Thoughts on Who Owns Yoga
From the Editor-in-Chief, Spirituality & Health Magazine:
Forgive the language in this story. It’s a locker room tale about a yoga mogul who reminds me of an Eastern version of Arthur Jones, the late American fitness mogul. Art Jones was a workout fanatic who came to the Mr. America Contest in 1970 with the prototype of a Nautilus weight machine—and soon introduced serious weight training to the mall set. As Jones became one of Forbes 400 riches people, he became increasingly colorful. A pistol-packing chain-smoker, his motto was “Bigger alligators, faster airplanes, and younger women.” When my college rowing team toured his factory in the late ’70s, Jones promised that a circuit on his weight machines would have us “vomiting and ‘fribilating’ on the floor.” He showed us his alligators and pictures of his airplanes. Later, we met the last of his six wives (each married between the ages of 16 and 20.) He was about 60, and she was a supermodel.
What Jones did for weight training, Bikram Choudhury did for yoga. Choudhury took yoga out of the ashram and brought it into the mainstream marketplace as an intense workout for physical fitness and health. His success comes from a series of 26 postures and two breathing exercise that are done in the exactly the same order to exactly the same script, in a room kept at a temperature of 105 degrees. Bikram Hot Yoga was the first “McYoga”, and in 2003 Choudhury became the first and perhaps the only person to get a proprietary trademark on a sequence of yoga poses. Now a worldwide franchise, studios reportedly pay a $10,000 franchise fee and a monthly fee of at least $1,000, and instructors must attended a nine-week class that costs $10,900. The instructor certificate must be renewed every three years.
Like Jones, Choudhury has become rich and increasingly colorful. Here’s a snippet of his life as recounted online in “Bikram Yoga Law: Savasana, Baby!”
“Meanwhile, back at the palace, Bikram lives and acts like a royal Indian prince. One graduate tells a story of Bikram in only his tiny black Speedo, reviewing students at a recent training seminar while lying on his back in a lounge chair, his long hair brushed by an attendant while another ran for a glass of water. The Internet is rife with images of Bikram wearing tiny white speedos with red flames. He once told a reporter in defending allegations of sex with his students, that he did it only to save them from suicide.”
About himself, Choudhury is widely quoted as boasting to writer Paul Keegan at Business 2.0 magazine, “I’m beyond Superman . . . I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”
But there are differences between Jones and Choudhury. Jones invented Nautilus machines. Choudhury, who was born in Calcutta, began learning yoga at age four. His teacher was Guru Bishnu Ghosh, a brother of Paramahansa Yogananda, founder of the Self-Realization Fellowship and author of the landmark book “Autobiography of a Yogi.” Choudhury mastered the ancient poses so well that at age 11 he became the youngest person to win the National India Yoga contest. When Choudhury came to Beverly Hills with his wife in 1971, he initially continued inside his own tradition of teaching yoga for free. Nobody denies that he was a great yoga teacher, but given the ancient nature of his poses and the fact that 105 degrees is not uncommon in Calcutta during April and May, Choudhury may not have realized that hot yoga was something LA would see as new.
Another difference between Jones and Choudhury is the nature of their business model. Jones’ company sold machines and the knowhow to train with them. Choudhury, on the other hand, essentially sells himself. What I mean by that is that his teachers are trained to parrot his script—odd language included—and are forbidden to change a pose, a word, or even to add music. Obtaining or renewing a Bikram certificate is also at the sole discretion of Choudhury himself. One can imagine a young woman who has spent all her savings and many weeks to obtain a certificate that the man in the Speedo may not deign to give her. What if the alternative feels like suicide?
Another difference between Jones and Choudhury has to do with the purpose of lawyers. In his online memorial, one of Jones’ friends tells this story: “Inevitably, someone would ask Arthur what he fed Gomek. Just as inevitably, Arthur would cast a glance in my direction, with a twinkle in his eye, and growl: “What do you think we feed a man-eating crocodile? LAWYERS!” Choudhury, however, keeps his lawyers well fed. When Choudhury received his copyright and trademark, he announced that, he would “seek damages of $150,000 per infringement and all attorney fees.” One Bikram instructor immediately found herself facing a suit for adding music and not keeping the room sufficiently hot. She settled, as have others, and one reason is the disparity in available resources. For a yoga studio to fight a man as wealthy as Choudhury can be likened to jumping naked into a pool of crocodiles.
Judging from what is on the Internet, legal battles have been going for years over the question of who owns yoga. One lawyer, a veteran of fighting Choudhury, has fought pro bono because he believes the answer to the question is both obvious and important: No one owns yoga. But he also says the lawsuits run the same peril as “getting into an argument with an idiot. After a brief time, it is hard to tell who the idiot is.”
What spurred me to write this story now is that Spirituality & Health’s Zenvesting columnist, Paul Sutherland—who owns Spirituality & Health as well as the yoga studio Yen Yoga & Fitness in Traverse City, Michigan—has been named in a lawsuit by Choudhury as a result of hot yoga classes taught at Yen Yoga. Says Sutherland, “We started Yen Yoga & Fitness because we saw a need for an elegant, clean, happy, positive, convenient and inspiring place for our community. In our visioning work we looked on this as a mission or movement more than a business. We wanted it to be “Teacher” centered where great happy teachers could express their best to the students. Yen Yoga and Fitness offers 19 different classes, including Yen vinyasa, Yen gentle, hot yin, ashtanga & pre-natal yoga.”
As a result of the hot class, Sutherland now has to fight the lawsuit for his studio and himself. But it seems to me that the real fight is larger than any class or studio—and perhaps the Spirituality & Health community would care to help. No one denies that Choudhury’s sequence has done enormous good, but yoga needs to keep growing for the good of everyone, and Choudhury seems clearly in the way.
Says Sutherland, “It would be easy to ‘just settle’ and financially easy to just be done with it, but I really have a problem with bullies, the strong taking advantage of the weak, untruthfulness, and lies. I was the stubborn, stupid kid that would stand up to the bullies even if I got beat up. So I guess, ‘Kids just get bigger’. Anyway it will be obvious along the way what the right next step is. Right now we will move forward on this. I think that is the right thing.”
-Stephen Kiesling
P.S. If you would like to share a Bikram story or get involved, please email editors@spiritualityhealth.com.
Much of the background on Bikram comes used here comes from Your Karma Ran Over My Dogma: Bikram Yoga and the (Im)Possibilities of Copyrighting Yoga by Jordan Susman. To read the article in its entirety, click here to download it.
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