My Initial Impressions on Bikram, The Man

In the last couple of weeks, Bikram has been full time with us, giving us daily lectures and leading most of the evening yoga classes. That has given me the opportunity to getting to know him a bit better and creating an initial opinion of him. He has now left for a couple of weeks and will come back in May to stay with us until the end of the training. As a result, now it is a perfect moment to do balance of my experience with him.

Overall, I must confess that I was completely overblown by meeting him in person. As my good friend Nikos would say, I had my expectations really high but Bikram was able to exceeded them by far. He is a very unique person both in the good and bad sides. I have never had so much fun in a lecture as in some of his lectures. Given his extremely big mouth and his wild eccentricity, you either love him or hate him. I personally find him very endearing and one of the most interesting and inspirational people I have ever met. If you have time, please download and watch the video that CBS’ 60 minutes did about Bikram.

Anyway, as a good consultant, I will organize my opinion about Bikram in 3 parts (with 3 bullets each : Things I love from him, things I find funny and things I don’t like that much.

Things I love from Bikram…
(1) His vital energy and joie de vivre. I have never met a person with highest energy and joy in live than Bikram. He sleeps only 2-3 hours per day. He thinks that the greatest enemy of humankind is the waste of time and he seems to enjoy every single minute of his existence.

(2) His focus and sense of purpose. His purpose in life is to spread the message of yoga in the world to make it a better place to live. He always has this in mind in everything that he does. And he has been very successful: he has introduced yoga to millions of people, trained thousands of instructors and his franchise has more than 2,000 studios around the world, the largest yoga organization in the world. Not bad, don’t you think?

(3) His ability to say and do whatever he wants without thinking what people will say. He doesn’t give a shit about what people think and does whatever he wants with his life if he thinks is the right thing to do.

Elmo’s Fire Dance (Gloomy Sunday)

We have already started putting nicknames within the group of friends I am making in the training. I have helped creating some good ones like Ronaldinha, Spice Girl or TinkerBell. I am not extremely excited about the originality of mine: Elmo, the popular puppet from Sesame Street (although he was not present in the Spanish Version).

They chose it for two reasons: (1) some of them have problems pronouncing my beautiful name (and this sounds similar) and (2) I love to eat chocolate cookies with milk (in Spain we don’t have Elmo so I can’t verify that).

Anyway, this Elmo thing reminded me a beautiful video a friend showed me long time ago. In Youtube, there is a video trend of making nasty things to Elmo puppets. This one is a bit different than the rest of videos. It has a weird but touching combination of sadness, beauty and craziness (please play it with the music on).

Given that today is gloomy Sunday, here is the video-present from me to you!

CPR Certified!!!

Today I attended a Basic CPR Training. CPR (CardioPulmonary Resucitation) is an emergency medical procedure for a victim of cardiac arrest. If you watch ER, House MD or similar, you know what I am talking about… compressing the chest like crazy to pump blood to the body even if the heart is not working.

The training took a bit more than 3 hours and they showed us different techniques to use in case of chocking, unconcious choking and cardiopulmonar arrest. They also told us what to do in a number of emergencies (seizures, strokes, etc). I surely don’t remember all of them… but I have a nice book.

The thing that shocked me the most is the fact that a CPR procedure breaks all the ribs of the victim (in order to pump the heart effectively). Even more, if the chest compression don’t break the ribs, you are doing something wrong (creepy details, they said that in the first couple of compression you can hear the ribs cracking, then everything goes smoothly:-)

Anyway, I AM CPR CERTIFIED so next time your heart stops, I will be there to break your freaking ribs!!!