Bikram Yoga Teacher Training: What To Expect...

I have compiled, based purely on my own experience (and recognizing that there are people out there who would disagree with them), a list of things to expect for those of you who are about to embark on the Fall session of Bikram Yoga Teacher Training.

Here we go.

1. Expect everyone else to be as excited as you are. When you get 400+ people in a room, there is electricity in the air. And its hard not to catch it. The first few days of training, everyone is going to be awesome to each other.
2. Expect to be charmed by Bikram himself. He has a kind heart. He is funny. He is wildly perverted. You will laugh. But for the love of sweet baby Jesus, try to avoid pissing him off. (I will do a separate post based on my observations of what pisses him off.)
3. Expect to lose your appetite in the first few days.  By the end of week one, I was having to force food down my throat.  All that yoga, my body was rebelling. The thought of food made me feel sick.
4. Expect to have other digestive issues.  Peeing... Pooping... Too much, too little. Your body will be on its own schedule. IT HAPPENS TO EVERYONE.  Please don't force laxatives down your throat, though, if you find yourself constipated. Just drink more water. And let your body figure out what it wants to do. Eventually, it will find its rhythm.  
5. Expect the room to be ridiculously hot the first few days, at least. Sometimes it takes a few days for the heating engineer to figure out how to heat the room as evenly as possible. 
6. Expect to be shocked at how many people leave the room. People will leave for various reasons. RARELY is it because the room is too hot.  It's usually an emotional thing.  And for some people, it becomes a nasty habit. Just be warned, if you walk out of that room, the staff will yell at you to get back in. And rightly so. Unless you are vomiting or have passed out, you should be in the room.
7. Expect to be regularly kept up till 2am.  My training was lucky. We only had like three 4am nights.  Bikram was generous with us, in terms of how late he kept us up.
8. Expect to fall in LOVE with Hrithik Roshan.  He will be the star of quite a few of the movies you watch late at night.  And even if I hadn't been so deliriously tired, I still would have found him hot.
9. Expect to encounter REALLY ANNOYING TEACHERS visiting training.  The staff at training are great. At least, they were at my training. But some of the visiting teachers were really super freaking annoying.  I would name names as to who I KNOW you will encounter at training that are annoying, but I don't think that's fair.  You should develop your own opinion about them. I am just here to warn you that there will be annoying teachers in posture clinics who really aren't helping people become teachers. They're just there on power-trips. My advice: zone them out.
10. Expect there to be fellow students who are really freaking annoying. OHMYGOD! If you only knew! I was fortunate to only have one annoying student in my posture clinic group (they never memorized the dialogue... they were always late... they left the room during class every single time)...  But like they say at training, "If someone steals your peace, you are the loser."  And trust me, you will be a loser a couple of times during training. Because that much time with these people, for so many hours a day, in that small a space...  It will test your limits. 
11. Expect to be surprised by how prepared you are to teach your first class when its all done.  Trust me, you'll likely be in the majority that walks out of trainings thinking, "There's no way I can teach 90 minutes! And I have to do it next week! Ahh!" But trust me, you'll be able to do it. Be confident.
12. Don't have any expectations.  LOL! I know. Contradicts this whole list. But just sit back and let training evolve, and watch yourself evolve by it.  I guess maybe a better way to say it then is, "expect anything to happen."