Six months ago Chicago didn’t have a single Bikram, or “hot yoga,” studio, where the temperature hovers around 105 degrees. Now there are three.
Choudhury, a former amateur weight lifting champ partial to gold jewelry and Rolls-Royces, developed a 26-posture sequence that’s performed in front of mirrors, a physical fitness approach that he claims can cure everything from heart disease to multiple sclerosis. He believes it to be the only “true” yoga, although the Bikram teachers I spoke with don’t adhere to this view and–at least verbally–support other schools of yoga. He says it’s designed to bring new blood and energy to each limb and organ using something called “the tourniquet effect,” and he’s dubbed it “the most exciting, hard-working, effective, amusing, and glamorous yoga class in the world.”
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One of those teachers is Liz Myers, who walked into her first Bikram class 22 years ago, while on vacation in Key West. “I came back to Chicago and there wasn’t any Bikram yoga here, so I studied different forms,” says Myers, who also teaches ashtanga and apprenticed for a year at Yoga Circle, the local Iyengar studio. She completed Choudhury’s teacher training six years ago and began teaching one class a week. “I started adding more classes, and soon I was teaching one class a day plus working full-time for a Fortune 500 company in Glenview,” she says. “I came to the point in my life where I loved yoga and hated doing the other thing, so I quit my full-time job.”
“A lot of people get disconnected from their bodies and don’t know when to stop, and they end up getting light-headed and dizzy,” says Gumuchio. “That’s a dangerous environment to pass out in. As a teacher we try to empower them to give everything they can while honoring and listening to their bodies at the same time.”
