Interview with Benjamin Lorr, author of HELL-BENT

Benjamin Lorr got addicted to Bikram. Can't say I wasn't there myself, especially when I was living in Madison, Wisconsin and working at a job I was terrible at. Ben, however, was quite a bit more addicted than anyone I know. So addicted, in fact, he wrote a book about it.

HELL-BENT: Obsession, Pain, and the Search for Something-Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga, from St. Martin's Press, is the result of his journey into the strange and, yes I can say it again, addictive world of Bikram Yoga. I interviewed Ben a few weeks ago and the response is below.You have to get the end of the interview, though, to see Ben rocking a perfectly aligned Mayurasana (or Peacock Pose). It's worth it.

Why did you feel compelled to write this story?

Let's see, I walked into a Bikram Yoga studio, overweight and a little depressed after a break-up, with almost no preconceptions about yoga or Bikram and quickly fell into a daily practice that verged on the pharmacologically addictive. A practice where I would eventual lose a little more than 65 pounds,  reinvent my personality into someone who regularly used “juice” as a verb, and was surrounded by a community of otherwise normal-to-too-thin looking people who were doing basically the same thing. THEN, in the middle of this bender, one of my favorite yoga instructors suffered a stroke. He was a healthy guy, who like me had a daily practice, and his stroke hit me hard: not unlike learning that your chess instructor was actually getting dumber for all the chess he was playing. My eyes opened. And I decided I wanted to learn more, not only from a health perspective, but also why this type of yoga compelled so many interesting intelligent people with such intensity. 

 

 

I was talking last night about the parallels between creative writing and teaching yoga. Have you thought about this at all, or noticed any parallels yourself?

Oh definitely. The craft of writing uses words as a medium to shape and refine meaning. You practice how to connect your thoughts to a reader/audience. Stephen King calls writing 'magic' somewhere because as a reader there is a transference: you see 'telepathically' the ideas the writer is evoking. You become connected. In hatha, or postural, yoga you do something really similar. You use the body as a medium to control the mind. A yoga practice teaches you how to connect the body to the mind. In both there is a tremendous focus on the yoking, the act of connection, and in both - like all practices - progress is incremental and surprisingly democratic. People always like to attribute success in both areas to things like 'talent', 'her natural flexibility', 'his mind-blowing creativity', but in my experience, people who are really good all started from a pretty similar place and all put in a tremendous time and energy in their respective areas to get where they are. 

That said, although the two appear extremely complementary - one physical, one sedentary - for me to practice either deeply, I find that I can immerse myself in only one at a time. I have never been able to really write while really focusing on my yoga, and always felt my yoga practice wain when I begin writing seriously. But that might just be me. Balance doesn't come too natural. 

 

What is inspiring you these days? Are you still writing? And, if so, what are you writing about? (Yes, three questions in one. Sue me)

 What is inspiring me? Man it's everywhere. I just finished a book of short stories by Jim Gavin - Middle Men - and it just made me want to write. It was so fucking good. Excellence and, ahem, jealousy are always a little inspirational. On the other hand, I am big fan of the notion that life is a creative act in and of itself. I met a woman who had shin splints the other day, and suddenly I found myself writing her a little pamphlet on how to actively rehab her shin splints. I had all this crazy rehab knowledge floating around in my brain from researching Hell-Bent and just let it flow out. No one will ever see this pamphlet; I don't even know if she's using it. But really letting go and letting myself write and create in any odd situations is quite liberating -- and great practice for the real stuff. 

And as far as the real stuff, yeah I'm working on another book. Tentatively looking at another obsessive community, where money and corruption, narcissism and need are all colliding: a non-partisan exploration of hydrofracking and US energy policy.  

Yup.