BIKRAM YOGA VICTORIA

Divi Chandna, MD

BYV Co-Owner/Director, Instructor

I started Bikram Yoga in 2000 in Vancouver and became a teacher in 2001. I had the pleasure of opening the first studio on Vancouver Island in October 2002.

Prior to my immersion in yoga, I had worked full-time as a family doctor since 1993. I thought my years of medical training would help people live happier and healthier lives.

It didn’t take long for this illusion to be shattered. I quickly realized that the medications and the way in which I was trained to prescribe drugs caused more harm than good. People would end up with more side effects from my treatment than prior!

I saw that the majority of my patients had ailments that prevented them from living a full life. Everything from seemingly minor things like knee pain, back pain, headaches, or fatigue, to major ones like depression, anxiety, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, and cancer became my daily working reality. These people were living fragmented lives due to these ailments.

And then, I started Bikram Yoga. Through my own healing journey, and through watching the daily transformation of my body and mind through this ninety-minute exercise, I was blown away at how great I felt. I felt like I had a new lease on life. Better yet, I felt like I had a new treatment modality that I could recommend to patients.

When I attended Teacher Training, I had no grandiose plans of changing careers or opening a studio, but through the training process, I realized that this very specific, well-designed practice had the nuts and bolts to treat all chronic ailments.

I met students with both minor and major chronic ailments—and they were using Bikram Yoga for treatment. Through their dedication to the yoga, they were living much happier, more joyful, more meaningful lives than prior. I realized that aging is only a state of mind—that we don’t have to get old, in pain, and moody. Yoga is the answer!

Now, when I teach, and I embark with a student who is willing to do the work of Bikram Yoga, I do my best to encourage them to trust the process, to move with their bodies, to be easy with themselves, and most importantly to know that the work they are doing is going to reap them benefits beyond belief.

I truly believe that the human body can naturally heal, that this yoga series is the answer to all of our ailments, all of our dis-ease, all of our general unhappiness, and that all of us have the ability to live happier, healthier, and fuller lives through this practice.

I look forward to seeing you all in the hot room!

Ed Light

BYV Co-Owner/Director, Instructor

Ed Light is the co-owner of Bikram Yoga Victoria. Ed started his practise in Victoria in the fall of 2001, and he attended Teacher Training in Los Angeles with Bikram in Fall 2002. He’s been teaching ever since.

Ed’s background is in extreme fitness. Growing up, he played every sport from basketball to water skiing. Ed suffered a severe dislocation of his hip a few years before starting Bikram Yoga, and he was able to work through scar tissue in the hot room. He brings a great degree of empathy and caring to his classes, as he knows firsthand about the journey of healing.

Due to his full-time dedication to the studio, Ed has given up his other pastimes of running and cycling. Despite this, he has been able to maintain a high level of cardiovascular conditioning just through regular practice of Bikram Yoga.

Now, his other favourite pastime is golf. Ed swears that his mental and physical game has improved through his dedication to Bikram Yoga.

Wendy Crowther

Instructor

Before Bikram Yoga became as natural to me as getting out of bed? I was born and raised in Victoria until I left for ten or so years and spent what seemed an exciting lifestyle working and travelling overseas. But life really took off after trying my first Bikram Yoga class.

Over four to five intermittent years of practice, the yoga had chipped away at all my reasons not to attend Teacher Training, until in Fall 2006 I went for the nine-week experience. Now as a full-time teacher for the original Victoria Bikram Yoga studio, I generally practice six days a week. In the beginning if anyone had dared to suggest that between teaching and taking I would someday be in that hot room three times a day, I would have laughed out loud. Or screamed.

It has been suggested to me that I am addicted to this yoga. One definition of “addiction” refers to devotion. And yes, I am devoted. I am accustomed now to feeling good in my own body wherever it is from one day to the next. I have gotten used to greater equanimity and clarity of mind. I like where and who I am. And sharing the studio with others ready for greater health and happiness is a daily privilege.

Bikram. Bikram. Bikram. I could say the name over and over and over again. I never tire of hearing it or feeling it. This for me is a life-long relationship. My yoga practice can twist here and turn there, and I have made up my mind to show up and twist and turn right along with it.

I hope to see you soon, and I hope to see you often.

Darlene Murphy

Instructor

With twenty-four years in television, radio, and newspapers under her belt, Darlene decided to follow her husband to Seattle for something different—five years of diplomatic service.

Darlene says, “Some people go directly from the world of work to the loony bin. I chose yoga.” In September 2004, a year after returning to Canada, she took her first Bikram class and she was instantly hooked.

Dr. Divi Chandna, the only medical doctor who owns a Bikram Yoga studio on the island, told Darlene that her shoulders would probably take two to three years to open up. Soon after, Bikram invited Darlene on stage in Vancouver to observe her twisted spine. She has degenerative lumbar discs and arthritis.

Intrigued by yoga’s restorative promise, Darlene took Teacher Training in Fall 2006 and now is among the oldest yoga teachers on the island. “Yoga has saved me physically. At fifty-three, I’m in better shape now than after years of health clubs and marathons. My spine has never felt better.”

Darlene guides her students with passion and with compassion for their bodies. Ever the philosopher, she counsels, “Hang in there yogis! The journey is lifelong—and life-changing.”

Owl Blake

Instructor

I took my first Bikram Yoga class in March 2004, and attended Teacher Training in Fall 2007. I have been teaching full-time at the downtown studio since then.

I decided to try Bikram Yoga hoping that it would help with chronic tension, scoliosis, back pain, and stress. I was halfway through an honours degree in English at UVic, and my general anxiety had developed into having severe anxiety attacks that sometimes made me feel I was going to die. One of my courses dealt with the epic tradition, and I remember thinking that I was experiencing my own journey through the underworld. I loved my studies more and more all the time, but my body and mind were in conflict.

In Bow pose during my first class, I realized that I was in the right place and it was the right time. Who knew that what was missing from my life was kicking continuously into my hands, bending backwards and looking for my toes behind me?

A year later, a car accident left me with whiplash injuries, which really focused my approach to the yoga. The symptoms of whiplash seemed to migrate from one part of the body to another—one day the neck, the next the arm, the hip, the knee, the foot. For a while I feared the postures that made me hurt, but I could tell that my body was becoming stronger, more open. I had become very attentive to form in the hot room, and had grown aware of how breath, patience, and persistence worked with the forms themselves to develop the connection between body and mind. The more I trusted the postures, the more my pain eased. I noticed too that I had more compassion and respect for my body, and for myself. The yoga was rehabilitating my life, not just my injuries.

Every day, the yoga teaches me about concentration, dedication, will power, and especially faith. I thought that by focusing on the yoga I was taking a break from my studies, getting out of my head and into my body, but I have found a lot of similarity between both my intellectual and my yoga pursuits. They both involve recognizing form and what is beyond form. The more you chase the horizon, the more you realize that you will never reach it. There is always more depth, more expression, more meaning, and more relation, beyond flexibility. It starts when you look in the front mirror, into the eyes of your own true teacher.

Leona Smith

Instructor

If you ask me where I am from, I’ll say “Prince George,” the place of my birth and where my family has its roots. I haven’t lived there, though, for more than 15 years—my career meant moving around the province. I settled in Victoria in 1999, returning with memories of my university days in the 1980s. Here is where I call home.

On the advice of my physiotherapist after a bike accident, I decided to give Bikram Yoga a try. I attended “Free Day” in January 2004 and signed up for a year on the spot. Somehow I knew that this was right for me. Finding strength, flexibility, and peace within the yoga room has helped me to focus my life and has returned me to me.

Part of my refocusing included envisioning a healthy lifestyle and work that connects people to themselves, each other, and the earth. One day, when I looked at that statement, it dawned on me that yoga encompassed it all, and that perhaps I should look into becoming a teacher. Considering I was eighteen years into a public service career, this could have been a pretty daunting thought. It wasn’t—it was rather liberating! So, in the fall of 2007, I left it all behind, and went off to Hawaii to Teacher Training.

Teaching involves its own special type of connection and energy. Every day when I walk into that room, I am connecting with the students. I learn and grow with each class. I want for them what yoga has given to me—health, peace, and freedom.

Outside the yoga room, I love to make jewellery, and I am addicted to exploring the world by bicycle…and to soy chai lattes!