feel so distended and out of place from my normal existence, I decide that I must be having one last hallucination of the day.
Change Your Mind
Hallucinations are not a trivial part of Backbending. As a purely physical exercise, wall-walking is worthy of inclusion in any fitness routine. I arrived at Backbending both scrawny and muscular, with the oversized thighs and undersized chest that I am beginning to recognize as a body by Bikram. After just a few days of wall-walking however, I can already see new musculature rising up against my skin, almost like lost continentssurfacing from the ocean. But the physical aspect of wall-walking is not where the real effort lies. Backbending is training for the mind: both the deep primitive areas governing pain and the more socially important limbic channels responsible for emotions and fear. Hallucinations, waves of tears, anger, and pulsing headaches are just a few of the many releases that occur as you work.
Esak instills this idea in us on the second day. After a class, he pulls us into a circle. “The first rule about Backbending is we don’t talk about Backbending. It’s just like Fight Club. If someone asks, tell them you went away to train for competition. If they ask what you did, tell them to come and find out. Backbending can’t really be told. People need to come and experience it for themselves.” He pauses. “The second rule is we have to stop calling this Backbending Club. It gives people completely the wrong idea.”
The reason it gives people the wrong idea is the words do not do justice to the experience. Backbending is awesome. Not awesome in the teenage sense of the word, awesome in the literal sense: It echoes with grandeur. Your chest blows out, your heart floods with blood, and your brain vibrates. Every human has a half-inch-thick cord of nerves running down the center of his or her vertebrae. These nerves extend down from the brain stem along the entire length of the spine until finally billowing out to the rest of the body. When you radically bend the spine, building and flexing the muscles that line and guide the vertebrae, those nerves are being toyed with: physically moved, rubbed, tweaked, and teased.
The red and blue spots, the wavy rippling room, the uncontrollable weeping, and the occasional seizure are phenomena that result from this manipulation. Backbenders call it Third-Eye Blowout . It’s neither desirable nor to be avoided. It just happens. I’ve wall-walked until time slowed down, until I’ve heard a deep roaring white noise all around me, until I’ve felt heat shoot through my arms like I was an X-Man. I’ve heard other stories of backbending blackouts, of practitioners seeing blue sparks shoot from their fingers, and of full-blown narrative-length hallucinations. To be sure, far more often, I’ve felt nothing, broken a mild sweat, and called it a day.
If you’ve never done an extreme backbend, you’ll have to take these reactions on faith. But they’re real—repeatable, predictable, and remarkably consistent between practitioners. If you’d like to try, by all means find the nearest wall. Every back can bend in this manner. Maybe not so deep at first, but whether you’re five or fifty-five, former athlete or former invalid, your vertebral column is more than equipped for both forward and backward bending. It is part of a human’s natural range of motion. No bones chip off, no tendons snap. I’ve seen people with rods in their spine backbend. You can actually see the metal poking up against the skin.
But there is a reason why people from five to fifty-five avoid backbends. They hurt. If you backbend sincerely—peeling yourself into an arch that is just beyond your comfort zone—you will feel pain. And if you do it repeatedly, the pain will grow: hot, unambiguous, and very, very insistent.
Most people stop at the first whisper of the pain. Actually, most people stop at the prewhisper, at some instinctual trigger point
Change Your Mind
Hallucinations are not a trivial part of Backbending. As a purely physical exercise, wall-walking is worthy of inclusion in any fitness routine. I arrived at Backbending both scrawny and muscular, with the oversized thighs and undersized chest that I am beginning to recognize as a body by Bikram. After just a few days of wall-walking however, I can already see new musculature rising up against my skin, almost like lost continentssurfacing from the ocean. But the physical aspect of wall-walking is not where the real effort lies. Backbending is training for the mind: both the deep primitive areas governing pain and the more socially important limbic channels responsible for emotions and fear. Hallucinations, waves of tears, anger, and pulsing headaches are just a few of the many releases that occur as you work.
Esak instills this idea in us on the second day. After a class, he pulls us into a circle. “The first rule about Backbending is we don’t talk about Backbending. It’s just like Fight Club. If someone asks, tell them you went away to train for competition. If they ask what you did, tell them to come and find out. Backbending can’t really be told. People need to come and experience it for themselves.” He pauses. “The second rule is we have to stop calling this Backbending Club. It gives people completely the wrong idea.”
The reason it gives people the wrong idea is the words do not do justice to the experience. Backbending is awesome. Not awesome in the teenage sense of the word, awesome in the literal sense: It echoes with grandeur. Your chest blows out, your heart floods with blood, and your brain vibrates. Every human has a half-inch-thick cord of nerves running down the center of his or her vertebrae. These nerves extend down from the brain stem along the entire length of the spine until finally billowing out to the rest of the body. When you radically bend the spine, building and flexing the muscles that line and guide the vertebrae, those nerves are being toyed with: physically moved, rubbed, tweaked, and teased.
The red and blue spots, the wavy rippling room, the uncontrollable weeping, and the occasional seizure are phenomena that result from this manipulation. Backbenders call it Third-Eye Blowout . It’s neither desirable nor to be avoided. It just happens. I’ve wall-walked until time slowed down, until I’ve heard a deep roaring white noise all around me, until I’ve felt heat shoot through my arms like I was an X-Man. I’ve heard other stories of backbending blackouts, of practitioners seeing blue sparks shoot from their fingers, and of full-blown narrative-length hallucinations. To be sure, far more often, I’ve felt nothing, broken a mild sweat, and called it a day.
If you’ve never done an extreme backbend, you’ll have to take these reactions on faith. But they’re real—repeatable, predictable, and remarkably consistent between practitioners. If you’d like to try, by all means find the nearest wall. Every back can bend in this manner. Maybe not so deep at first, but whether you’re five or fifty-five, former athlete or former invalid, your vertebral column is more than equipped for both forward and backward bending. It is part of a human’s natural range of motion. No bones chip off, no tendons snap. I’ve seen people with rods in their spine backbend. You can actually see the metal poking up against the skin.
But there is a reason why people from five to fifty-five avoid backbends. They hurt. If you backbend sincerely—peeling yourself into an arch that is just beyond your comfort zone—you will feel pain. And if you do it repeatedly, the pain will grow: hot, unambiguous, and very, very insistent.
Most people stop at the first whisper of the pain. Actually, most people stop at the prewhisper, at some instinctual trigger point
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