole theology of the body here that we could delve into, but i'll leave that to the more cerebral theologians. if such discussions interest you, here is an article my husband wrote on the topic.

p.p.s. i love this open letter to a new student.

p.p.p.s: just so you know: