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Cheating and Cursing: An Alternative Approach to Bikram Yoga

Posted by on January 8, 2017

Hot yoga. The longer you practice, the more the superficial complaints melt away: the sweat, the smell, the heat, the humidity. Even your slowly cooking reptilian brain calms down after several classes, where it’s no longer preoccupied with craving thoughts of food, fighting and sex. Initially, the practice dredges up arguments and emotions long past. Causes one to hunger for meat and carbs. And as far as sexual musings go, that’s just a given in a hot room where people glisten with sweat, in such a state of undress, they’re barely recognizable in their regular clothes.

So, even when you comprehend the intermediate bikram yoga instructions like, “rotate your femurs forward while maintaining both sit bones evenly on the floor,” yet your body cannot follow, just breathe deeply, curse under your breath and cheat your way through the posture.

Oh, yes—curse and cheat. This is an upgrade from the “fake it ‘til you make it” advice. Release those curse words like steam through a valve in a pressure cooker, but much quieter. After all, you must celebrate or suffer throughout your yoga practice without distracting your neighboring yogis from their own misery or joy. It’s a shared practice, but the journey is individual and you never really know where the other yogis are.

Just be true to yourself: curse and cheat. You know you’re going to do it. It’s much worse to lie to yourself than to admit your humanness. Every time you willfully ignore the sage advice of “never sacrificing form for depth,” you’re essentially saying, “To hell with form, I know I can go deeper if I disregard the basic set up of the posture.” Then you modify, however you please, for the gratifying illusion that you’re doing the posture rather than cheating your way through the posture.

Sometimes, you enter the room very ego-heavy. Check yourself out in the mirror just a little too often or a little too long. You’re either thinking, “Damn, I look good!” or “Damn, I suck at this!” Or you got this hot and heavy inner dialogue going on with yourself. Whether your ego distraction is external or internal, you’re not the least bit burdened by what the yoga teacher is saying. Some don’t even consider being ahead or behind the script as cheating.

And who hasn’t mentally cursed the instructor for going off script and making them hold those excruciating postures precious seconds longer than regulation, especially when the instructor chooses to make corrections? Is there not a special place in hell for that? There is if the silent f-bomb dropping yoga students had their way. As they fake the intensity the instructor wants or truly live up to the spirit of “fuck this,” and defiantly come out of the posture, perhaps groaning audibly so the yoga student ensures that the yoga teacher knows his/her dissatisfaction.

So why bother?

During final savasana, or the last corpse pose at the end of class, after every muscle, ligament and fascia have been stretched, and you’re lying drenched in the hard work of your own sweat, you finally get to close your eyes and in the vacuum created by the exodus of the curse words, cheating strategies and other excreted toxins, a sense of serenity flows inward, filling the void. The torture chamber transforms into the rejuvenation space. In that moment, you are renewed from the inside out. Then you go home and put that wind-removing pose to good use.

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