Yoga is a co mpetitive, commercialized, mega - industry. Can yoga survive with its good karma intact? Esak Garcia is a ‘competitive yogi’ whose ultimate goal is the Olympics, a dream instilled in him by his guru, Bikram Choudhury, the ‘Bad Boy of Yoga’. While fighting to have yoga recognized as an Olympic sport, Bikram has also copyrighted his yoga style, demanding teachers play by his rules or stop teaching. A court must now decide if someone can ‘own’ yoga. And with yoga chains (McYoga?) proliferating, everything is u p for grabs, from yoga shoes to chakra panties. Is nothing sacred
Yoga's history stretches back over centuries, 3,000 year old representations of what appear to be meditating yogis have been uncovered
Written accounts of yoga appear in Hindu spiritual texts recorded approximately 1,400 years before the birth of Christ, and through the ages, yoga practitioners have been dedicating their lives to attaining yoga's ultimate goal
The purpose of yoga is the development of self-awareness to the point of liberation
And that's for the hippies
Yoga is a certified, bona fide, worldwide phenomenon
There are booming yoga scenes in Asia, South America, across Europe, and even the Middle East
But the ancient yogis might have a hard time recognizing today's practice
Yoga has become the answer to everything
It's an alternative therapy, a meeting place for like-minded people
They're not professionals, they're not teachers, they just have an interest in the practice of yoga
And a way to get closer to more gods than the ancient yogis ever dreamed of
We're going to use the scripture today from Psalms 46 to just be still and know that he is God
Yet as the practice continues to thrive, yoga purists are wondering whether the essence of yoga can survive, especially in the United States, where an estimated 18 million practitioners a year are fueling the big business of yoga
18 million people in the United States doing yoga, a thousand dollars a year for classes and books and mats and clothes, etc
That becomes an 18 billion dollar business
That's more sales than Coca-Cola does in the United States or McDonald's does in the United States or Gillette does in the United States
Yoga is sort of caught in between two cultures and I look around and I see all the affluence and I see the affluence connected to yoga
That doesn't feel right to me
I think all of us are looking for answers
We're looking for the great truth
We want somebody to give us those answers instantly perhaps in Western culture where we're used to drive-throughs and microwaves and now we think we can get instant enlightenment
Each culture has become interwoven with the practice
Now yoga is becoming American
I'm hoping that it can remain genuine, remain authentic and still become, you know, part of our culture
That
Right? That
Everyone's doing that
Okay? I'm just going to talk to you while you're doing it even though we're talking
So at that moment
Knees down, shoulders up
Yes
You have beautiful, soft face
You just keep doing that
Bright eyes, soft face
Now, when the hands are loose like that, it looks soft
Seven milk, no sugar
Wheat sugar
Everybody sugar? Wheat sugar
I was doing sugar separate
Okay
Check, check
One, two, three, four
Good morning everybody
Welcome to the First World Yoga Competition
Thank you very much for coming and let's officially start the competition
Yogis from across the globe, including Japan, Thailand, Italy, the UK and Australia, have flocked to Los Angeles for this, the first world yoga championship to be held in the United States
Yoga championships do have a history
In India, there's evidence of competitions stretching back at least four decades
In countries such as Argentina and Italy, yoga competitions are popular events
Not so in the United States
And much of the criticism has been levelled at Bikram Chowdhury, the driving force behind the competitions
His supporters say Bikram is making yoga accessible to the masses
His detractors see him as the embodiment of everything that's wrong with modern yoga
So any idiot ask you how yoga could be competition, you better go back home and tell them, no, we didn't compete with anybody
We didn't compete in America or Germany or Japan or India
We compete our, my body, my mind, my spirit to improve it in the highest level in cosmic consciousness
That's it
My main actual goal was to be competing with myself and to show at least one part of my soul to the judges
That's how I knew that I'd be a winner
I was like, went home last night and I was like, well, I wonder how hard it is to do some of these things
So I started hitting it
I think I might have to put my clothes back on
Primarily my interest for the readership of FHM, the magazine I'm writing for, is the paradoxical nature to the man on the street of there being a yoga competition
Because almost everyone's perception is that yoga is a non-competitive pursuit
It's quote unquote spiritual, whatever the fuck that means
And it seems all the resistance is coming from Johnny come lately, yogas and yoginis who don't really know that much about the history of yoga
The popular perception is that yoga arrived in the West pure and fully formed sometime in the 1960s
But the struggle for the soul of yoga, this war between spiritualism and secularism has been raging much longer than that
The biggest misconception is that yoga really became popular or known or practiced in any significant way in the 60s in the United States
And it basically, you have to kind of back that up by a century
Vivekananda was the first Indian to come here and teach yoga
He addressed the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893
The irony, of course, is that he did not come to America to teach yoga
He came to raise money for India
He wanted to help impoverished Indians because he had seen how much his country was suffering
By the turn of the century, people were actually practicing yoga
People from really wealthy, prominent families, names you would recognize, Vanderbilt, Rutherford, Goodrich
In general, it drew a more open-minded kind of American because there was still a lot of anti-Hindu sentiment
It was kind of easy to target Hindus
You also have a change in the immigration law in 1924
Indians are banned from immigrating here
Indians could come, but they couldn't legally settle here
Indra Devi was the first to really succeed in presenting yoga in this sort of more mass way
The way she did that was to kind of further pull it apart from Hinduism
She opens a studio up on Sunset Boulevard in the late 40s, and she starts teaching starlets, saying, you know, you don't have to worry about the spiritual practice
You can just do this, and it'll keep you fit, it'll keep you healthy, it'll keep you looking young
It was accommodating the national temper in many ways
And so they joined the stream of family life in the suburbs, soon to become part of its familiar sights
When I was a child, people didn't really understand yoga
It was, even in San Francisco, it was considered to be an oddity, a weird thing
My parents had a really popular and abundant yoga center back in the 50s
It was unusual
I was often referred to as Hare Krishna
I was teased a lot by different kids
This was post-war years, so America was a somewhat conservative place
We were not kind of so interested in the mystical dimension as a culture
I mean, it was kind of, get things done, get things moving
I was only four years old the day that President Kennedy was assassinated
It was like the first right in my face that this death thing is a reality for all of us
My mother gave me a variety of different answers that included yogas
They had the answers to the mysteries
Then you think, I want to be a yogi
We were in Ohio at the time, I mean, I'm the only kid that practiced yoga, the only vegetarian
There was a big divide between middle America and people doing things that were alternative
I don't know anything about yoga
Who does? When the counterculture starts to happen, people see this yoga thing and they kind of see, oh, if you just turn it a little, there's this whole dimension that actually really fits in with our whole idea of challenging Western materialism and rationalism, all the sacred cows of bourgeois middle class society
Also, from the mid-20s to the mid-60s, Indians couldn't legally settle here, and that changes as the mid-60s
So in 1965, Indians can come to America and settle here again
As soon as I came to America in 1960, February 5th, 1960, in one month and a half, I started teaching yoga
People were getting into marijuana and LSD
This is the now generation
And that was the hippies who were really disenchanted with the society and with the culture and focus on the money and power
They are a part of the wave of the future
When the Beatles went to India and became fans of Trans-Mental Meditation, I mean, that just had a huge ripple effect
In the early 70s in Southern California, it's all right there
So I was, you know, intrigued by the Eastern religions, and all of those things were taught at my crazy college
Some of the advanced students, they said, we would like to continue to study with you and maybe live near you
Everywhere I went, people said, we want to be in your ashram
There was so much happening here, it really offered a way to think about the world and what was important in life that was meaningful and resonated with a whole range of people
Years of yoga training have led up to this moment
It's now practiced by all kinds of people, lawyers, construction workers, housewives, people, people
If Debbie panics or freezes on the top of the platform, the yogi could easily be killed
When we come back, we'll see if the yogi's concentration can keep him from being crushed to death
What happened is these hippies, they became yuppies
You have this large cohort of baby boomers who are reaching middle-aged, and we live an increasingly fast-paced life, and so they were seeking stress relief as well
And then you had another large group that I think was attracted to yoga because celebrities publicized the more athleticized forms
Let's begin with a deep breathing exercise
Welcome to fat-burning yoga
In the early 90s, there was a great boom that happened in interest in yoga, the no pain, no gain kind of, if you don't sweat, it's not good for you
That really rapid rise in participation occurred in late 2001
Yoga went public, TV, movie stars, shows about yoga
The last time it was so secularized was probably the post-war period, when it was harder to use yoga to sell other products
Now yoga is sort of available to market other things that have nothing to do with yoga
And you're seeing that spiritual aspects are being drawn on even by advertisers right now, that other inner dimension of yoga
One of the ones that kind of crosses the line for me is chakra panties
My question is, what next? Where will they take it next? It's a common denominator among many spiritual movements where you can't have anyone emerge as someone interested in making money off of it or someone with a very strong point of view because it somehow brings down the community or the collective
In this instance, we have Bikram, who is a very aggressive capitalist
Bikram is kind of a caricature of himself, I think
That's the impression people get of him in the media
People have like a vehement reaction against what Bikram is doing
I'm the smartest man in the world you've ever met in your entire life
I make a package
Twenty-six posture, two breathing exercise, it works
Of the literally hundreds of yoga styles that have emerged, Bikram's brand of yoga is one of the most popular
The Bikram organization says it's endorsed over 750 studios worldwide to teach his yoga
A Bikram class is the same from Calcutta to California
Ninety minutes of stretching, bending and balancing performed in a heated room
Adherents swear by Bikram yoga, whether they're trying to lose weight or regain the use of paralyzed limbs
I broke the C2 and C6 vertebrae in my neck and I fractured the left temple part of my skull
Every class it seems like I just keep making more progress
Previously in the United States, you could take a Bikram class at many studios that weren't affiliated with Bikram's franchise
Not anymore
In 2003, in a move that cemented his bad boy of yoga reputation, Bikram sought copyright and trademark protection for his yoga style
He now demands that teachers offering unauthorized Bikram yoga or using the Bikram name either join his franchise and follow his operating guidelines or face copyright infringement fees
I think that's why the mafia is so successful because they've mastered the art of working with family and if you can master that art you can pretty much accomplish anything
All of a sudden there's this person telling you, you can't practice that yoga pose or you can't teach somebody else or practice with somebody else that yoga pose or that series of postures because they're mine
All yoga is good yoga
The only bad yoga is saying that your yoga is the best or the only
We're certainly not against Bikram
We love the yoga
We paid a good penny to take the training
I just don't want to give it up
There are many, many people who are interested in being part of a franchise or who are interested in being a yoga college of India but to attempt to require people who don't want to be part of his organization to be part of it is kind of ridiculous
Pivot on your right heel, bend the right knee and sit down into warrior two
Because I'm now not playing the franchise game that Bikram wants everyone to play, then what? I should stop teaching yoga all together, just stop helping people, no more, no more helping people, sorry
The postures that are in Bikram's sequence are not Bikram's postures
They're postures that have been passed down from his teacher and his teacher and Bikram passed it on to me and now I pass it to my teachers
It's not anyone's property to own, let alone to steal
This is our business
This is our livelihood and we don't want to see it destroyed by anybody, especially by somebody who we feel is acting in an unlawful way
I had never gotten a letter from an attorney before
It's not something that you can ignore and hope that it goes away
It's something that you're apparently required by law to respond within a certain number of days and we, you know, had to find a lawyer
Sandy McCauley comes to me holding this letter saying, what do I do? Bikram is sending out these cease and desist letters all over the place
He's telling people, you are violating my copyright if you teach my yoga or you're violating my trademark if you use my name
He's threatening to sue everybody for statutory damages of $150,000 per violation
He's telling people, stop what you're doing
Don't teach Bikram yoga anymore
Tell me how much money you've made and I'll tell you what you owe me
An analogy would be if somebody in the Yankees pitching staff pitched a new pitch and said, it's mine, you have to pay me
Generally Americans applaud these kinds of things
However, within the yoga community, we have a lot of people complaining about a guy who's basically a classic entrepreneurial up by the bootstraps American success story
And what angers them is that their precious misconstrued view of India and yoga and all of these things that are other and foreign to them are being brought back to them in a very like McDonald's American kind of form
You'll see the term use muck yoga as in McDonald's a lot now in all the journalists writing about the Bikram case
And then by the way, there is going to be a new chain of yoga studios called Yoga Works
There are two businessmen who have bought several studios in Los Angeles
They've bought several studios in New York
We knew it was just a matter of time before you would begin to see chains of yoga studios in addition to Bikram in this country
We worked together for about three years at a prior company, Ask Jeeves
And then after Jeeves, we were thinking about what could become next
We had this year where we were trying to come up with a business idea and we said, let's do something where we think there's an important contribution we could make
Rob started doing yoga up where he was living and I was doing yoga where I was living
But we weren't sharing this
We finally had this confessional that we were both doing yoga
So we said, let's create a business where we could make great yoga accessible to many more people
We bristle at the word chain and every time from the moment we wrote the first description of this as a business idea, we edited that word out every time we saw it and people would say, you're a chain
We said, no, we are a family of yoga schools
The cynicism is, my gosh, if we're not careful, this will turn into the way, you know, Starbucks or Walmart has come in and sort of changed the landscape of America
It's a key question
How do you take the advantages of scale, but keep the essential rightness of individual empowerment? How do you blend that together? How do you manage those two tensions? Yoga has an incredible, varied, creative expression of itself that evolves constantly, continues to adapt itself to not just regions, but to the personalities who's leading it, to the insights that they have as human beings and their direct experiences
I think that's one of the beauties of yoga
I built my website so that people can find out about me with the hopes of getting a sponsorship
If a sports apparel company wanted to support me in training, I would go for it for sure
Personally, I'm not a big fan of Nike Corporation as far as the way their workers are treated in third world countries
But at the same time, Nike Corporation has so much money and if they wanted to put it into something like promoting yoga, I would accept that
When competitive yogi Isak Garcia comes to Chicago to demonstrate Bikram yoga, a friend suggests he should try his luck at getting on a local morning chat show
I don't really know how to approach somebody and say, I want to sponsor me
I don't really have connections, but I'm making connections every day and I think that it's just a matter of time before yoga athletes start to get sponsorships
Yeah, he'll talk about it
I gave him those press releases you gave me
Hey kids, I want you all right over here
Coming up in a moment, we'll update the top stories
And we have a yoga practitioner outside
Look at that
I don't know why
He just happened to visit us here at Studio 5
Now, I didn't realize that there was competition for yoga
Well, it's a new thing in the United States, but it's been going on for a long time in India
It's an ancient tradition in India and it happens in other countries all over the world
He does have goosebumps because it is cool out here
We're leaning into the wind this morning because we do have a pretty brisk headwind coming in out of the north, bringing in some much cooler air
Oh, geez
Unbelievable
Oh, he's moving
You're messing him up
There we go
Right there, guys
Holy cow
Is there an alternative to this bullshit? I mean, everybody's marching around with a yoga mat and they think it's the goddamn Torah
It happens to be available to every single person on earth now
At every level, they have it for a fucking dog, they have it for a child, they have it for a parrot
It's a business formula, like anything else
Nothing is safe, you know? So fuck it
The whole thing started by accident
I walk into the house and my wife was going to yoga
Yoga before dinner, yoga before this, yoga before that, is like, fuck yoga
I made her this shirt as a birthday gift
I believe her exact quote was, not on your life am I going to wear that? And so I wore mine around a lot
Next thing you know, I was selling shirts in Johannesburg, Vienna, San Diego, Oregon
It's kind of the shit happens of the new millennium, you know? The kicker is this, here it is
Yoga has gone unopposed for thousands of years
You know what I mean? And so that is really the thrust of it
It's like, come on already
I'm sure there was some sucker 4,000 years ago standing in the back of some stone temple doing yoga with all those people thinking, what the fuck am I doing here? But didn't speak up, because he would have got his head cut off or his arms chopped off or incinerated or whatever they did
I heard that there was another t-shirt that you might have considered which was about Sting
Fuck Sting is, that is a brilliant shirt, but he's incorporated in the yoga shirt
And fuck yoga means fuck Sting
By the way, we have all sorts of, this is, we have fuck yoga water
Oh really? Yeah
This is for you
Thanks for coming
Thanks for coming to fuck yoga
Good afternoon and welcome to the second regional Northern California Yoga Championship
Give it up, give it up, give it hot
A yoga competition you say, isn't yoga spiritual you say, how can you compete in yoga you say? Well we say you can
And here we are today to present that
Life is a competition and yoga teaches you emotion in action
This competition is judged on the yoga postures, poise and gracefulness, but the competition is within yourself, taking you to a new level of self-improvement
Now let's get into that for a minute
Each year it gets better and better because when people see it, they want to do it the next year and then their friends want to do it and I think next year it'll probably be sponsored by Mercedes-Benz
We are going to announce the winners of our second annual North California Yoga Championship
First place, Isaac Garcia
You know I don't feel like I beat anybody because all these people, you know, they're my inspiration, they're my peers, they're my teachers and we can call it a competition, we can call it other things, but it doesn't, I don't think that that really embraces completely what's going on
We're just going out there to demonstrate what it is that we put our hearts into and what it is that we focus on
And what if I told you these championships are part of a move to get yoga in the Olympics, which is what Bikram's people are saying? That I would just laugh
I have definite questions about that
If we enshrine the physical part of the practice, we're condoning an understanding of yoga which falls far short of yoga's potential
It would really diminish and demean the whole beautiful and to me a very sacred practice
Whoever can do the most contortionist-like position wins
That isn't yoga for me
There always has to be a winner and I don't know how you deem that someone has reached enlightenment faster than the person in lane three
It seems almost comedic
Yeah, you can't really measure somebody's spiritual practice, but I think that a person's level of self-esteem and self-control is on display
Now there's the argument
Is this yogic? Is this what it's supposed to be about? Isn't it not about competition? Isn't it about personal practice? Of course it is
Then the other side of the coin is, yeah, but isn't it silly? At the end of the day, really what's the harm of it? They're practicing yoga, they hopefully get peace of mind out of it, and they're making some money
Big deal
If you live in the Olympics and that's someone's view of doing yoga, so be it
And maybe they will stumble onto the quote-unquote spiritual side or they'll find some kind of soothing or psychological calm through doing it, which would be beneficial
These are cease and desist letters sent to other studios and other clubs
Who's that sent to? Las Vegas
Is that Las Vegas? Yeah
In the yoga copyright and trademark case, Sandy and Bill McCauley and their daughter Vanessa band together with other studio owners who've been targeted by Bikram's lawyers
We had all these people that were scared to death and they didn't have the money to fight individually
My advice was to put together an organization to provide a common voice and a pooling of resources
The group calls itself Open Source Yoga Unity after the open source software movement, which rejects intellectual property and ownership restrictions, allowing anyone to design and market new computer code
I saw a parallel between open source software and yoga
Yoga's been around thousands of years
If somebody controls a part of it, then its development in other directions could possibly be hampered
It's not so much the issue of whether it's unique, it's whether or not you can control a style of yoga
The editors here at eWEEK
com, they were intrigued by open source yoga unities taking on the mantle of open source software as their cry of liberty
They felt that since it's such an ancient practice, it can't be copyrighted, it can't be controlled by any one person or any one practitioner
It's in the public domain
It's clear that business is business and competition is competition and it doesn't matter whether you're selling software or you're selling philosophy
I think that Beacon has worked very hard all his life to get where he is
I believe what he's trying to do is keep his yoga pure so that when you call something Beacon yoga, you know that you're teaching his yoga as it's meant to be taught
He teaches it to others and they're going to bring it out into the world and it's going to change and it's going to grow and that's the painful reality of the situation
Oh, you have a right to do whatever you want, but if you're going to call it Beacon yoga, then it should be Beacon yoga
I think it's a very painful case
A lot of these people were very close to Beacon at one time
Nobody had a connection with Bickram more than I did, so families were very, very close
I was Bickram's senior teacher, which he called me for 15 years
We used to call each other brothers and I still have a very, very warm place in my heart for Bickram even though we had political and business fallout
He's still family
I loved him and do, continue, always will because I deeply appreciate what I gained in the training
And the lawsuit wasn't about getting any money, we didn't sue him for any money, we just sued him so that we would have the right to do what we wanted to do, what we were trained to do
This is grassroots
These people just want to be able to continue their business
Positioning itself as the little guy taking on the big guy, OSYU asks the federal court to declare Bickram's claimed copyright and trademark as unenforceable
OSYU says yoga positions that existed in the public domain cannot be treated as intellectual property
Can someone copyright yoga? And if you can, what protections do you have under it? I don't like money, I don't like money, I don't like money, but I sure like what it is, but I sure like what it is, but I sure like what it is, but I sure like what it is
In America, it's naivete that present the ideas that yoga shouldn't make money or should be free
The tradition of yoga is that you pay all you have to the guru
That you scrape together every last cent that you can get and you put yourself at the mercy of the teacher
I don't see any problem with generating money if it's used wisely
The idea if you're a yogic you shouldn't be successful, I've been a big target for that
But I believe if you're a yogic, there's no choice, you will be successful
Hey, Barman, check this out
It wasn't our intention to have some large successful yoga center or a worldwide movement of any sort
All we did was try to share what we knew with people who were interested
Hello, I'm Evan
Hi, I'm Jojo
Hi, I'm Adesha
Hi, I'm Donna
Hi, I'm Rodney
Welcome to Family Yoga
You guys ready for one more? Okay
Why not make a living out of something that you're just really impassioned by? I love it
I love to share that knowledge
If I was less successful monetarily wise, I just don't think it would matter so much
I would still spend my hours a day trying to share this very special stuff
Yoga is more than a business
I remember Buddhist nun that I meditated with, Irina Sakhar, saying, what you need is right livelihood and yoga is a good livelihood
And so there's a lot of people who see yoga within its spiritual path and would probably be repulsed by some of these other fragmentations
One of the things that we found most startling and disappointing when we've come into yoga is how quickly we find yogis capable of claiming that other yogis aren't yogic
So all of a sudden everyone's going, well, that's not yoga
She's not, he's not, they aren't
And so everyone's kind of squabbling
I like two words, intention and desire
If your intention and desire is there, yeah, it can be very lucrative business
If your intention is to just make money and take advantage of people, then obviously it's a karmic thing that's going to work against you
You know, yoga traditionally is based on moral standards, moral disciplines and self restraints
Not rigid morals or religious morals, but just a natural morality that is, it makes a distinction between serving humanity and using or consuming
We like to skip over that part in America
We like to do what we like to do, morality is relative
I have my morality, you have yours
There's no hard and fast rules
But yoga industry watchers say the time may have come to create a single enforceable code of ethics for all yoga teachers in the United States to abide by
We need a moral code out there and ethics because we've lost our way that much as a yoga community
If we need it, then fine
I don't need a code of ethics personally, because I already have ethics
To say, okay, now we have to enforce a new code of ethics, it almost becomes a fascist like implication
It's hard to enforce a universal code when there's all these different camps, all these different styles
Yoga is so multi-dimensional and there may be people who only ever practice yoga as physical fitness, but for some people yoga is strictly a spiritual practice and how do you regulate that? Especially in the United States where the Constitution prohibits any regulation of religion
Over the years, this freedom has allowed some swamis, gurus and godmen to wreak unholy havoc, often dragging yoga's good name down with them
Down in Southern California, there's a guru that is guru in there
There are some groups that have kind of hitched a ride in the yoga craze
They see yoga as a means of recruitment
Within the yoga universe, some people are wrestling, I think, with the idea of purification
Can I purify my mind, my body, my heart, my breath? You can start to become obsessive
It's all about the leader as opposed to spirituality or yoga or some other practice
So the voluntary enslavement to the desires of the guru becomes a way to enlightenment
People are not brainwashed or hypnotized into this, but they are seduced
When the Beatles became involved with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Maharishi was able to use their endorsements to grow his financial empire
The empire is now far bigger and contains more wealth than all the Beatles' fortunes combined
It's estimated at between five and nine billion dollars
There is no such thing in any part of the world anywhere that has ever been such a thing as perfect guru who will never make any mistakes whatsoever
Is it dangerous? It depends on you and the teacher
Things and gurus have certainly changed
Popular yogi Rodney Yee once called yoga the backbone of his marriage
Now Rodney has left his wife of 14 years for another yoga teacher
In the past this might have caused an uproar, but today's yoga community is accustomed to yoga teachers acting like rock stars
Sometimes the guru relationship gets in the way
I make mistakes, you make mistakes, hopefully we get up, we get back up, we learn from them and we move on
And it's no surprise today's most successful gurus are part spiritual teacher and part showman
Do these people express a slightly strange kind of reverence for Bikram? Yes, they do
However Bikram quite correctly perceives that any publicity is good publicity, because how many other gurus can the average American reel off? He has like a brand name and he does what he can to promote himself, good for him
How did you meet each other? This was like a safe haven for them
They feel really bad for us and for themselves because they won't have us here
Is there room for me? I haven't been in a room this full in a long time
Thank you everyone
We were the first hot studio in the city
All of a sudden it just took off
We grew really rapidly and then other studios started opening, but that was still good because it was still getting the word out there to more and more people and everybody was really busy
In fact there were times when we cut our classes off because the room was too full
At the same time the yoga teacher training programs were just popping up everywhere
After that followed gyms being able to offer more yoga because they see people want yoga
There's too many choices for people and it diluted the number of people that everybody could see
When the big gym down the street opened our income went to half, like that
Lower Manhattan below Canal Street has 30,000 residents
If you get 1% of that market, that's 300 people
300 people in my opinion can barely support a yoga studio
Now we're splitting it across every gym and like five yoga studios
How can that make sense? Nowadays with the rents here in New York and then without having the numbers of the people, the classes be full, it's like it's very hard to make ends meet
But it's not really about us, is it? Like our students will find other places to study yoga and those teachings will survive anything that happens in business
Marilyn's students soon found a new yoga studio and they didn't have to look very far
Soon after Marilyn cleared out a new yoga studio went up in her space
It's run by one of Marilyn's former employees
Yeah, I mean good luck
I did everything I could to make the business go and so it's like good luck, you know
How can we help you? Yoga for a side dish of jelly, how can we help you? Oh, yeah
Every instructor is encouraged to put her or his soul and mind into the practice and so there's no interest in standardizing
The McYoga is out there, that's what Bikram represents, that is a franchise
That's a prepackaged form of yoga where the script is the same, every word, every experience is the same
The yoga community is kind of realizing that everything's changing, but given our commitment to yoga this looks like a pretty good result
Okay, here's the form if you've never been to YogaWorks, just fill in these out and then once you fill those out sign into the class
Come on, it's so exciting
How are you? I'm good
It's been wonderful to see you
I would never have joined this if the principals weren't there
To have these two guys come in and bring all of their expertise and the financial end of it into it, really allows us as yogis to teach well and do what my vision was all along
So I'm really happy about it
Opening the heart, the head is centered
It's really hard to be in business and then switch over and try and be yogis
It doesn't really match each other
It's very hard for me to sit there and really just worry about this individual and their spiritual growth and not have to think about money
In fact, it's adding stability to the yoga because it's very hard to have stability if there's no financial stability
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they don't open right downstairs from me
That would be a drag, you know
Let's face it
Small independent yoga studios will have a more difficult time surviving because these large chain studios will be able to offer more kinds of classes probably at a somewhat cheaper rate than the little local mom and pop yoga studio can afford to do
Is that a development that would please you or displease you? It makes me cry
Thank you for running such a good school
Well, thank you
All this time
It's been a pleasure
See you soon
Bye
Thank you, Ashley
Keep up your yoga
You did great
It is what it is and there's just a time sometimes that things come to an end
Thank you
Trisha Lam has quit her job at the Yoga Research and Education Center to begin an extended silent retreat under the guidance of a Buddhist guru
So this will be home for? Three years
A little over three years actually
In a three-year retreat you essentially work up to meditating 24 hours a day
The purpose of yoga is growth and self-awareness to the point of becoming completely awake
And that's the purpose of Buddhist practice, that's the purpose of Hindu yoga practice, it's the purpose of any true spiritual practice
OSYU, the yoga studio owners doing battle with Bikram, have gotten bad news
In a pre-trial ruling, a federal judge in San Francisco declares Bikram's yoga series has been designed in a manner creative enough to warrant copyright and trademark protection
Before the case gets to court, OSYU instigates a settlement
Studio owners like the McCauley's agree to stop using the Bikram name
Bikram drops his lawsuit
The McCauley's are no longer discussing the case, citing a confidentiality clause in the settlement
It seemed that the open source yoga unity people were going to defend a principle, but then it seemed that they settled their own particular dispute with the Bikram yoga organization and both sides went on their way
It was just really a betrayal of what I thought the goals of their position were
And I can't comment on what the terms of settlement, because it was confidential and that's part of the agreement, but as I said before, our purpose was not to protect ourselves
The reason why we got together in the first place was to protect everybody else
Yet the settlement only protects OSYU members
Studio owners outside the case are still wondering what to do
The basic copyright issues remain unresolved as to whether anyone can copyright a yoga routine
It would have been good to see whether a court upheld Bikram yoga's copyrights
I think that there was a strong argument to be made that they could not be enforced
The only reason I would prefer to have gone to a court case is so that we wouldn't have to talk around the issue, so people know exactly what it is they could or couldn't do
At the same time, it was getting very expensive, very costly, extremely stressful for everyone involved
So just let this thing be done with
The ball is in Bikram yoga's court
If they want to pursue it against other practitioners, they're free to press their copyright claims against them
We'll get you situated
I'll just have you twist that chair around the other way for me
This way? Yeah, good
Before the third Bikram yoga championship, Bikram finally sits down for a hastily convened formal interview
But when it's reiterated to him what issues the film will cover, he withdraws his permission to use this interview and any others we'd done
The next day, as we're setting up our cameras to film the event, Bikram orders our crew to leave the premises
Any further contact with him, he says, will have to be through his agent
As you know, I've been barred from the event, and I just wondered, have you ever found yourself on the outs with Bikram? Um, no, and I've definitely
You know, he's definitely told me to do things that I wasn't happy about
I choose to stay on good terms with Bikram because I believe in what he's doing and I want to be a part of it
We live in a world where we're taken apart, where as individuals we no longer feel connected to the generation before us, the generation after us, to our colleagues who are made to fight in corporate environments, to compete
Everything is just processed through and then spit back out to us
There is a yearning for meaning
Job stress, job loss, family problems, money problems
They need some sanctuary for their soul, and yoga provides that
Can yoga survive all of this commercialization, industrialization and so on? Yes, absolutely
I mean, it's been around for 5,000 years
It teaches the truth
The truth never goes away, it just becomes difficult to access in certain times
People who have spiritual awakening and who are real seekers, they'll find the right path out of it anyway
I'm just excited that right people will find something very beautiful that yoga has to offer
I really think it's all as it should be
The universe is behind this, not us
And so yoga will go exactly where it needs to go
Audio:
Subtitles:
Yoga Inc
Becoming Animal
Secret societies
Dalai Lama
Aldous Huxley And The Brave New World
The Future Makers
Vishnu Mantras
Yogananda: The Life of a Saint
Narratives of Modern Genocide
Jesus: The Hidden History