Yoga Knowledge
26 & 2 Bikram Yoga – Why the sequence is what it is, why the timing matters and why 90 minutes cannot be shortened without missing something essential. Every Posture in this Yoga operates with a common fundamental principle. Bikram called it the tourniquet effect.
When you hold a Posture still, really hold it with full effort, you are cutting off circulation to specific parts of your body, for 10-20 seconds. Blood pressure builds behind that constriction. The longer you hold the Posture, the higher the pressure builds. Think of Lake Mead against the Hoover Dam. Then when you come out of the Posture after those 10-20 seconds, it’s like opening the lock gates to the dam. Your blood, now at high pressure, floods back into those areas carrying fresh oxygen, glucose, minerals, vitamins, amino acids directly to the organs, glands, muscle groups and joints that were just constricted. Not flowing in the way blood normally moves through the body. Flooding in, high pressure, like a fireman’s hose or a syringe. That is what is happening every time you come out of a Posture and feel that wave move through your body. That is “natural human irrigation of the circulatory system, with the help of the respiratory system.”
What does this mean specifically?
In the Balancing Stick Pose, ten seconds (that is all it takes): You stretch your arms forward, your shoulder blades squeeze together, your chest opens. You are cutting off circulation to the coronary arteries as you’re stretching your heart muscle. “Blood fills the crown of veins around the heart, some of them so small, molecule size, that never receive enough blood under normal circumstances, and flushes high speed blood to your brain, activating, reactivating overused and underused brain cells.” In other words, hyperoxygenating your brain. When you come out of the Posture, high pressure blood flushes through your heart like a dam with the lock gates opening. Dilating blood vessels, making them more “elastic,” dissolving and clearing plaque and cholesterol. “You give yourself a heart attack for ten seconds so your heart will never betray you.” That is heart attack prevention built into a Posture most people think of as just a balancing exercise.
In the Half Tortoise Pose, the Posture most practitioners rush through or do lazily, your arms stretching forward, shoulders blades squeeze together, with your hips back on your heels, pushing your forehead into the floor. The lower heart muscle stretches, again temporarily cutting off circulation to the coronary arteries and flushing blood to your brain again, like the Balancing Stick Pose. The pineal gland, which produces the “relaxation” hormones serotonin and melatonin, is stimulated creating a biochemical “relaxation” response.” In twenty seconds you receive more benefits of relaxation than eight hours of sleep, biochemically. That is the mechanism Dr. Herbert Benson documented at Harvard Medical School in his research on “The Relaxation Response.”
These kinds of things are happening in every Posture. All 26 of them. Each one targets specific organs, glands, muscle groups and joints in a precise sequence that builds on everything that came before and prepares for everything that comes after.
The Postures are not exercises, they are tools. Each one is doing something specific to your body that nothing else does in exactly that way. And the Dialogue, every word of it, is the delivery mechanism for that tool. When you understand and follow what the Dialogue is actually saying at the level of Action, every instruction lands differently. Every Action makes sense in a way it never did before.
– Jim Kallett, Senior Teacher