Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Workout notes 4 mile walk to yoga, yoga, 7 miles back. Pace felt good; some tingles in my left hip/butt area afterward. This will happen from time to time.

A quick look back on my last ultra: of course, slowing by 30 minutes on my last 11 mile loop bothered me some. But I have to remember that many years ago (late 1980’s) I took this long to walk ONE 8 mile loop at Bastrop State Park (The Lost Pines Trail). Of course, I weighed close to 300 pounds at that time, and that didn’t help matters much.

(Image of the Lost Pines trail is from here)

So, not only should I remember that I am still getting into shape, I need to remember where I came from.

Local Peoria Pundit talks about the local issues of today. Check out points 5, 9 and 10. I’ll post his 10′th point:

I wonder if the “moment of silence” means that no one is allowed to complain if some student announces after the fact that he or she is using the time to silently offer up a prayer to Satan?

(for the unaware, our idiotic state legislature (controlled by Democrats, by the way), MANDATED that our schools have a period of silence. That’s right: it is supposed to be mandatory! Mind you, we live in a friggin blue state!!!)

Yoga I’ve gotten the hunger to do some yoga again, and have visited the boards at yoga.com a bit. On those boards, I learned something trivial but interesting: Bikram yoga students are discouraged from wearing green!

A long discussion ensued (personally, I wonder if a style of yoga that imposes the nonsensical whims of its “leader” on everyone else is really some sort of a cult). Nevertheless, my experience with Bikram yoga has been positive; the studio I went to (Davenport, TX, near Austin) has some good teachers and friendly people. The students all appear to be fit, and the teachers are themselves fit experts (something you don’t always see elsewhere). I know that I’d practice there if I lived nearby. And, they have a cool looking frog on their webpage! Note: I was in the class on the day that the studio was featured on Fox 7 News.

Nevertheless, I found this article about Bikram yoga to be interesting:

[...]
Choudhury was the first to spot yoga’s enormous money-making potential, and in 2001 claimed copyright to ‘his’ 26-pose sequence and two breathing exercises – much to the fury of the wider yoga community, for whom claiming ownership of ancient asanas was tantamount to taking out intellectual property rights to verses of the Bible. This year, he says he has signed contracts with fitness corporations WorkOutWorld and California Fitness to franchise Bikram Yoga across the Far East, Japan and Asia. He expects to have 5,000 affiliated studios by 2008 and is in negotiations with another multinational wanting to buy franchising for China. Many fear that yoga is being hijacked as just another fitness exercise and its more esoteric elements eroded.

Halima Malik, deputy editor of Yoga Magazine says: ‘If people want to look good and be fit, that’s fine, but it’s not yoga. The way yoga is being marketed, we’re getting further away from the essence of it, which is spiritual, philosophical and ethical; it’s not just about getting upside-down. But yoga is a great way of making money and everyone is cashing in on it.’

‘Look at me,’ Choudhury says, leaning back, with twinkling eyes. ‘I have a lot of money now. We are doing yoga right now, you and me, we are exchanging our philosophy of life.’

Sheer cheek, energy and absence of self-doubt are the key to Choudhury’s charisma and it is hard not to like him. He exudes happiness and is certainly enjoying himself. In fact, he likes to big it up: ‘There’s nothing like this in the world! Give me a pen or T-shirt and put “Bikram Yoga” on it and it will sell for $45.’ He has developed a Bikram brand line in yoga clothing, jewellery, videos and even CD recordings of Choudhury singing songs he has written himself with lines like: ‘I believe in God: it is me/I believe in yoga: it is the key’ in Hindified English; accompanied by whining stringed instruments.

[...]

Choudhury has worked hard to get to sit on Howard Hughes’s loo seat. His life story is a rags-to-riches drive for self-determination, reinvention and money. He was born in 1947 in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states. He was a weightlifting champion in Calcutta at the age of 13, and when a knee injury halted this career Choudhury turned to yoga for a cure. ‘By then, I looked like a baby gorilla: each leg was 26 inches wide and it took me eight months practising 20 hours a day to get my body down to size so that I could do the yoga.’

After becoming yoga champion of India at the age of 23, Choudhury decided to try his luck in America. He set up his first yoga studio in Los Angeles in 1973 and when actors began coming to his classes, he was dubbed ‘guru to the stars’. Now there may be as many as 315 people in any one of his yoga classes, each paying £12 per session.

‘Yes, 315 people!’ he says delightedly, ‘See how they love my yoga? It’s fantastic! This is getting so big: yoga is an industry now, it is a business.’ For Choudhury perhaps, there can be no higher accolade. But what about yoga as the ancient Sanskrit defines it: a bridge between body, mind and spirit?

Cramming as many students as possible into a class may be economic – but is it yoga? Bikram’s sequence of 26 ‘hot’ yoga poses and two breathing exercises – practised in a raging 105-degree temperature to mimic conditions in India – loosens up the muscles, sweat out toxins and effect weight loss. The exercise makes bodies very sleek, very fast. Michele Pernetta who runs three Bikram Yoga studios in London says: ‘Bikram has tailored yoga to the Western market and stripped away the dogma: the bells, incense, props, mantras and hippy beads.’

Bikram yoga is turbo-charged, egocentric and extreme. It is confrontational and without mercy. Some say it is a mirror image of its creator’s personality. When I question Choudhury about this, he leans across his huge desk towards me and raises an index finger. ‘Your mind is your number one enemy. When you come to my class I guarantee you, for 90 minutes you will forget who you are, what is your name, whether you are man or woman, what you are doing here; for the first time since you were born your mind will be totally free, meditated from the rest of the world: I take you to another galaxy.’ He has written a script, which teachers of Bikram yoga have to learn verbatim, so that the words used by them during a class are his alone. Choudhury’s voice is supposed to bypass individual thinking and liberate the mind, but some resent the control he exerts. ‘He’s a dictator,’ says one Bikram-trained teacher who asks not to be named. ‘He works his employees to death and it’s all about him getting really, really rich. To him it is strictly business and he demands total subservience.’ [...]

While practitioners quibble about the best way to practise yoga, huge numbers of people are joining the Bikram boom. As his fitness empire grows, Bikram needs more teachers and the training course, which originally took four years, is now stripped down to just nine weeks. Tony Sanchez, an ex-student who broke from Bikram to set up his own school of yoga, believes that this is too short a time for a teacher to be responsible for their students. ‘The teachers are not experienced and do not know enough to be able to modify the poses to individual needs.’ [...]

When I joined prospective teachers at Bikram’s West Hollywood studio last week, they were beginning their sixth week of training. Most are women aged between 20 and 35, though there are some men and a smattering of over-forties in the crowd. The totty factor is scorching: lithe young bodies braced in revealing sports bras and pants of Choudhury’s own design: baby pink, blue, orange, red and definitely no green. (He says green is an unlucky colour and bans it from all his studios.) [...]

This is not a place for the sensitive. The poses have picturesque names like Locust, Rabbit, Eagle, Camel, but now the sight of normally hidden body parts exposed at awkward angles is testing. Sweat dribbles from body crevices fully opened and straining. The sound of Choudhury gulping down water echoes from the headset around the room’s microphone system. ‘Push!’ he shouts, ‘beyond your flexibility. More!’ Someone’s sweat sprays my bare arm.

Tendons extend easily in this heat and sweat drips off elbows and raised heels, pours down knees and backs. Choudhury appears to be oblivious of any discomfort among his students and now goes into diatribe about how he felt watching his wife Rajashree eating ‘for two’ when she was pregnant. (They have two children, a daughter aged 16 and son aged 13.) ‘I got so disgusted to look at the way she ate, Jesus Christ, she put on 10 pounds and I took off 10 pounds.’

His general message is that people eat too much and ‘yoga is food. Yoga is the fuel in the tank’. But it is hard not to notice that one teacher’s body is emaciated, her hip-bones poking out like sticks. Clearly, this anti-food message could be taken too seriously by some.

But Choudhury has moved on. ‘Bikram yoga is good for marathon sex!’ he shouts. ‘Once you do Bikram yoga you can’t get it down for 72 hours!’ Some manage to chortle, in spite of their contortions. ‘The biggest problem in the Western world is divorce! Wind Removing Pose!’ In response to this order, everyone lies on their backs with knees bent and pulled up into armpits. ‘Why buy the cow if you don’t get the milk? If a woman cannot do this posture don’t think about getting married … NO GAPS! If there is gap, instead of nice sex the man will be playing ping-pong under the bed, the husband loses his balls … ‘ Some giggle, others frown in the effort of trying to work out what cows, ping-pong and gaps have to do with sexual congress. This monologue goes on, interjected with a little singing in Hindi (‘My grandmother used to sing me this song’) and more sounds of gurgling water as Choudhury slakes his thirst.

Below, his students are closing their gaps, gasping, groaning, some turning puce, eyes bulging, wet hair clinging to scalps. At last, he allows a short break – ‘OK, I let you drink some water now, I’m being nice to you today’ – and each student gratefully grabs for his or her litre bottle.

[...]But not everyone enjoys the Bikram yoga rush. I hear one student mutter on his mobile phone: ‘He was bullshitting … .’ And according to Kundalini teacher Howard Davis, practising yoga at such high temperatures can lead to hyper-extension or dehydration. ‘The other danger of working in such high temperatures is that people may want to drink too much before and after the class, and drinking too much water can cause kidney failure. In fact, you shouldn’t drink any water while doing yoga, because it interferes with energy flow.’ [...]

Choudhury is indomitable: ‘If someone comes to my class for the first time, I say: “Welcome to Bikram’s torture chamber to kill yourself for the next 90 minutes”.’ [...]

Hat tip to Bruce for pointing me toward this article.

Other topics: Religion: see the spread of some of the major faiths on a map. The runtime is about 90 seconds. Hat tip to Friendly Atheist.

Randi Rhodes The liberal talk show host was assaulted while walking her dog in the park. Details are not available, but I sure hope that she gets well soon! personally, I’d have to caution against seeing this as some sort of a “hate” or retaliation type crime; unfortunately there are people out there who will beat you up just for the fun of it, and my guess is that these sort of criminals vastly outnumber the number violence prone wingnuts.

Besides, though she is well known by talk show host standards, I’d say that the vast majority of people have never heard of her. I only found out about here when I was looking for something to replace the “radiopower” show that I used to listen to (which got moved off of itunes).

Update In Peoria, we have a local wingnut, er, conservative blogger, named Vonster who hosts a typical wingnut, er, conservative blog. But alas, in yet another example that seemingly hopeless people CAN be good for something, he alerts us to the fact that the “Randi Rhodes was mugged” story was indeed at least a partial hoax: something did happen to her but it wasn’t a mugging nor was she a victim of a crime, according to the police:

Air America radio host Randi Rhodes is temporarily off the air, but claims she was brutally attacked near her Manhattan apartment are bogus, her lawyer and a police source said today. [...]

A police source said Rhodes never filed a report and never claimed to be the victim of a mugging. Cops from Manhattan’s 17th Precinct called her attorney, who told them Rhodes was not a victim of a crime, the source said.

Rhodes’ lawyer told the Daily News she was injured in a fall while walking her dog. He said she’s not sure what happened, and only knows that she fell down and is in a lot of pain. The lawyer said Rhodes expects to be back on the air Thursday. He stressed there is no indication she was targeted or that she was the victim of a “hate crime.”

Yep, this could well happen. I once took my klutzy wife to the emergency room because she tripped on some cement stairs; she had gone to a neighbor’s house to go walking early in the morning. And yes, I was immediately viewed as a suspected wife-beater. (grumble…)

So, though it kills me to say this: “Good job, Vonster! Thank you!”.

Humor (not work safe; this joke is of sexual nature). Leave it to the Skip Jenkins Show. I know crude, non-pc, etc. Nevertheless, I blew coffee all over my keyboard.