Hell-Bent Quotes

“The postures are both a metaphor and a means for that process. They are tools for creating a connection between the imagination and the physical world. Realizing this connection—this union between body and mind—could be called yoga.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“Treat people as if they are what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they can be.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“Science tells us we are merely beasts, but we don’t feel like that. We feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, forever craving transcendence.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Bikram Yoga

“Pain has a unique ability to pull lives otherwise too busy to stop, out of their banality, toward their great cosmic humility.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“One hundred percent is an illusion. Why do you think so many people in the Bikram world have a beautiful practice for a few years and then slip away? One hundred or even ninety percent is impossible to maintain. You will become exhausted. Mentally if not physically. Terrified of practicing the yoga you love because it is draining you not replenishing you… but even if you could practice at that intensity - it would be undesirable. you can’t make adjustments at your edge. For regular practice, seventy-five to eighty-five percent is fine - you will never tire out and in the long run you will grow much stronger.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“It was a contradiction that Bikram negotiated with two twin sayings:
"Ninety-nine percent correct, one hundred percent wrong," and its complement,
"Try one perfect the right way, get one hundred percent of the benefits." This 99 percent wrong/1 percent right mentality created the classic Bikram dynamic. During class, internally, there is a perfectionism, a demand for almost hostile conformity that works like metallurgy on the human form. Outside the hot room, externally, or from the teacher’s perspective, the yoga is compassionate, open, and tolerant. every improvement is praised because every improvement is hard won. The strict disciplinarian and the loving healer.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“Yoga just ain’t that type of enterprise. It is ten thousand rain droplets rather than one holy spring. The postures are being innovated. The ideas reorganized, reinterpreted, and reimagined. And there is a long, hearty history where long individuals have appointed themselves all-knowing gurus and deliberately twisted facts to their own satisfaction and cosmology. So throw your ideas of authenticity out the window.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“Yoga is simply one of those things impervious to certainty, as incapable of corruption as it is of authenticity. And no amount of bossy, possessive attempts to claim a “real yoga” will make it otherwise.”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“really backbend, you have to become intimate with pain, not as an informational entity that raises awareness, not as a warning, but as a phenomenon, a presence you can dialogue with. You have to engage the phenomenon every time it comes up, and ultimately move through it while it screams in your face. To put”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga

“It was a metamorphosis. We all change. But we also have some control over the path. We choose our surroundings; we choose where we put our energy. Bikram—one of the most powerful forces to spread yoga—chose his road of materialism and control. He chose to surround himself by very needy people who gave themselves to him. Was it always there from the beginning? Of course it was. But so were many other possibilities.…”
― Benjamin Lorr, Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga