If Yoga Gurus Bikram Choudhury and Sri K. Pattabhi Jois had a love child it’d be called Hot Power.
Bikram, Hot yogi of Bev Hills is a brash body-beautiful, celeb hob-nobber who peels off a signature teaching Speedo to preside over his World Yoga Championships in a fedora and P. Diddy pinstripes. He is Bengali, proud of his success, and quick to brag.
Yes, he collects Rolls Royces.
Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga Yoga recently deceased at age 93, was a lungi wearing, ritual performing Brahmin. He arrived in the city of Mysore by foot from his boyhood village to attend the Sanskrit college where he earned highest honors. For decades he taught Mysore residents and a handful of back packing hippies. After his teaching visit to NYC in 1993, New Yorkers turned the hippy trail into a stomping ground.
Via Hollywood, Bikram gave America a Yoga challenge of 26 poses in a mirrored room boosted to the temperature of a malarial mangrove.
From a dusty classroom in his modest Mysore home, Jois taught a flowing asana sequence coordinated with a husky breathing technique that stokes an internal fire.
When most global Yoga was called Hatha, Jois’s method was baptized Power.
25 years ago Bikram and Jois were relative unknowns though both taught their devoted students a healing and liberating method according to the principles of their own Gurus.
Today Bikram Yoga is in the news and courts with schools worldwide.
In addition to the global imprint of Jois’s Ashtanga Yoga, the improvisation inspired by it’s power flow is tantamount to how Yoga is practiced today.
These two Pundits never crossed paths at a Yoga Journal Conference, bumped smart phones, and pow-wowed the future of fitness. No matter.
Hot Power.
It’s here.
To stay.
And I suppose if Bikram and the cloying Lululemon had their own sticky bun-in-the-oven, it’d be a pair of teeny shorts requiring only slightly more lycra than fashion visionary Rudy Gernreich’s pubikini.
Walking into a Hot class of Power-clad uber-fitties, I’m confused, do I tip?
Hot Power.
Bikram’s Hot. Jois’s Power.
Is this mash-up Yoga?
Students could care less.
Enter class looking like Colin Farrell in Hollywood flop Alexander– debauched and paunchy.
Emerge 90 minutes later looking, well, like Colin Farrell – clean and ripped.
Except you’re a woman and your tiny shorts are wedged in a dehydrated notch between your pubis and the first pack of your 6.
There’s a likelihood that litigious Bikram and Lululemon could cross paths in a courtroom, though it hasn’t happened yet.
But Lululemon is on its way to court in a lawsuit accusing Calvin Klein of a patent infringement over a body-shaping waistband.
Lululemon yoga pants are known to lift a housewife’s buttocks to randy enhancements.
Lululemon’s also known to be (Ayn) Rand-y in their business pronouncements.
Ass-shaping pants with slimming waistbands?
In other words, Lululemon is acutely narcissistic and inspires the same in its devotees.
Lululemon, you’re getting awfully XXL for your britches.
Bee-itches!
Let Lululemon re-write Yoga history and they’ll convince you that before their design team intervened, we were naked in caves with our muddy bottoms dragging the swamplands.
That the goal of Yoga was not a path to know the essential self but a pant to clothe it.
Yoga clothes?
Honestly, Lululemon.
Clothes don’t do Yoga.
People do.
But Yoga Pants for real?
I mean pants that actually practice Yoga so that I can sleep in with my hottie trying for our own love child?
Now those would be some fierce britches.
(Bee-itches!)
