Choudhury’s Inferno

I love yoga. It feeds my soul and keeps my body limber. After a challenging session of Kundalini or Ashtanga I feel energised, filled with chi, taller even. But there is a special circle of hell reserved for the kind of people who use yoga to attain that highly sought after, yet extremely shallow, goal of the bikini-fit body, a place I recently discovered on my quest for a flat belly in the few short weeks before I go on holiday. It’s hot, very, very hot. Sweat steams off contorted bodies creating a searing humidity that leaves you struggling to take the deep ujjayi breaths meant to ease your muscles into yogic postures so they don’t snap like rotten rubber bands. It’s called Bikram Yoga, after its inventor, Bikram Choudhury, a man that strikes me as having something of a god complex (its the way he sits raised above his devotees, like some kind of choli-clad guru dispensing half-starved delusions from the mountain top).

Before I leave the changing room of the yoga studio, I realise the experience I’m about to embark on is probably not for me. Four middle-aged platinum blondes with more Botox between them than a crate of contaminated baked beans natter while stretching designer lycra over their salon-tanned limbs. But it isn’t just the clientele that has me sucking in my stomach and feeling out of place. The changing room decor; white leather armchairs, crystal chandeliers, chrome taps; is more suited to a boutique hotel than a yoga studio. And call me old-fashioned, but yoga studios should smell of incense, chai and enlightenment.  Here, a tinge of industrial bleach mingles with the blonde’s expensive perfume to scent the air with a post-operative-plastic-surgery-ward aroma.

The heat hits me as soon as I open the studio door.  Following the lead of the blondes, I lie down in Savasana (corpse pose) to await the instructor. In less than an hour I’ll wish I was dead, but for now I am feeling positive because, for some unfathomable reason, I am convinced that the heat will simply melt my fat away. The heat is dizzying, and to make matters worse, my olfactory glands have been assaulted with a sickly stench of too much expensive perfume oozing from the dilating pores of the four blondes, a redolence only topped by the duty free perfume counter at Heathrow Terminal 4 during a British Airways industrial action.  It makes me feel a bit nauseous so, as surreptitiously as I can, I move my mat away from them, towards the door and the cylinder of oxygen that stands ominously next to it. This small not-strenuous-in-any-way motion makes my heart race like I’ve just dashed up six flights of stairs. I lie down and try to breathe deeply in an attempt to bring my pulse below 600 beats a minute, but find I can’t suck the heat beyond my throat. I feel like I’m breathing through a boiled flannel.

Forty minutes later my clothing is soaked with sweat. Every pore in my body has opened and I deduce, from the resulting reek, that I’ve begun to release toxins ingested during my rave years in the ’90s. The postures are not dynamic, nor are they particularly difficult, but I’m finding even the teeniest movement  hard work. My balance, usually quite good, is completely off and I wobble during Warrior One!  I begin to wish the hour away, then realise that an hour has passed and the instructor is showing no signs of winding it down. Unable to push myself any further, I collapse onto my mat like an overcooked piece of spaghetti. I lie in Savasana for a while, waiting for my heart to stop pounding. It doesn’t, and I know, with deadly certainty, that if I don’t get out of the heat soon, I’m going to vomit.  I sit up and catch the instructor’s eye, but he refuses to let me leave and instructs me to lie down again. Tears sting my eyes, I want to cry like a baby. I feel ridiculous and wish I was dead. Then I wish he was dead. Then I blame the overly fragranced blondes and wish they were dead.

Through a haze of death wishes, I watch the instructor adjust the temperature dial on the air-conditioning system and I wonder how many trees I’d have to plant to offset the amount of carbon a bi-weekly practice of Bikram Yoga would add to my footprint. How does that much heat generation fit in with the yogic philosophy of generating love, for yourself, for others, for all creatures that share planet Earth? From where I’m lying, it seems soulless, focussed on the physical with scant regard for anything else. It certainly doesn’t care about climate change, and I can’t imagine the four-blondes sitting cross-legged  while visualizing the golden light of universal love pouring from their third eye. Then again, yoga is about being in the moment you are in, and allowing others to be. With that thought, I close my eyes. A slightly cooler (45ºC?) pocket of air wafts over me. I feel intensely grateful, the class is over, the instructor is gone. Hell has freed me from its clutches.

Namaste.