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Preface
This book is somewhat of a personal ouroboros, which is perhaps fitting given
the yogic significance of coiled serpents. My first encounter with the practice that
I would later come to call “modern postural yoga” occurred at the age of nineteen
in the stuffy upstairs room of an unassuming office cum shopping complex in a
ritzy hamlet on the Jersey Shore. Vaguely intrigued by my mother’s stories of hav-
ing to wring the sweat out of her clothes after class, but having almost no real idea
of what “yoga” might entail, I followed her into Bikram Yoga Rumson.
I would subsequently learn that not all yoga classes were done in hundred-
degree heat or left you with the kind of blissful afterglow that only emerges
when one narrowly averts heat stroke. The studio I had unwittingly found myself
attending was operating under the symbolic auspices of a man named Bikram
Choudhury, who seemed to believe that suffering was something to be celebrated.
So I suffered. And I thrived. While there are many Bikram Yoga acolytes— indeed,
Bikram himself— out there with tales far more miraculous than mine, the prac-
tice fundamentally transformed my relationship with my body and in doing so
transformed my life.
Yet the deeper I delved into the first kind of exercise that I had been able to
sustain the more I wanted to view it as more than glorified exercise. Hoping to
dispel these anxieties, I enrolled in a Hindu Philosophy class during my second
year at Rutgers University, where I learned that yoga was actually about the
nirodhaḥ- ing of vṛttis rather than the doing of lunges. At the time, there was little
scholarship relating modern postural practice to yoga’s premodern origins and,
even if this had been otherwise, it seems unlikely that I would have known where
to look. Still, whatever cognitive dissonance I experienced did little to under-
mine my commitment to sweaty yoga classes. By the end of my junior year, I had
concluded that since the economic aspect of my practice was quickly becoming
unsustainable, I had better become a yoga teacher myself. That summer, I trav-
eled to Ft. Lauderdale to study with Jimmy Barkan, one of Choudhury’s oldest
students and now- estranged right- hand man. I did this largely because Barkan’s
training was half the price of Choudhury’s.