About Bikram
Yogiraj Bikram Choudhury is the founder of the worldwide Yoga College of India™. Born in Calcutta in 1946, Bikram began Yoga at the age of four with Bishnu Ghosh, brother of Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi, founder of the Self Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles). Bikram practiced Yoga four to six hours a day at Ghosh's College of Physical Education in Calcutta; and at the age of thirteen, he won the National India Yoga contest. He was undefeated for three years.
At seventeen, an injury to his knee during a weight-lifting accident brought the prediction from leading European doctors that he would never walk again. Not accepting their pronouncement, he had himself carried back to Bishnu Ghosh's school, for he knew that if anyone could help to heal his knee, it was his teacher. Six months later, his knee had totally recovered. Ghosh was a celebrated physical culturist and the first to scientifically document Yoga's ability to cure chronic physical ailments and heal the body.
Bikram was asked by Ghosh to start several Yoga schools in India. There Bikram came into his own. The schools were so successful that at Bishnu's request Bikram traveled to Japan and opened two more. He has since brought his curative methods of Yoga therapy around the world.
Bikram's 26 posture Beginning Yoga Series is now taught and practiced worldwide. It is the aim of our Westminster school to maintain the integrity, purity and passion for this original Yoga Series.
About Bikram Yoga
By Design
Nothing about Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class™ is haphazard. It is a twenty-six asana series designed to scientifically warm and stretch muscles, ligaments and tendons in the order in which they should be stretched. To hop into pose 15, for instance, without having prepared the necessary muscles, could have the same unhappy results as doing an over-hasty back flip.
So follow the exercises in order, exactly as Bikram directs, and you won’t go wrong. Bikram’s twenty-six exercises systematically move fresh, oxygenated blood to one hundred percent of your body, to each organ and fiber, restoring all systems to healthy working order, just as Nature intended. Proper weight, muscle tone, vibrant good health, and a sense of well-being will automatically follow.
Your Progress
How quickly you progress will depend entirely on you -- upon your natural ability to a small extent, but mostly
upon the honest time and effort you give to Yoga. It will have little to do with how “perfectly” you can do the poses. (Few of us ever do the poses “perfectly.”) Instead, it will have to do with how well you understand what you are trying to accomplish in each pose, how honestly you try to accomplish your goal, and how supple your muscles and joints have become in comparison to the point at which you began. In Yoga there is no standard of comparison except yourself. Perfect is the best you can do that day.
Bikram teaches you not only the ideal pose - how you will eventually be able to do it - but also the reality - telling you what problems you will have as you try to do the pose, what clues will help you make rapid progress, and where you might be tempted to “cheat,” thus depriving yourself of the benefit of doing the pose properly. Bikram explains to you, in his inimitable humorous and informative way, how his scientifically designed series of twenty-six poses will enhance mind and body, relax, strengthen, reshape, and heal all of you in 90 minutes.