Bikram learned through experience that doing any posture the wrong way would not help you. Bikram says, “If you follow my instruction and do my yoga postures sequence to the best of your ability, you will live a better, healthier and more peaceful life.”

Yogiraj Bikram Choudhury, founder of the worldwide Yoga College of India, was born in Calcutta in 1946. Bikram began yoga at the age of four with India’s most renowned physical culturist at that time, Bishnu Ghosh, the younger brother of Paramahansa Yogananda (author of the best-selling book, Autobiography of a Yogi, and founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles). Bikram practiced Yoga at least four to six hours every day at Ghosh’s College of Physical Education in Calcutta. At the age of thirteen, he won the National India Yoga Championship. He remained undefeated for three years and retired as the undisputed All-India National Yoga Asana Champion.

At seventeen, an injury to his knee during a weight-lifting accident brought the prediction from leading European doctors that he would never walk again. Not accepting their pronouncement, he had himself carried back to Bishnu Ghosh’s school, for he knew that if anyone could help to heal his knee, it was his teacher. Six months later, his knee had totally recovered. Ghosh was a celebrated physical culturist and the first to scientifically document yoga’s ability to cure chronic physical ailments and heal the body. Bikram went on to devise the 26 postures sequence which works irrespective of age groups and has a profound healing power on the body and mind. Through his teaching, Bikram has shown the light of healthy life to millions of people around the world.

“It’s never too late, you’re never too old, never too sick and never to bad to start from the scratch and begin again with yoga.”

Bikram Choudhury