Hot Yoga High: Endorphin Buzz or Ancient Rite?

I love Hot Yoga -  but not the kind where barely dressed hotties are always yelling at me to straighten my legs.  No, I love the kinder, gentler Moksha franchise where the teacher is calm and always modestly covered. But I digress.

Hot yoga may have taken a few hits from critics lately – but who cares? I can’t keep away. I understand that it may not help me lose weight or detoxify (and may even be dangerous) – but it leaves me feeling cleansed and purified, not to mention higher than a cloud.

I love my hot yoga so much, I worry my passion has crossed the line into addiction. And by addiction I mean any behaviour that electrifies the reward centre of the brain at the expense of well-being. The plain fact is, by exercising in the heat, I am putting my poor old middle-aged body under duress. According to Heat Index Charts “extreme caution” should be used when exercising in 91°F and above – lest we risk dehydration, heat exhaustion and heat stroke.

Now I am no medical expert, but this is what I’ve managed to glean from those who are. During hot yoga our cooling systems go into overdrive, our heart and respiratory rates soar, we release sweat in a process called evaporative cooling.  Our body, rightly perceiving itself under threat, moves into the ‘fight and flight’ response as our sympathetic nervous system turns on.

 We begin to release endorphins which ‘numb’ the sensations of physical exertion so we can fight for our lives or in this case – flee for cooler climes. This endorphin buzz, also known to joggers as the runner’s high, is the cause of many a injury, because it dulls pain as we propel ourselves past safe limits.

Clearly subjecting my body to such conditions is not very yogic. It not only runs afoul of the yogic principle of ahimsa (non -harming) it also defies Yogi Sage Patanjali’s instructions that asana be a “posture that brings steadiness and comfort”. And one look at my red sweaty face reflected amongst the numerous other red sweaty faces in the wall to wall mirrors shows comfort is not a factor involved here.

So why do I continue to do it?

The bottom line is that during hot yoga, I arrive at a supremely yogic place. Patanjali defines yoga as “the cessation of the mental turnings of the mind”. And for some reason during my hot yoga practice I am able for a few glorious moments to go beyond my thoughts and find a still, quiet centre within.

In this state, I am curiously calm yet wide awake. I am hyper-aware of every little thing; the rivulet of sweat on my calf, the whir of the overhead fans, the collective breathing of my classmates, the sun in the windows. The struggle evaporates, and the posture I am holding becomes effortless.

And whoa! Don’t it feel great.

Is this just a buzz brought on by the gazillions of feel good chemicals coursing through my body? Maybe – but in a strange way this state goes way beyond the physical.

After all, many spiritual traditions use techniques like extreme heat, fasting, sleep deprivation, blood loss and even extreme pain to achieve altered states of consciousness. In the long term, these activities would harm the body, but in the short term, they play an important role in religious ceremonies and initiation ordeals because they give us an experience of the transcendent.

I think much is revealed through hot yoga’s emphasis on detoxification. While our materialist culture sees purification as releasing toxins and harmful chemicals from the body, ancient cultures saw this purification as a spiritual practice. Ritual heat and sweating were used in many religious rituals across North America, Europe, Africa and Japan, for thousands of years.

While practicing asana in heat is not part of the yogic tradition the practice of internally producing heat certainly is. The Yoga Sutras see “purification” as stoking the internal fire to burn away the “Maya” or illusion of the external world.

According to esteemed yoga scholar Mircea Eliade, rituals involving fire or fire sacrifices are well documented in The Rig Veda. From the Vedic perspective “ritual sweat “was generated by the practitioner as he performed in the heat of the sacrificial fire.

Is hot yoga a similar initiation? A new fangled ritual to satisfy an archaic spiritual hunger? Fact is, little in our chair/couch bound modern life demands such sustained physical effort in the face of difficult conditions as hot yoga. Surviving one’s first class has definite initiatory overtones, as newbie’s are often congratulated for having ‘made it through’.

So I can’t help wonder, as I profusely perspire under radiant heat lamps, if I am partaking in an ancient and sacred rite? By subjecting myself to adverse conditions, do I go further? Find a deeper – or higher place– in which I burn through ‘Maya’ and overcome what I believe are my physical limits?

Or is my “yogic place” just an illusion generated by a sympathetic nervous system designed to get me over life’s tough spots? A momentary high I’ve gussied up as transcendent experience?

I don’t know. I haven’t resolved my relationship with hot yoga. All I know is that if I go a few weeks without it, I begin to feel tight, my joints feel creaky, I crave the release it brings. So while I take care not to overwork and replenish my electrolytes, I can’t stop fretting that an addiction is still an addiction – no matter the rationalization. So I have to chew on that for awhile.

But in the meantime – are there any other similarly conflicted hot yoga aficionados out there? How do you deal? Or maybe you’re not conflicted at all, maybe you are a convert – or a critic – I want to know why. I’d love to hear your ideas. I need all the help I can get.