Day One, Ground Zero

Orientation never is.
It's more of a sorting bin.

I arrive in the parking lot of Bikram World Headquarters, which is an unassuming building in a nondescript neighborhood.From the outside, if the signs didn't say "Bikram Yoga" in large blue letters, you might mistake the building for a car dealership or abandoned warehouse. Everything is smaller and more run down than you'd expect.

People are sitting around in the parking lot, but there are no signs, no people with clipboards, no indication of what to do and where to go. I wander up to a girl and say, "What do we do?" She says, "I think we all put our suitcases on that truck." I trust blindly that the U-haul really is part of the program, and not someone making a killing off a parking lot full of clueless yoga students. Beyond the suitcase procedure, no one seems to know anything. I return to the girl and we chat.

Jalena is originally from Bosnia, but has lived for quite a while in British Columbia. Her accent is much more Canadian than anything else. She's very chill, the type you'd want to take camping, or to Burning Man. We stick together as they herd us into the main yoga room, a large mirrored room with peach walls, lots of old photos of Bikram and his wife, Rajashree, demonstrating lots of poses against K-mart family photo backdrops, and a rough cream-colored carpet with thin blue lines running the length of the room. This is where we will spend the next nine weeks. We wait in several lines for books, room assignments, photos, blah blah, nothing very organized. After a few talks that no one can really process, we're divided up into van groups, and find our roommates. Jalena is about 3 rooms away.

My roommates are Nalini & Chastity. They're both from the same studio in Las Vegas, though they didn't know each other well before now. Chastity, 28, was born and raised in a trailer park under the name Chastity Christian. Logically, she went on to work for several years as a dancer in several clubs in Las Vegas. She has three kids -- Anthony, 11, Serena, 8, and Sadie Jo, 2. Chastity had a hip injury (related to childbirth, not the club) that plagued her for years until she started doing Bikram. She's been practicing for at least 2 years.

Nalini, 35, grew up on several ashrams in Massachusetts, upstate New York, and India. She arrived in India with her family when she was 16, and ended up staying for five years after her family left. She was actually born Penelope; Nalini is the name her meditation guru gave her. I have no idea what it means. She has a 10-year-old daughter. Before we leave the studio, I meet her daughter and a man whom Nalini introduces as "Varsha's father" -- no idea whether they're divorced, distant, or what. They seem to be very friendly.

Living with two moms makes me feel incredibly clueless and unprepared. Nalini drove here with a car full of stuff. (Can I say, I scored by getting a roommate with a car. This equals a certain degree of freedom on the weekends.) Chasity flew, but still brought about twice as much as I did. Between the two of them, the kitchen is already half full. But we still need something for the week beyond cereal, juice, crackers and vitamins, so we make a late night grocery run and have no idea what to buy. It's actually only 9 or 10 pm when we get back, but it feels like a week in itself. We come back with absolutely stupid things, like a whole chicken. When are we going to roast a chicken?

The apartments are much nicer than expected -- the term "corporate housing" always makes me think of a second-rate motel with a kitchenette and pastel wallpaper. But they did us well -- everything's clean, looks like it was painted or bought in the last couple years and the walls are, thank god, simply white. Best of all, there is a decent kitchen with a coffeemaker.

None of us still have a clue what's going to happen tomorrow, though at least we won't have yoga at 9:30 am. The anticipation is draining. The school doesn't really tell you anything until it happens. I've only heard vague references from other teachers that equate training to a strange sort of boot camp laden with mental and physical breakdowns. But no one goes into specifics. I think that's part of some strange secret pact. Maybe they make you sign a contract when you leave, promising not to discuss details of anything you did at teacher training.

But I ain't signed anything yet.