Hi everyone. Michelle Vennard here, owner of Bikram Yoga San Jose, with Matt and Sarah Newman, and we’re sitting on the couch having coffee and chit-chatting about what we love, which is all things Bikram Yoga. We’re having this great conversation about Bikram idioms, which are said in the dialogue, like, “Mamma give me money” or, “From the side, you look like a Japanese ham sandwich.” But a lot of other ones that maybe you don’t necessarily hear in the yoga room, but we hear Bikram say, and we might say them in class, and you could probably say, “That’s silly,” or brush it off, but actually they have a lot of meaning and a lot of depth. And one idiom we want to talk about right now is, Matt, you say it.
Matt: Would you rather suffer for 90 years or 90 minutes?
Michele and Sarah: 90 minutes!
Matt: There are many reasons why it’s profound, but you are developing the muscle of dealing with what is in front of you right now, not putting it off until later, and starting to be okay with discomfort. There is no path to success in our lives. There’s no magical path that you could come up with. If I knew everything about my life in advance, I could somehow navigate through my life, avoiding any discomfort, tension, or awkwardness. That’s just a ridiculously fantastic dream.
Michele: If that’s the case, guys, you’re not growing.
Matt: Yeah, exactly, you’re living in a bubble. So, life is uneven territory. When you go for a hike, it’s not a flat, smooth surface; it’s uneven. So, developing the muscle to deal with things as they arise and be okay with it. It’s like, no big deal. It’s just fluctuating.
Michele: When we say it in class, it pops the pressure bubble. It’s there to remind you that it’s worth the struggle. It’s worth suffering in class to do this yoga for 90 minutes. In ten years, I don’t want to have a hunched spine. I don’t want a sore knee. I’m keeping myself very healthy, and my systems are working right, so I’ll have that sense of vitality for a long time. I’d rather work hard in class than have to pay for it later when I’m going to doctor’s appointments, cutting into the quality of my life. No, no, no. Right?
Sarah: Bikram’s teacher, Bishnu Charan Ghosh’s guru, used to talk about stress being the source of all problems. This is a strong statement, so don’t take it personally: It is said that stress makes you fat, stupid, and sick. So, do you want to be fat, stupid, and sick for 90 years or a bit hot for 90 minutes?
Matt: Well, I want to be hot for the rest of my life, if you put it like that! 😂
Michele: Let’s be honest here, everybody. That’s what these sayings are about, right? And that’s the thing about Bikram Yoga, too. It doesn’t candy-coat things; it’s straight up.
Do nothing, you get nothing
Matt: At the physical ailment level, there are a lot of things that simply don’t get better if you do nothing, like lower back pain. There are civilizations from two or three thousand years ago where we have evidence because they kept medical records, and lower back pain was almost unheard of. It was a very rare condition, but now, 80% of the modern population will probably experience lower back pain at some point because of how we live our lives.
Lower back pain doesn’t get better because you stay at home, and it certainly doesn’t get better if you take painkillers. It gets better when you move in healthy ways and learn how to use your body. So you come into the yoga room, and your back hurts like hell. It’s like, “Oh my god.” Why do I want to do this? I should stay at home and pop some pills. But bit by bit, your spine gets stronger, your body gets healthier, your carriage, your posture gets better, and then suddenly, after a while, it’s no big deal. That’s the real journey, just that willingness to deal with it today rather than putting it off until tomorrow.
Michele: Exactly, that is a big thing about this. The other aspect that you learn a lot in Bikram Yoga is that sometimes I feel like our threshold for pain is so tiny, and you know what, guys? Bikram will tell you that pain kills the pain.
The late Emmy Cleaves would say, “In class, even your threshold for pain increases. Sixty minutes into class is different than your first five minutes. You’re able to tolerate a little bit more.” And I know from my own health right now that I can tolerate a bit more of the discomfort in certain situations, and it allows me to heal. I know I’m moving through something, and I often think we jump the gun, right? If we feel a little bit of pain, it must be bad.
Sarah: “Your back is going to hurt, don’t be scared.”
Discerning pain from discomfort
Matt: I think part of it is that we have a very poor understanding of pain. Pain is when somebody stabs a knife in my thigh, that’s going to hurt, that’s going to hurt a lot, right? Or somebody takes a hammer to my knee, that’s going to hurt a lot. But if somebody pinches me, or I’m sitting on a bit of a stone, these are discomforts. We start to reimagine that discomforts are in the same realm as pain.
Michele: We put them right in the pain bucket, don’t we?
Matt: It doesn’t serve us well because it makes us run away from discomfort. Discomfort is just what you push through. You have to trust your body. If you’re doing something that’s damaging your body today, right now, in this moment, your body’s going to yell and scream at you and tell you to stop. But if you’re stiff, it’s just your body moaning.
Michele: And we do a lot of things in the room to help you with that, in terms of the heat and the humidity in the air, to help you tolerate discomfort. So, would you rather suffer for 90 minutes or 90 years? You know that, in part, it is to be able to take in the pain but also the mental discomfort. When you want to run or get out of a situation where you feel uncomfortable, mentally stay with it. How many of us will always have situations that are a little bit tough? You’re in a conflict, and you don’t want to run from them; you want to be able to face them. Be bolder and look at situations. How many of us will sometimes get into a situation – I don’t know you guys, but I see people freeze. They get in paralysis mode and then don’t deal with it. And before you know it, five years go by, and they’re still in the same situation, they’re stuck. That’s not healthy.
Matt: You see people that have back pain. And they become so tentative because they’re so scared, then six months, nine months, a year later, they’re still in pain because they’ve not challenged it. That’s trending towards 90 years of suffering versus just going in the room for 90 minutes, possibly coming in several times to deal with it, and working hard and working through the discomfort to rebuild the strength in the spine. It’s like when you wake up in the morning, and maybe you slept poorly, or perhaps it was really cold, you were dehydrated, you got drunk last night, whatever it was, but, you know, it’s a horrible bed that you don’t like, and you wake up, and you’re as stiff as hell. The point is that it’s painful to get out of bed. You don’t just go back to bed. You stretch it out. You have two minutes of discomfort, and then get on with the rest of your day.
Yoga rewards you with relief
Michele: The other side of the coin I want to add to this because I don’t want it to end on a depressive note, you guys – what’s miraculous about this yoga is that within a short time – it doesn’t matter how much you’ve been in pain, you take a couple of classes, you’re going to feel great, you’re going to feel so good. I don’t know about you guys, but I remember thinking, how come someone didn’t tell me about this sooner? You’re going to feel so good, and you’re going to want to come back. So know that, even after just a little bit of endurance of some of this struggle, this pain, you’re going to feel so good, and you’re going to be like, wow, I need to keep doing this.
Sarah: I’ve heard so many testimonials from people who had muscular back pain. I had a student whose life was changing because of it. It couldn’t be treated because there was nothing the doctors could get at. He did three classes, wow. And he could move fine again.
Michele: Isn’t that amazing? Can you imagine how free he must have felt, how liberated that he has a new lease on life? Bikram says, “If you don’t have a healthy body, all you’re thinking about is the pain in your body. You can’t think of anything else,” which is so true. If that’s going on for too long, you develop an investment in that pain, and all you’re doing is managing life. Oh, that’s horrible.
Matt: If you develop that mindset where you can suffer for 90 minutes, you can develop that mindset. One of the number one techniques that high-pressure salespeople use to succeed is to get you to buy something you don’t want to buy. And they do it by making you uncomfortable. They deliberately have scripts and techniques to lead you to a place where you will be so uncomfortable that you sign off to get it done. But you can develop an immunity to that, where you laugh and say to yourself, I’m used to the uncomfortable. I came here with a mission. I want the GTI; that’s what I want. Don’t talk me into this hunker over there. I want the GTI, and I know exactly how much I’m willing to pay for it, and that’s that. So, it’s a skill that transcends the physical. There are profound mental and life force aspects to this simple willingness to be uncomfortable.
Come more, do less
Michele: You remind me of when Bikram talks about our horsepower. But we don’t use it, right? We have that force in us, right? How about “come more, do less?” Sarah, do you want to expand on that?
Sarah: Yes, for example, maybe you’ve got an acute injury, and the doctors cleared you; you’re fine to move around, but then you think, oh, I’ll stay home a little bit longer. Or you have some chronic issue; anything that stops you from coming into the room is going to be too hard. It’s going to be too difficult. Come into the room and do what you can, even if it’s very little in the beginning; just come in and do what you can according to what you can do with the words that are being said. It doesn’t matter how much. You’ll see; there will be progress. For example, people come in with bad knees and can’t kneel down, so they start. Sometimes, within a week, they can do the whole posture or at least kneel happily. But that has to start somewhere. So you basically start from where you are.
Matt: There’s a really important point related to that, which is fundamental, and sometimes it’s very hard for us to communicate to students, which is your path to health when you’re injured like that is to never avoid 100% of the discomfort – that will never lead you to a healthy place, it simply won’t.
When you have an acute injury, it is appropriate to take a pause, but once you’re beyond the phase of acuteness, you have to work to recover. Recovery is a process that requires work and effort, making an appropriate amount of effort for where you are in your recovery. That’s the process to restore your strength and your vitality. And as much as you might wish it wasn’t so, that’s simply what is so, and that’s the process. So be comfortable with the fact that that’s so, then it’s not a big deal.
Embrace yourself the way yoga does
Michele: The yoga is going to embrace you. I say that because, even emotionally, it’s hard sometimes for people to look at themselves in the mirror for 90 minutes. I don’t know of any other exercise where we ask you to look in the mirror that long. And even if there’s something emotional going on, you need to connect with yourself in the mirror and do less. Bikram always says, “Yoga makes you be you.” And so with the mirrors, at first it’s like, God, I have to look at you for 90 minutes?
I’ve learned how to love myself in the yoga room. You become more familiar, and things start to shift and change and get in you. But that can be uncomfortable, too. But do a little bit. The yoga room is going to embrace you. Don’t think you have to endure it; embrace it. Come more and do less, right? So, would you rather suffer 90 years or 90 minutes? There’s a lot to it. Bikram is so smart when he says it; he’s getting you to the point where this relates to you.
Sarah: In the yogic context, all human beings, unless we’re enlightened – unless we know who we are, our self-realization – are effectively suffering. And we may not consider it that way. We may be having a nice time, but we’re effectively suffering. So there’s that aspect to it as well: if you come to Bikram Yoga San Jose, you start to know who you are, and the suffering begins to go away.
Michele: It does, it really does. Good one!