Bikram Yoga Chadds Ford
Yoga for You
What is he REALLY like?
Yogi Kate recently traveled to Europe to attend an Advanced Seminar with Bikram Choudhury. Here, she reports her findings on Bikram, the man.
First, the disclaimer: obviously, a full impression can not be garnered from a one-week seminar. As much as I would love to lay claim to the man’s inner-workings, even with my astute insight I can not grasp the full depth of a man’s soul from four rows back, five mats to the left.
From my corner I braced myself. I was prepared for a myriad of behavioral… um… oddities. Most of which I am happy to report, I saw.
All this I was prepared for. All this and a cart-load of shouting that I didn’t hear. What I was not prepared for was that this man was, in general, nice. If I had to summarize the man I would be as likely to chose the word, “nice” as the word, “garish.” This is not at all what I expected.
We had several children in the room, which he doted on. He called them to do demos, helped them into poses and only spoke shock-talk when they were not present. He even had one of the children sit on her dad’s back to get him deeper into final stretching. While I would not call the man selfless, you could certainly see it in him when he taught.
His dancing across the stage was not to get attention to himself, it was to get us to push harder. And we did. It lightened the mood too. This man would do anything to get you to your potential. Dancing, laughing, telling bad sexual jokes, calling you fat. He clearly did not give a rat’s posterior what anyone thought of him. If you needed him to be mean, lively, outrageous or deep, he would be that for you, critics be darned. The man really put himself out there for his students and I found that a very nice thing to do.
Bikram is at his best teaching. I thought it odd before meeting him now I totally get it.I had never thought of it that way before, that he was just a fun yoga teacher. It really puts things in perspective — & explains a lot.
Teacher Juliana agrees, “This is Bikram at his best, and this makes me miss him!! This is actually the reason why he’s been such a great success – in the beginning, he was just a really fun yoga teacher.”
Kate is a Bikram Yogi of two years. She recently completed 365 classes in 365 days. She also competed in the Illinois Asana Championships this August.
Bikram Yoga Chadds Ford 