It’s a Bikram post today!

So this weekend past has been pretty indulgent booze-wise, celebrating the Christening of my beautiful niece L, even yesterday I think that my molecular structure hadn’t altered from equal parts Hendricks Gin and Sauvignon Blanc. Throw in seriously dehydrating journeys to and from Birmingham, three late nights and the delusion that I would be fine in the hot room and what happens? Well, read on....

I lay down for my 10 minute snooze/acclimatisation before class and did a massive hypnic jerk awake just as the lights came on, nearly clouting the poor bloke next to me. The first step of the class is Pranayama Breathing. ‘Prana’ means breath and ‘yama’ means master, so you are becoming the master of your breath. When you breathe in the hot room, it’s almost always through the nose. During the exercise, you stand, your palms are interlocked under your chin, elbows together, heels and toes together with your quadriceps engaged, tummy sucked in hips forward and back straight with your weight in your heels. When you inhale, you do so deeply, lifting your elbows out and up to frame your face. When you exhale, you force every last drop of air out of your lungs dropping your head back and stretching your optic nerve to look (eventually) at the back wall whilst moving the elbows down into their original position. How well you do this, indicates how well the rest of the class is going to go, and what I have described is what happens in an ideal world.

However, in my world, I arranged myself into some semblance of Pranayama and wobbled and chuntered and wheezed my way through the first set, noting with horror that aside from the usual bikram funk, my sweat had a definite toxic tang of gin. With the hope that the second set might be a great improvement came the realisation that despite the three litres of water I drank during the day, and the healthy lunch, the weekends excesses were coming back to haunt me and there was nothing I could do except sweat it out.

The first three poses were slightly laboured but they didn’t make me want to do a fairly accurate representation of that bit in The Exorcist where Reagan’s head spins round and she voms everywhere. I thought this was an indicator that I could push myself a bit more so when I got to ‘standing separate leg head to knee’ otherwise known as Dandayaman-Bibhaktapada- Janushirasana, and was rewarded with one of those burps that deposits a little acidic present in your mouth.

From there on in, it only got worse. Every time I attempted a Bikram sit-up or Situpsana as it is commonly known, my head spun and I had to hold onto my yoga mat for dear life whilst inwardly chanting “Please don’t puke, please don’t puke”, my head pounded with a ferocious headache and my sweat, thick and syrupy with toxins, tickled and irritated as it trickled slowly down off me and formed a squidgy pool on my towel that made flatulent sounding protests every time I moved.

By the time we got to Savasana which translates to dead body pose – a state of total relaxation, I was convinced that my mat had taken flight with me on it and not in a ‘ooooh, I’m having an out of body experience’ way, it was more of a ‘why have we left terra firma to execute loop a loops? I’m about to barf and cry’ way.

Anyway, if you are thinking of starting to practice Bikram yoga, please don’t let this put you off – just don’t be a moron (like me) and expect to feel awesome after a weekend of late nights and booze. Hopefully you will learn from this epimyth. Even if I do not (wedding next weekend).

R x