“Did you miss me? Bullshit!”

Week four – you go down!

This week we finished our anatomy lectures.  In the process of studying for the exam tomorrow, I have pulled out some interesting facts:

·    Fingerprints develop 6-8 weeks before birth

·    Fingernails grow 4 times faster than toenails

·    We lose 500 million dead skin cells daily due to ordinary wear and tear (this makes up 95% of household dust!)

·    We have 3-4 million sweat glands

·    At rest, in a cool environment a normal person loses about ½ litre of sweat per day

·    During  training, it’s estimated we’re losing about 5 litres a day

Euwww. And if that wasn’t enough to make you turn your nose up how about this one - you can smell a giraffe from ¼ mile away. The smell repels ticks.

I am reasonably confident NONE of this will be examinable.

The Boss was back on Thursday and marked the occasion with a memorable class. He was running late and class went over time, so I had the pleasure of over 2 ½ hrs in the torture chamber. He was tough. There were many fallen soldiers.

The lecture that followed gave me greater understanding of the lesson he was teaching us that night.

“Hi dead meat!” he greeted us.

He proceeded to speak about Vedanta Yoga – the philosophy of yoga and the problems of the Western world caused by so much freedom and choice.

“Lie down on a water bed. You get arthritis. I am from India. I grew up on a bed of nails. My back is fine.”

Our minds are trained in negative attitudes from childhood and every second of every day we are damaging our bodies.  We work all day. We are angry, tired and our bodies hurt. By doing something as simple as 90 minutes of yoga our minds are clear. Once a day we have to “flush the toilet” so to speak. Yoga creates discipline and allows us to become best friends with our minds. No one can ever make you do something against your mind and your mind will never, ever let you do anything that will hurt your spirit.

That’s all it takes to change lives. 26 and 2 and ‘lock the knee’.

Yes, it was a fantastic lecture - even by Bikram’s own admission.

“What I have said, in the last two hours – if you type it – it would be the best book ever written.”

The night was capped off with a marathon session of Mahabharat. It reminds me of the 70’s Japanese show Monkey.  It really is impossible to adequately describe the production values, the quality of acting, special effects and the sweeping scale of this epic but you too can experience the first episode here.