Pros and Cons of Hot Yoga: Book Review of Jerome Armstrong's Calcutta Yoga
In December 2020, I finally buckled down to read Jerome Armstrong’s Calcutta Yoga. I was looking forward to this tome after having soaked up every Bikram documentary that I could get my hands on.
You may not know this about me but I started as a hot yoga practitioner. My first yoga class was hot yoga. I went on a backbending retreat led by Esak Garcia. I was in it. And I still practice the 26and2 today.
That being said, I have a complicated relationship with hot yoga. Because I primarily am known as a trauma-informed vinyasa and a yin yoga teacher, and I have had time to reflect upon how, if hot yoga can be trauma-informed. I have had questions about where it all started.
I will be sharing resources at the end of this blog that you can check out for yourself.
I came across Calcutta Yoga when I was seeking out yoga podcasts to listen to and at the time, I would listen to any tea about hot yoga. It was a fascinating episode with the author and I immediately bought an e-copy… That e-copy sat in my Kindle for a while but I finally buckled up to read it.
From my reading of the well researched although not without its flaws book, I embarked upon my one and only video essay.
You can watch the video and go to time stamps for particular sections.
Here is also a loose transcript of what I share in my video essay. I have also chosen to expand upon and update some sections here, which are mostly on the pros and cons of hot yoga.
My Personal Practice With Hot Yoga: It’s Complicated
You may not know this about me but my first yoga class was in high school when my friend offered me a free Bikram yoga class. During the mid-aughts, the craze for hot yoga was BIG. I remember when there was still carpet on the floor.
And I was obsessed with it. I loved how it made me feel. I admit that I was drawn to the intensity, and the euphoric yoga high that I always had after class. And even with all the dialogue, awkward cues, I still found for the first time meditation. A moving meditation.
I did the 30-day challenge, which was practicing a yoga class every day. At that time, that was a 90 minute practice in 40 degrees Celsius heat. One day during that challenge, I practiced THREE 90-minute classes back to back, because I would be gone for the weekend.
Even just a few years ago, when I went back to this practice, I went to Esak Garcia’s backbending retreat where we literally spent a week backbending. The technique? Extending our back to the wall, placing our hands on the wall, and walking our hands down the wall to the floor. I puked on the second day. And it’s actually pretty hard for me to puke.
My personal practice is one of conflict. Because although I was diligently practicing, it became harder for me to ignore the hot yoga environment and the type of student and the type of yoga practice that it cultivates.
Hot Yoga Is Not Trauma-Informed
Hot yoga, the way that Bikram teaches it and the way that his teachers teach is the school of tough love. The heat is aggressive and so are the teachers, depending on how much they’ve drank the Kool Aid.
This was not a container where people are inviting you to befriend your body but oftentimes, the cues are quite dangerous and also could be taken as bullying.
While things are changing, it is still common to come across Old School Bikram Teachers. And even among teachers that are changing the way they teach, there can be a bit of a cognitive dissonance between the militant cues and the more trauma-informed cues they bring in.
I have Bikram’s red book published in the 1970s filled with images of Hollywood celebrities like Quincy Jones practicing the poses. And in that book, he would call people fat and he would not have a problem with it.
Because of all this, I take a very careful approach to recommending hot yoga for folks. A lot of folks injure themselves or get scarred from their experience of what they think hot yoga is.
It is a shame because it is a medicine, and a legacy, however filtered, from a Bengali yoga master, Bishnu Ghosh, brother to Yogananda.
What Is Hot Yoga?
Hot yoga, also called the 26and2 sequence, is what Bikram brought to the West in the 1970s. He tried to trademark his sequence in the US in 2012 and failed. Bikram Yoga is a standardized sequence that he created from his learning with Bishnu Ghosh, a pioneer in therapeutic yoga.
There are differences to Bikram Yoga and the yoga that he learned from Bishnu Ghosh but first, here are some interesting things to know about Bikram. A brief biographical sketch, if you will, based on my reading of Calcutta Yoga.
Bikram trained with Bishnu Ghosh one-on-one yoga for 6 months before he went to Japan to teach and represent Ghosh’s Yoga College. He was not, at all, the first pick, and he only got it because he asked his friend, Bishnu’s son, to put in a good word for him when there were people against him going.
Bikram was a “second-rate bodybuilder and weightlifter.” A direct quote from Calcutta Yoga.
He was a great masseuse. Bishnu had a reputation for securing good job prospects for his students at his gymnasium, and Bikram was one of them that benefited from Bishnu’s connections. He became a masseuse to people including Bollywood stars. So, to me, I infer that Bikram has always had a charismatic personality and it makes sense why he had an affinity with Hollywood personas.
Similarities and Differences Between Bikram Yoga And Ghosh Yoga
Bikram learned from Ghosh and there are similarities in what was being taught.
This includes similar poses and the stillness in between poses (There is resting in between poses. Think of your mini savasana during the floor series).
However, Ghosh provided personalized yoga therapeutic prescriptions. He would offer people a few poses to work on for a period of time based on their ailments like constipation or asthma.
This was a major difference as Bikram himself calls his style of yoga, the “McDonald’s” of yoga, where it’s the same thing all the time. In his teacher training, the teachers are taught to memorize his dialogue, word for word.
Another difference is Bikram adding in mirrors in his studios. This was a part of the bodybuilding culture at the time, not a yogic influence.
Bikram also says there are 2 pranayama breathing exercises but the opening breathework is not yogic breathing but actually a warm-up that was used in bayam, an Indigenous exercise to India.
TW: Sexual Predator
Bikram is a sexual predator. He used his position of power to sexually assault female yoga teachers and he created this culture of silence where everyone turned a blind eye towards it, which goes to show how un-yoga-like Bikram is.
I do not want to negate anyone’s experiences but to me, if he once was a guru, he is not by these actions. He is a fitness instructor whose teaching style is bootcamp. If there is any healing or learning we get from him, I believe it is through what he has been able to channel from the environment of being in the Bishnu Ghosh College where there were not only excellent bodybuilders but Kriya Yogis.
He’s been run out of the US and he’s still doing teachings in South America. I hope he will atone for the harm that he has inflicted on people who trusted him with their practice.
Book Review: Jerome Armstrong’s Calcutta Yoga
A lot of the information that I just shared has been from the well researched Calcutta Yoga.
Calcutta Yoga is not so much a book about Bikram but about Bishnu Ghosh and Buddha Bose, two influential yoga families of the twentieth century. But if you want to know about Bikram’s origins, you want to know about Bishnu Ghosh and Buddha Bose.
I really cannot fault the sincere earnestness of Jerome Armstrong trying to find out the story of Buddha Bose, the so-called “forgotten yogi of the twentieth century and his life inside the yoga family of Calcutta.” And ultimately, I do think it’s worthwhile to read because you will learn a lot. That being said, I also have problems with it, which I’ll go into later.
Calcutta Yoga tells the story of Bishnu Gosh and Buddha Bose.
Bishnu Ghosh is the younger brother of Yogananda who teaches Kriya Yoga and wrote a little book you may heard about called Autobiography of a Yogi.
Buddha Bose is the son of an Indian magician and and an Englishwoman who became one of Bishnu’s greatest students and toured with him to Europe and the US in the 1930s.
While Yogananda was a promoter of traditional Hatha Yoga goals of meditation, Bishnu was utilizing yogic techniques for other purposes including therapy, as well as feats of strength.
Think circuses and touring. Bishnu would lecture about yoga and have some of his best students, like Buddha, perform traditional hatha yoga as a demonstration. This included purification techniques such as nauli kriya, where you are able to move your abdominal muscles in such a way where it’s circular motion, thus massaging your internal organs.
Major Criticisms of Calcutta Yoga: A White Man’s Pilgrimage Into Spiritual India
Armstrong has a keen desire to know more about the great yoga families but he can’t help but interject himself into the narrative, like I will find it fascinating, or that I will relate more because he is a white man being personal.
When I saw the tourist photo of him standing in what used to be Bishnu Ghosh’s original gymnasium, my instinctual thought was: I don’t need to see him IN the gymnasium in the standard tourist stance. I’d like to just see the gymnasium, if that’s all right.
And his desire to not politicize things is a politicization in and of itself. Armstrong wants so hard to push this agenda of east + west = good that he is neutral about the impact of British colonialism and post-colonialism.
This is a MAJOR failing and incredibly disrespectful to the yoga practice he claims to revere so much. Because the yoga we have inherited in the west is a product of colonial trauma and you cannot bypass that.
I would also challenge the assertion that Armstrong makes that Yogananda was not an activist or had no political beliefs.
I would have been interested to explore the career paths of Yogananda, Bishnu Ghosh and Buddha Bose and interrogate how their proximity to whiteness shaped their trajectories, and even their decisions to cater to white people. Why did they feel called to go on tours? Why did they feel they had to spread the message of India outside of India?
I would have loved this to be unpacked by looking at the colonial climate of the times.
Let’s Talk About Buddha Bose’s Parents
It was a missed opportunity to not talk further about Buddha as the product of a biracial coupling. Armstrong talks a lot about Buddha’s father issues, and how that may have spurred his vigorous devotion to Bishnu Gosh and to bodybuilding and hatha yoga.
But he never talked head-on about the racial perspective.
Buddha was born to an Indian magician named Raj and an Englishwoman who performed with him named Emily. After Emily’s father cast her out for being in an interracial relationship, the couple moved to India. When she later decided to move back to England and asked her father for money for the travel, he was STILL pissed at her and did not give her the money that she needed.
Meanwhile, Raj had an Indian wife at home and when they moved back to India, he had two households. His father wasn’t happy about the bigamy, and he was the one to give Emily the travel fare back to England.
And the reason why Emily decided to leave was because the straw that broke her back was discovering she and Raj’s other wife both had babies at the same time. Yup. This is just too much tea. Anyways. Emily took all the kids except for one, which ended up being Buddha, back to England.
One more tidbit of interest was that although Buddha despised Raj, Buddha’s half-brother that grew up in England looked up to Raj, glorifying him so much so that it was a bone of contention between the two brothers.
Challenging The Tragic Narrative of Buddha Bhose
Armstrong spends a fair amount of time to portray Buddha as an obscure figure, tragically lost in history’s annals, but I don’t see him as a tragic figure. I could see he lived a full life, and he had so many accomplishments.
Just because the west doesn’t know his name like a household name does not mean he is any less than. It’s not a shame. He’s not lost. He was always there.
I thought it was beautiful he had a personal experience with the Himalayas, and how he went every year there and knew enough that he created a film and would talk about the spots that he went to, sharing his spiritual experiences with folks who could not physically go and visit these sacred sites.
To that end, learning more about Japan and Thailand and Bishnu’s renewed campaign to bring yoga outside of India would have been so interesting to expand upon instead of leaving it to the very end, almost like an afterthought. Because it didn’t have an impact in the west, it’s like it’s not as big of a deal. But it is.
And so we come to the crux of the problem behind Armstrong’s western liberal bias.
He is blinded to this, and wants to paint this dramatically tragic portrait of Buddha that feels sensationalized. It’s too much “the sun has set on this country” vibe that feels incredibly neo-colonial.
Adding to this impression, he puts himself in this role of discoverer. He is bringing back hidden, lost treasure. And this treasure isn’t jewels or artifacts but knowledge of a lost figure.
Again, it’s very neo-colonial of him.
And as an aside, I was given the impression multiple times that he did not like chai and the only reason he drank it was because he was in India. He mentioned that explicitly several times in the book. Like ?? Also, I thought his opinion or general skepticism on arranged marriages was irrelevant. He didn’t understand them and he had a bit of bias against them, was my understanding.
Debunking Bikram’s Stories
I did enjoy the subtle digs at Bikram throughout the book. This is where Armstrong is strong because he debunks Bikram’s claims to fame. One surprising fact that I learned is the origin of many of his claims. While I have heard how Bikram is a product of his culture where he is a storyteller, here we see that his claims are lifted from his elders. Many of his fabricated stories are siphoned from real accomplishments of Bishnu Ghosh’s greatest students like Buddha Bose, Monotosh Roy, and Dr. Gouri Shankar Mukerji!!
Overall, I truly appreciate Jerome’s dedication in writing Calcutta Yoga. He did the work. The research is there. But the perspective and the lens in which he puts together that data? As someone who advocates for decolonizing yoga, I would caution you to stay critical if you plan to read the book.
So Should I Practice Hot Yoga? Is Hot Yoga Safe To Practice?
Now, as for the practice itself… I wanted to share what may be attractive as well as unattractive traits of practicing hot yoga.
As I mentioned earlier, I find it difficult to recommend hot yoga. This is because I don’t want to encourage folks to try out a studio, when I know that many studios are most likely operating under the same old system, unless explicitly stating otherwise. I don’t want folks to have an experience of hot yoga that, for them, becomes the blueprint. That forms their expectations of all other hot yoga classes.
Because hot yoga can be incredibly traumatic.
It is not uncommon for me to hear students say that they injured themselves in hot yoga. And, even as a teacher, I am aware of what is behind the curtain so there is that managing of expectations, I still find myself appalled and also disappointed at how yoga teachers and studio owners conduct themselves in class.
So, here are some cons and pros of hot yoga… take it as you will. These are just some things to start to deconstruct what you may have been told about the benefits of hot yoga.
Potential Cons Of Hot Yoga
It can be easy to injure yourself in a heated class. Heat warms up our muscles so we can stretch, but it can sometimes mean we overexert ourselves, stretching beyond our limit without realizing it.
Yoga is treated like a bootcamp. But yoga is not a fitness class. It may have cardiovascular benefits but the goal isn’t to be conventionally attractive. It is collective liberation. It is spiritual awakening. Therefore, this bootcamp style is, ultimately, not conducive to yogic philosophy. I am caveating this to say that you can be serious or solemn as a teacher and trauma-informed.
Appeals to the sado-masochist. Hot yoga is similar to fitness classes in that there is this expectation that the teacher will yell at the students. And that attracts a certain personality type. One of my hot yoga teachers who I trained with said this and it’s always stuck with me. She said this practice attracts someone who wants to punish themselves, who hates themselves, who wants to look in that mirror. I believe that and I relate to that. If you have a low esteem of yourself, punishment feels like cleansing. The austerity is needed in order to be purified… a twisting of tapas.
Because the class runs on dialogue, it is easy for students to get sloppy and check out. Many students don’t listen and it can be easy to plateau in learning the practice. At least in Ashtanga, there is not the constant dialogue that sounds sort of true but most of it could be updated. Vinyasa teachers are constantly updating their cues based on new understanding of anatomy in contrast to hot yoga teachers that do have a script they follow. I will say that there are teachers that are changing, and that there is a skill to teaching a set sequence.
If you believe hot yoga can help you lose weight, know that it is water weight you are mostly losing. Easy come, easy go. You can also start to crave salty things if you lose a lot of water weight, speaking from personal experience.
Potential Pros of Hot Yoga
If you like the heat, you will like the practice. I know that the heat is not for everyone but it helps to reset my constitution. I truly feel better after sweating everything out. All I can share is my personal experience. I also love to take hot baths and go to the sauna, so that’s just what my body enjoy for health.
It’s a great sequence for the spine. It’s not going to do much for your planks or chaturangas, but you will be working the spine, so if you are interested in a backbend practice, this is a class where you will be working on many poses that may seem hard but will become very natural. I have observed that vinyasa students can find Cobra pose challenging while hot yoga students are capable of these backbends on the belly due to the regular practice of Cobra, Locust, Bow pose etc.
A set sequence can also be helpful for students who like to know what poses that they are doing in every class. You really have the time to focus on expanding your understanding of a pose by spending more time on it, as opposed to a vinyasa class where one of the thrills is trying something new. If you do not check out, you can cultivate a state of mindfulness.
If you made it all the way down here, wow! Thank you. You are just as obsessed as I am and I love that for us.
Anyways, here are additional resources for you to look through.
GHOSH YOGA
⭐Calcutta Yoga by Jerome Armstrong:
-Readable, informative read about Ghosh Yoga but watch out for its western liberal bias.
⭐Ghosh Yoga blog: https://www.ghoshyoga.org/blogs
-Excellent online resource about Ghosh Yoga run by Scott Lamps and Ida Jo, head teachers of Ghosh Yoga. Ida works directly with Ghosh’s Yoga College in Kolkata, India. They’ve studied at the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Center, under Muktamala Mitra, granddaughter of Bishnu Ghosh, as well as Tony Sanchez.
⭐ Buddha Bose’s 84 Asanas and Holy Kailas: http://www.buddhabose.com/about-buddh...
-More information about the lost manuscript to Buddha Bose’s Key to the Kingdom of Health Through Yoga (1939) that spurred the writing of Calcutta Yoga.
⭐ Gheranda Samhita
-1 of the 3 class texts of hatha yoga, an influential text for Bishnu Ghosh.
⭐J.Brown Yoga Podcast: History of Hot Yoga with Jerome Armstrong: https://www.jbrownyoga.com/yoga-talks...
-Interview with the author of Calcutta Yoga.
BIKRAM ORIGINS
⭐ESPN 30 on 30 Podcast Bikram: https://30for30podcasts.com/bikram/
-On Bikram’s origins.
⭐Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr: https://www.benjaminlorr.net/book/hel...
-Explores hot yoga culture (Esak Garcia, hot yoga olympics, Bikram’s origins). This was quite a healing book for me, as I was initially grappling with my relationship with hot yoga.
⭐Netflix Doc Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator: https://www.netflix.com/ca/title/8022...
-Resource to listen to and hear from the survivors.
Written By: Irene Lo