Yoga Heats Up
By GINNY MERRIAM of the Missoulian

		Bikram discipline West's hot new thing Upstairs at 211 N. Higgins Ave. in Missoula, it's 105 degrees and dripping humid. Open the door from Missoula winter chill, and you enter the tropics. To the novice, it's at first a smothering surprise. To the serious student, it's a warm homecoming to the work of strengthening body and mind. Twenty-three students in skimpy clothes go about rolling their mats out on the carpeted floor, quietly preparing for their 90-minute class at Bikram's Yoga College of India/Missoula. Among them walks Meg Lattanzio, the tall and clear-eyed instructor and owner of the studio, greeting people by name. Lattanzio is 28. The crown of her head seems attached by invisible string to somewhere above, her posture is so straight.
Bikram yoga instructor Meg Lattanzio helps Tandy Gustin with the triangle pose during a class last week in Missoula. Bikram yoga, a set of 26 postures and two breathing exercises done in 100-plus degree heat, is a way of strengthening and stretching the body while sweating out toxins. Photo by TOM BAUER/Missoulian

She is serious - very - about her own Bikram yoga practice and about leading others in it, but she is not without humor.

"Yoga is not something we do," she says. "Yoga is something we try."

In Bikram, students are trying two breathing exercises and 26 postures set by Bikram Choudhury. They're practiced in the same order, for the same lengths of time, in every class.

Bikram brought his method of "hot yoga" to the United States from Calcutta, India, and it is sweeping the West. There are Bikram schools and studios all over the world - Paris, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, five schools in London. Bikram himself has settled in Beverly Hills, Calif., where his teaching has made him well-known and materially wealthy, which has made him controversial.

In Missoula, yoga teacher Celeste River was among the first to teach Bikram's method 20-some years ago. But it flamed into popularity last year under the teaching of Pam Gibbon, David Johnson and Stacey Simmons and has taken off since Lattanzio opened Bikram's Yoga College of India/Missoula in June. It's now Missoula yoga's biggest new thing.

Since June, 500 to 600 students have taken Bikram classes in the fourth-floor studio. A core of 25 to 30 students practice at least three times a week, Lattanzio said. She and two other teachers cover a 13-class week, and she plans to expand to 19 classes.

"I don't ever want to turn anybody away," she said.

The first couple of months were tight for the business, she said, but since then it's been healthily afloat.

"The studio has taken care of itself," she said. "And of me."

Bikram (pronounced BEEK-rum) began studying with his mentor, Bishnu Ghosh, in Calcutta when he was 5, he says. He won several national yoga competitions in India as a child. When he was 20, his knee was crushed in an accident. Doctors said he would never walk. But, working under Bishnu Ghosh, Bikram recovered in six months. Bikram's mentor told him to go out and teach yoga to western people.

Bikram designed his 26 postures, he says, to fit together almost scientifically to work and stretch and strengthen all the systems of the body. They are basic postures described in yoga more than 2,000 years ago, each held for 1 minute or 30 seconds.

"The spine is the greatest nerve center in the body," Bikram writes, "and yoga starts with correcting any imbalances in this important part of the body."

A healthy nervous system creates a healthy immune system and eventually "radiant health" overall, Bikram says.

Missoula's Bikram studio aims for a temperature of 102 to 105 degrees and 40 percent humidity with radiant heat panels in the ceiling, Lattanzio said. Bikram says the ideal is 110 degrees and 60 percent humidity, hard to achieve in Montana.

After a class, students' clothing is soaked, and their hair is wet, even dripping. That heat, Bikram says, has helped perspire out toxins. The perspiration has also cooled the body during the session. And the heat has relaxed the muscles, tendons and ligaments to allow maximum stretch.

"Bikram's metaphor is the blacksmith," Lattanzio said. "You're molding the body."

The whole package creates discipline, she said: staying in the hot room, working on the same postures each time, concentrating mentally and physically.

"It's the mind, the body and the breath," Lattanzio said.

It's ideal to practice Bikram's yoga every day, she said, but, "Three times a week is awesome."

"Yoga is a humbling experience," she said. "Yoga is not about instant gratification."

Students who come to Bikram's include athletes who want to improve their performance, people who want to overcome injuries, people who have a lot of stress in their lives, Lattanzio said. Men seem drawn to it. Middle-aged people often say they are there because they are worried about their aches and pains and their basic abilities to bend down, to touch their toes.

Others come because the sports they've done for years are coming up short as they age. Many want a mental benefit to their physical routines.

"Running, aerobics, basketball are really fun," Lattanzio said.

"But there's impact on the joints. Yoga is lengthening, strengthening, stretching. When you open, lengthen and stretch, there's a mental component. You're opening yourself up to self-criticism and learning to quiet the mind."

The benefits are holistic, she said.

"It's about sleeping better, paying attention to your body, looking at your life," she said. "Once you can build on that practice, you can look at the things in your life, your choices.

"How your yoga practice plays out is it seeps into your life. It isn't just an hour of exercise."

Esther Chessin Ball, a 38-year-old Missoula resident who owns Bernice's Bakery, started doing Iyengar yoga about a year ago. She added Bikram yoga and now does Bikram six days a week. It has helped her control asthma and made her stronger and more flexible, she said. And she likes to sweat.

"It's very cleansing," she said. "And it's intense."

It has also helped her control her work life. Letting go of a little responsibility to go to yoga class has shown her that she doesn't need to be there as much as she thought.

"It's 'flexible' in all ways," she said. "When you become more flexible, you're more flexible in your life. It's all related."

Lattanzio, who's originally from Boston, was playing soccer, running and going to a gym just three and a half years ago, when a friend invited her to go to a Bikram class taught by Vicki Learned in a rented room at Missoula Children's Theater.

"I said, 'No, I don't do yoga,' " she said. " 'It's too oovy-groovy. They chant.' "

But she went, and she loved the challenge. Soon she realized the back pain she had had since a skiing accident in high school was gone. Last fall, she went to Bikram's training in Los Angeles, a nine-week grueling program with at least four hours of class a day and a tuition of $5,000, before lodging. Bikram keeps the room temperature at 115 degrees, and he's very blunt, she said.

"It is intense," Lattanzio said. "He calls it Bikram's torture chamber for teacher trainers. Or Bikram's boot camp."

Tandy Gustin, a registered nurse who works as clinical educator in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Patrick Hospital, is leaving this weekend for nine weeks of training with Bikram in Beverly Hills to become a certified teacher like Lattanzio. She's taking a leave from her job and not worrying about the nearly $10,000 of expense all told.

A longtime marathon and ultra-marathon runner, she took up Bikram yoga a year ago October. It hasn't come easily to her, and it took her a year to get a handle on some of the postures.

"It's just been transforming," she said.

It has also calmed her and made her feel taller.

"I have a thousand things going in my mind at once," she said.

"This forces me to be present with myself."

"It's such an open form of exercise, rather than running, which is compressing," she said.

Bikram's method can have something in it for everybody and does not require fitness, Lattanzio said. But it's not the form every student settles on, she and Chessin both said.

"I think that this yoga is really special," Chessin said, "but I think to each his own. Yoga is awesome. All yoga."

Students also should not feel they have to give up sports or other exercise - or other yogas - just because they start Bikram, Lattanzio said.

"I just want people to do yoga," she said. "Bikram, Ashtanga. We don't want war of the yogas. I don't care what yoga you do. Just do yoga."

Bikram's Yoga College of India/Missoula can be reached at 541-9292.

Reporter Ginny Merriam can be reached at 523-5251 or by e-mail

at gmerriam@missoulian.com