Thoughts on Bikram yoga, part 2

It's funny, this Bikram yoga really gets under my skin. Meaning, it gets me all worked up. There are definitely aspects of it which I really appreciate, but other aspects just drive me nuts.

In a nutshell, I think the thing that bothers me the most is how so many hundreds, thousands, of yoga teachers have just adopted Bikram's 'my way or the highway' approach. I think one of the greatest attractions of yoga is its scope. There are just so many aspects to it, so much variety available, that it allows the individual teacher and practitioner to find a path that makes the most sense for them. Whereas in Bikram, not only do you do the same poses in every single class, but, good god, all the teachers say the same things. And I think it's just part of the culture, Bikram is very adamant that everything has to be done the way he says.

I think one of the best books on yoga I've read is called The Heart of Yoga by T.K.V. Desikachar. He's the son of Krishnamacharya, who was the teacher to Iyengar, Pattabi Jois, and others, and is probably more responsible than any other person for yoga's blossoming in recent decades. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in yoga. Now, as it turns out, what I was going to mention isn't actually in The Heart of Yoga, but rather in another book by Desikachar called Health, Healing & Beyond. This book is in no small part a biography of its father; the subtitle is Yoga and the Living Tradition of Krishnamacharya. Both of these books made an impression on me when I was going through my yoga teacher training about three years ago.

Anyway, the most important thing I took away from these books was how Krishnamacharya used to teach and why. Generally he did one-on-one teaching, because he believed that everyone is different, and the yoga they do should be tailored to accommodate their needs and abilities.

This is something I've felt relatively strongly about the whole time I've been teaching, which admittedly is only about three years. Not every pose is suitable for every person. I think the skillful yoga teacher adjusts their classes and their teaching for the people in the room. More importantly, I think perhaps above all else the individual practitioner should be working to understand how their body and mind respond to the different asanas and other things we do in yoga class.

The subtitle of The Heart of Yoga is "Developing a Personal Practice", and I think this is what everyone should be doing to some extent. You have to decide what works best for you, those postures and practices that you respond best to, and that challenge you in suitable ways. Even if you're never going to do yoga at home by yourself, I think you have to make every class a personal practice. You have to do what the teacher says, but I think you have to make it your own somehow, by finding your own areas of focus.

So the Bikram-style emphasis on everyone doing exactly the same thing, exactly the way Bikram says you should do it, that just sits badly with me. And I think it especially rubs me the wrong way because I dislike Bikram himself. It just kills me that all these people just swallow everything he says as gospel. But more on that later.