Obsession? Pain?

In a bid to understand why people love hot yoga, I picked up Benjamin Lorr's new book, "Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga." In the book, Lorr falls in love with Bikram Yoga because it helps him lose a bunch of weight and get into crazy good shape. So he quits his job and commits to spending nine weeks in a shabby  hotel so that he can train to be a Bikram teacher, spending $11,000 for the privilege. His journey is a definite must-read for yoga geeks like me, because he makes some excellent points about what it means to practice yoga. Watch Lorr talk about his journey here.

For one, he mentions that "to define yoga is to limit yoga." The physical extremes that he and his fellow yogis strive for actually look nothing like the yoga that most people experience in class; but knowing that the body can achieve such extremes does illustrate yoga's unlimited reach.

For me, I can't help but think about Brahmacharya. That's the yama, or yogic restraint, of nonexcess. To practice yoga to a point where an arm and shoulder become completely paralyzed, as in Lorr's case, is to ignore the concept of moderation that is so important for wellness. As Deborah Adele says in her excellent book "The Yamas & Niyamas,"

In yogic thought, there is a moment in time when we reach the perfect limit of what we are engaged in. It is this moment of "just enough" that we need to recognize.

Basically, Brahmacharya just reinforces the common sense approach of "moderation in all things." Maybe heating a room to 110+ degrees and backbending until you lose control of a limb isn't the best idea, but it's important to test your limits once in awhile in order to feel truly alive.