Hot yoga is a system of yoga that places a physical demand on your body, which is a polite way of saying it will try to kill you in a room that's been preheated like a personal pizza oven. The focus in many of the postures is on contraction, tension, effort, sweating in places you didn't know had sweat glands. It is still true yoga, because the concentration remains on the breath and the present moment, even when the present moment is "I am dying, and also there's a person next to me who looks completely fine." It's different from Yin yoga, where the focus might be complete relaxation in a given posture, no pulling, no pushing, no extra stress, just letting the body melt like a popsicle left on a porch, hoping the relaxation itself releases the tension.
In hot yoga, we're hoping a total stress load on the nervous system, tension on the muscular system, causes the body to release like turning a dial, contraction first, then the reflex to let go, like the universe's worst, sweatiest stress ball. Some practices use both. Early in a session, moving through sun salutations, there's a lot of contraction, strength, balancing, twisting, extra stress, which demands more concentration on the breath so you don't accidentally clench your way into a knot shaped like regret. In the second half, seated postures, less muscular effort, more conscious relaxation, which sounds easy until you realize relaxing on command is its own special form of suffering.
Even in moments where total relaxation should be achievable, like dead body pose, the official form in the hot series has you touch your heels together and let your toes fall out, which somehow still requires tension up at the hips, because apparently even corpse pose has homework. Depending on your body, you might rotate the toes from the calves or ankles instead. Can you find relaxation in the feet, in the ankles, even inside a pose that's technically asking you to lie there and pretend to be dead while also actively engaging your hips? Yoga is full of these little jokes.
The most important thing in all yoga practice is the breath, followed by redirecting your thoughts, which is not the same as fighting them, no matter how much you'd like to body slam an intrusive thought to the floor. Redirecting just means we don't engage with a thought to the point of getting swept away by it. Let it walk in, show its face, maybe wave, and let it walk back out, gently pushed along, blown away, or slid off like it never had a reservation here. Sometimes that takes extra effort, changing the breath, getting absorbed in the difficulty of the posture, anything to yank yourself back to the present moment instead of mentally drafting a text to someone who wronged you in 2014.
In the present moment, old experiences can still live on as tiny flickering images, quietly influencing us, but we don't have to attach to any of them. If something sad surfaces, let out a tear, take a deep breath, take another. This too shall pass, even if "this" is currently your hamstrings filing a formal complaint. Our experience is our life. It's our treasure. But each day, that day's treasure has to get buried in the subconscious, like a squirrel hiding nuts it will absolutely never find again. Every day, a full reset. Let go of resentment, injury, failure, fear, and in the morning, confirm nothing carried over from yesterday. So how do we still know how to tie our shoes, how to turn on the coffee machine? Relax, that stuff comes back automatically. What's useful sticks around. It's only the resentment we're trying to evict.
We tell ourselves it's going, and then a little voice pipes up, "actually, I must hold onto this resentment to preserve the honor of the moment, I must hate the person who hurt me," and then, plot twist, you realize by that same logic you've hurt people too, so now you're spiraling into "I'm unworthy of forgiveness," which is a truly inefficient use of a Tuesday. Let those thoughts rise so you can actually look at them and recognize them as early stage thinking, hand me down narratives you mistook for gospel. Every resentment was designed to be forgiven. The first step is just being willing. And what helps you get willing is realizing resentment is active, not passive. It takes energy to stay angry. It takes energy to defend yourself against the anxiety quietly humming behind that anger, like a refrigerator you've learned to tune out.
When we see an older person, we owe them profound reverence, they've walked a long, difficult road, possibly without air conditioning. When we see young people, reverence too, they're the next generation, and also they will one day discover Bikram yoga and understand our suffering. We must be tolerant. We must teach well. We must be kind. We must be welcoming. Keep an open mind, even a child teaches the deepest philosophy without ever saying a word, usually by handing you a rock like it's the answer to everything.
Coming back to the mat each time is an act of self love and self preservation. It's self help disguised as fitness, like a Trojan horse, except instead of soldiers it's full of feelings. It's meditation. Concentration. Emotional release work. Connection to the body. Learning to move in harmony with a community of strangers all sweating in unison. Teaching ourselves to stay open to a teacher even when they say something slightly odd in a heavy accent. It's the moment to be present, the moment to change patterns, the moment to step into the observer self and cultivate the highest version of who we are, not for material gain, but for gratitude and compassion. These are not easy words to live by. Most people who teach them don't fully live them either, because the mind keeps pulling us away, we learn the lesson, we forget the lesson, we bury it deep in our own tissue like a tiny philosophical time capsule we'll dig up next class.
I am here to serve all living creatures. I am here to give praise to the divine. I am here to be present, for myself, and especially for my children.