Bikram

When you hear of the benefits of bikram yoga, you will undoubtedly understand why so many are flocking to the classes held by Bikram Choudhury, inventor and foremost authority on the practices of all things bikram. Already active as a teen in the practice of yoga, Mr. Bikram soon managed to leave the relative poverty of Calcutta behind and opened his own schools teaching yoga in India as well as Japan. His big break came in the 1970s when he situated a school in buzzing Hollywood, California, and quickly became familiar with the American model of franchising. Instead of painstakingly opening one school here or there and then filling the teaching position with a pupil who has been learning at his feet for decades, he instituted the fast food approach to training a new generation of yogis, and within nine weeks a committed individual will find that he or she is a certified bikram yogi ready to explain the bikram yoga poses, the benefits and effects of bikram yoga, open one of the many bikram yoga locations, hold bikram yoga classes, and of course sell lots of bikram yoga accessories.

This mode of doing business has earned Mr. Bikram a lot of criticism. Practitioners of Iyengar yoga and other disciplines scoff at the notion that a yogi is ready for teaching others within just nine short weeks – especially considering that their own instructors often require five to ten years to even be permitted to train others in the deeper and more advanced forms of the exercises.

Not deterrent to adherents of bikram yoga - hot yoga in south Florida and Hollywood are hot commodities - bikram yoga and Las Vegas appear to be synonymous to the spa hoppers, and bikram yoga clothes are all the rage. While it may appear to have gotten somewhat lost in the shuffle, the actual practice of the bikram yoga postures are 26 bikram yoga positions which are based on the hatha yoga approach. While the yoga establishment was willing to forgive Mr. Bikram his rather unconventional approach to doing business because of the benefit bikram yoga may have for those who engage in the exercises, the fact that he sought to copyright as well as trademark the age old practices that he based his postures on has caused a furor in the usually tranquil world of yoga, and wagging tongues have insisted that a new posture has been added to the 26 positions – namely, the money pose.