Sublime Shapes

Benjamin Lorr’s “Hell-Bent: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga” contains not just one but at least three of these metamorphoses, which partly accounts for the book’s appeal. It is immensely satisfying — close to a guilty pleasure — to read about real people who turn from hairy caterpillars into beautiful ­butterflies.

The central transformation is the author’s own. Lorr was a naturally lean fellow who had ballooned, almost willfully, into a chubby young professional; once he can’t see his penis, he realizes he should probably do something. He decides on Bikram yoga, the technique that reshapes all of the bodies in this book.

Bikram is the kind of yoga practiced in a room typically heated above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Students perform a set series of 26 postures while instructors deliver what is essentially a script. Bikram Choudhury, the originator of this yoga, has made a small fortune teaching it. He has also secured a copyright and sued a number of Bikram teachers who have altered his script and ­sequence.

Lorr, though, is not content merely to practice. He decides, improbably at first, that he will compete. The book is loosely pegged to Lorr’s transit from novice to national yoga competitor. At one point, he inserts himself into a New Jersey contest he has no right to be in, since he has nothing but disgust for that state and lives in New York. By way of explanation, Lorr offers this: “I had a book to write. I had an editor who wanted a story. And God bless my cowardly unyogic sex, there were no men competing from New Jersey. As in zero. Which was in striking contrast to New York, where ‘I’ ‘lived’ and which had something near 20 male competitors. Male competitors whom I knew and who were very good.”

Lorr’s maneuver — shamelessly deploying himself as a comic foil while using the project of writing the book to advance the plot — saves him from one of the pitfalls of the yoga memoir. Until very recently, Americans discovered yoga as adults. By the time they did, some had literary ambitions or even entire careers. This is true of Lorr and also his predecessors, including the journalist Jess Stearn in the 1960s and, more recently, Neal Pollack and Elizabeth Gilbert (who wrote a cheery blurb for “Hell-Bent”). As a reader, it’s hard not to wonder how the fact of their books — Gilbert, for instance, had a contract before she left for her spiritual-culinary quest — impinges upon the moments of inner turmoil and epiphany they recount. Most writers never say. But Lorr does. And you thank him for his candor.

He also spends a total of about one and a half paragraphs discussing his inner transformation. This would seem a glaring omission except that what he does say, mostly in a footnote, is not only so contrarian but believable too: “I have always felt my essential nature — my sense of self — has remained fairly consistent through my yoga practice.” Yoga, Lorr says, has acted more like a dial, amplifying or humbling his ego, but never perceptibly changing it.

The star that burns brightest here isn’t Lorr or the many yoga champions who can make sublime shapes with their bodies; it isn’t Bikram or even Bikram yoga. It’s Lorr’s realism. He exposes aspects of Bikram yoga that I haven’t seen mentioned in print, though I’d bet they are truisms in the community. His account of teacher training is searing — the tent is so hot that students start sobbing; Bikram himself seems by turns cruel and pathetic; the hotel is decrepit. And yet the program was fully subscribed: 380 people paid $11,000 each for the nine-week course.

Lorr ably navigates the narcissism masked as self-­interrogation, the eating disorders, platitudes, self-righteousness and general weirdness of devoting oneself so completely to something that can cause as much pain as pleasure. He’s well aware that to an outsider, yoga in general, and Bikram yoga in particular, can look like an expensive, time-sucking pursuit. Trying to understand it is a lot like trying to understand why a heroin addict shoots up again and again, given the depredation at the end of the needle. It’s almost impossible without experiencing the high for yourself.

“Hell-Bent” is witty and wise. If you don’t practice yoga, read it anyway — you may learn something about the impulse for self-transcendence. And if you do practice yoga, you will laugh and cry with recognition.