it’s really important for you to find out as much as you can about Bikram yoga, the training, and the financial/time commitments as you can. Everyone’s experience will be different. I went to Bikram training back in 2000. It was a very challenging experience and it showed me discipline and commitment. My teacher at home taught me how to think on my feet, how to make corrections and work with injuries. I learned through experience and years of teaching (10,000 hours of it) how to specialize in working with injuries and refine my techniques. I am still learning.
And as Jane said perfectly…But more to my point, you will be learning different things from different places—some of the ‘places’ may be your own experience DOING the practice. I think another good place is at the Hot Yoga Doctor.
You will invest a large sum of money in Bikram training, that is a fact. If I may, I recommend that you find out all you can about the Bikram franchising business. There is a huge amount of contention about the money grab “franchising” going on right now. Just do a simple Google search. It may affect your decision re. opening a “Bikram Yoga College of India”. There is a real change of focus/direction in the Bikram world and I am saddened to see that this may fracture the community irreparably. There has always been, in my opinion, a lack of support for teachers and studios from Headquarters and this just seems to reinforce that opinion.
Once you start reading what is going on, I encourage you to stay focused on the positive. You have said you want to…have my own healing school with Bikram Yoga. In this world of ours, you are allowed to teach any sequence of poses that you’d like. If you call yourself Bikram Yoga and want to be affiliated with Bikram Yoga then you need to be a part of the Bikram franchise. His name and his marketing materials are copyrighted. You can also complete another teacher training and still open that healing school of yours.
If I can share a story with you, when I started Bikram yoga 12ish years ago I LOVED it. It changed my life. I had never done anything like it. The studio started announcing that Bikram was coming to town. Bikram is coming to town, what’s a Bikram? A man, I had no idea. I didn’t even know there was a man behind it, other than my teacher Jim from New Jersey. Then I started to think about all of the wonderful things that had happened once I started this yoga. I wanted to meet the man who saved my life, who changed MY life. I was so excited. This was big. Then it wasn’t. I went to the seminar and I was greatly disappointed. It wasn’t one of Bikram’s finer seminars. I went home very dejected, Bikram, the man who “saved” me was just a man with faults and gifts just like the rest of us.
I didn’t know how I could go back into class again. Then it occurred to me it was a real blessing that Bikram, the man, didn’t turn out to be someone I really connected with. It was ME who saved and changed my life, by pushing open the door to that stinky studio day after day after day. Why I tell you this is because it will be YOU, who goes in to work each day inspiring people, taking people through a series of poses, be it Bikram’s sequence or another sequence and those people will take it upon themselves to change and affect their own lives. It is a truly wonderful “job”.
