A while back, there was a discussion here about Bikram yoga -- that's the thing where they heat the room up to some ungodly temperature and everybody starts dripping sweat.
Yesterday, there was an article about Bikram Choudhury, the founder of the method named after himself, in my newspaper. I thought this was pretty funny:
... he has sworn by the discipline as a means of healing injuries and achieving serenity -- even while ducking the brickbats of critics who charge that his overheated yoga does more harm than good.
"People talked bad about Jesus, too," Choudhury snapped.
Um ... isn't yoga supposed to make you
calm? As in not being inclined to snap at people?
And aren't all the Eastern practices supposed to help tame runaway egos?
Here's the article. It's sort of interesting:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...15/WB65835.DTL
By the way, I have to take back what I had said earlier about how only young uns were taking this up. Last time I passed my local Bikram studio, they had taken the curtains on the plate glass windows down again (is this some sort of marketing ploy? inspire passers-by to join by letting them watch the people inside the glass box sweat and grimace?) and this time, there were some geezers in there, along with the usual 20-somethings. ("Geezer," the way I define it, is a precise term meaning anyone older than myself.
) And that made me actually start thinking about it ... well, for about five seconds ... even though Bikram himself seems like he might be kind of a big nut.