By Karen Parr-Moody
CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – “I love Raja,” enthused Rusty Richards, a glamorous redhead who owns Aqua Color Lounge here. “It’s amazing. It’s changed the way I think about everything.”
Richards is one of the many devotees of Raja Hot Yoga, which has opened two Clarksville locations in less than a year. She posts on Facebook when she is attending hot yoga classes and she extolls hot yoga’s virtues while snipping away at clients’ hair in her chic salon.
Like other Raja Hot Yoga enthusiasts, Richards performs her yoga poses in a dimly-lit studio that is warmed up to humid 105 degrees – hotter than most summer days in this area.
“I am calmer and less reactive,” Richards said, describing the benefits. “It’s like yoga teaches you to be able to find peace in the midst of chaos. I am just overall happier on a day-to-day basis and little things are less important than before yoga.”
She isn’t alone. Since the first Raja Hot Yoga studio opened here at 2269 Wilma Rudolph Boulevard on April 5, 2013, the fan base has exploded into sweat-drenched masses. To handle demand, a second Raja Hot Yoga studio opened on Feb. 5, 2014 at 1481 Tiny Town Road.
Yoga is not new; some historians date it to Vedic culture of the third millennium B.C. Hot yoga, however, began in Los Angeles four decades ago when Bikram Choudhury, an Indian yoga teacher, brought his personal form of hot yoga to Tinseltown. Bikram yoga is a series of 26 hatha yoga postures performed in a 105-degree studio that has grown to include fans such as George Clooney, Lady Gaga and David Beckham.
The Raja Hot Yoga studios in Clarksville are co-owned by two best friends, a wiry, bearded man who goes by the name Billy Barefoot Yogi and a petite brunette with a pixie hairstyle who calls herself Padma Dharmata.
While Billy admires Bikram Yoga, he has developed his own signature sequence of 12 yoga postures performed by glistening bodies in steamy heat. He studied hot yoga at the Hot Yoga House in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, and opened his first studio in 2011 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky.
Billy says that hot yoga can increase one’s flexibility, overall health and mental focus. But beyond that, he says that the program works on one’s internal self – the same claims made by the founder of Bikram yoga. The tagline for Raja Hot Yoga is “the science of self-realization” – which gets straight to the point.
“When I discovered hot yoga, it completely transformed my life almost instantly,” Billy says. “Being able to open that door and change my limited self for my limitless self, I gained all of that energy and love.”
When Billy speaks, he sounds more like a life coach or guru than an entrepreneur who co-owns two popular yoga studios. His conversation is peppered with platitudes of what hot yoga brings to a practitioner’s body and soul in terms of self-realization.
“One thing that I’ll say about self-realization, that term is very similar, if not identical, to what Christians call ‘being saved,’” he says. “Being saved means, ‘Through Christ all things are possible’ … What makes you saved is you release the limited self in favor of the limitless self. There’s a similar concept in Buddhism; it’s called ‘enlightenment.’ It’s the moment that you realize you are no longer a limited being, but that you are a vast, limitless self.”
Padma – who no longer calls herself Sarah Bailey, her given name, but rather the Indian “spiritual name” Padma Dharmata – also underscores hot yoga’s benefits to one’s soul.
“I feel like who I am has changed,” she says of her hot yoga enlightenment. “I don’t identify myself with who I was with the name Sarah Bailey. Everything has changed. I had practiced yoga and it was wonderful for me. But in hot yoga I came in with medical conditions, I came in with a mind that was broken.”
Padma says that hot yoga has changed her from the outside in, from shedding more than 100 pounds off of her small frame to easing her arthritic spine to helping her escape an abusive relationship.
In her first hot yoga class with Billy two years ago in Hopkinsville, Padma said she had an epiphany.
“I do deserve to be loved,” she says she realized. “Over the course of two years I’ve seen that same epiphany happen in many people’s lives, in people learning to accept who we are.”
So what is it about hot yoga rather than, say, jogging or swimming, that is spiritually eye-opening? It’s the heat, Billy says.
“In high temperatures the mind gets very concentrated,” he says. “And the mind moves inward.”
From that, one learns to control the breath first, then the mind and then the body. Self-realization is reached once someone can control all of these.
Once a hot yoga practitioner becomes his or her limitless self, Billy says, “You love everybody. I love everybody equally. That’s the door that gets opened here.”
To find out more about Raja Hot Yoga, call 931-472-5072. Single classes are $8 and monthly membership for unlimited classes is $55. (Those without an ability to pay can attend free of charge). There are 82 classes that vary in start times from 6 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
A group of women preparing to enter a hot yoga class at Raja Hot Yoga.
The dimly-lit, 105-degree studio at the Raja Hot Yoga location at 1481 Tiny Town Road.
Karen Parr-Moody began a career as a New York journalist, working as a fashion reporter for Women’s Wear Daily, a beauty editor for Young Miss and a beauty and fashion writer for both In Style and People magazines. Regionally, she has been a writer at The Leaf-Chronicle newspaper and currently writes about arts and culture for Nashville Arts magazine each month.