Before she broke up with her boyfriend, quit her job, attempted suicide, and began using drugs and alcohol, before the nightmares in which Bikram Choudhury takes her and some other women into a room and sets them on fire, the woman sitting across the table from me in a lawyer’s office in Oakland, California—I’ll call her Jane—says she had a carefree, sunny disposition. In 2004, then 21 years old, she was just another young American woman who fell under the spell of Bikram yoga, the original celebrity-favored form of “hot yoga”—a series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises performed in a precise sequence for 90 minutes in a room heated to 105 degrees. She had been working as a manicurist when she took her first class at a Bikram studio, and she’d fallen hard for it. “I loved it,” she told me. “It became part of my daily routine. It gave me energy; it was healing, it was spiritual, it was a workout, it was everything combined into one spot.” As her commitment to the yoga discipline deepened, her businessman boyfriend surprised her with a gift that deeply touched her: he wanted to pay $10,900 for her to attend one of founder Bikram Choudhury’s twice-yearly teacher trainings so that she could share with others what had been so meaningful to her. And so, in September 2010—joining some 380 other mostly female Bikramites, from 33 countries—she went to San Diego, where that fall’s training was being held at the Town and Country Resort hotel.

A Bikram teacher training is many things. Obligatory for anyone who wants to teach Bikram yoga, it’s a nine-week boot camp, featuring two 90-minute classes six days a week, plus anatomy lessons, posture clinics, and meandering Choudhury soliloquies. It’s an ordeal of over-stressed bodies and poor hygiene, a place where, according to several accounts, the combination of heat and vigorous activity causes people to vomit and weep and pass out and lose bladder control in a room full of their peers. It’s a mass education, with numbing hours of rote memorization of the 45-page Bikram “dialogue” (i.e., the class script: “Your spine is bending backwards from the coccyx to the neck / Arms back, lean back, way back, fall back,” etc.), overseen by an autocratic leader (permission is required to go to the bathroom; no one may wear green, a color Choudhury hates) and intensified by deprivations of food, water, sleep, and sex (forbidden).

It’s also a Bollywood film festival: most nights, though the next day’s program will begin at eight A.M., the hundreds of trainees gather in a darkened tent and stay up, often past three in the morning, watching Hindi-language films while Choudhury merrily narrates what’s playing out on-screen and name-drops which actors he knows, according to a source. How the action and comedy movies are supposed to advance one’s yoga practice or teaching efficacy is never explained, but attendance is mandatory. If you nod off mid-movie, one of the staff volunteers monitoring the room will shake you awake. A Bikram training, in other words, has some of the flavor of a 70s est event. Choudhury himself has likened it to “brainwashing.”

Above all, a training is Choudhury’s biannual moment of sustained stardom, when he gets to be Andrew Dice Clay with a Bengali accent, dubbing a bosomy trainee “Miss Boobs,” by several accounts, or asking a man he deems insufficiently tough, “Boss, you got one ball or two?” And Choudhury—who at 67 still conducts classes in his signature outfit of black Speedo, jewel-encrusted Rolex, and headset mike, his chest waxed, his thinning black hair pulled into a topknot, his baby-soft skin radiating a miasma of cologne—has fully embraced his guru prerogatives. Throughout the nine weeks, during daytime classes—when he perches on a raised leather chair with cool air blowing directly on him while everyone else melts in the suffocatingly hot tent—as well as evening lectures and the Bollywood-film viewings, he surrounds himself with clusters of lithe trainees who brush his hair and massage him. “He’d walk into the room,” Jane says, “and people would literally put their hands together in prayer and get down on the floor and bow down, out of respect for him.”