Piedmont Yoga Studio News: October 2011
The email from the Yoga Teacher spoke of desperate, frustration, outrage. It reminded me of a very short, out-of-shape person just ordered to play basketball one-on-one against Michael Jordan in his prime. The time had come, the author stirringly declared, to once and for all do "what's right" and put a stop to this "unacceptable and irrational" behavior.
What was this all about? Why was our YT up in arms? Who was behaving so abominably? Well, the "who" was none other than our old friend, Bikram Choudhury, up to his old tricks again. Remember Bikram? The world-famous yoga teacher who usually goes by one name only, like Cher or Liberace? In case you don't, he's the founder of the wildly popular eponymous style of yoga, which consists of a fixed sequence of 26 poses, coordinated by a teacher parroting a standardized script, and performed in a room heated to 300 degree Fahrenheit (149 degree Celsius), the idea being, um, um, actually I'm not sure what the "idea" is, though I'm told it's really a good one. The sequence and accompanying script are intellectual properties jealously guarded by Bikram and his posse of legal Furies. "Guarded" might be an understatement here. A few years ago, the Bikram-ites went so far as to copyright the sequence, so that anyone using it without first obtaining permission-and coughing up a substantial amount of moolah for the privilege and honor-was immediately slapped up the side of the head with a cease and desist order, under pain of, well, you don't want to know. Oh, the gnashing of teeth this occasioned in Yoga Land. Copyright asanas? Sacrilege! Perversion! Thank God Patanjali isn't alive to witness this. No WAY he can get away with that ... is there? There is? He did? HOW much can he collect for copyright infringement? Wow!
Apparently our YT had been playin' without payin', though it's anyone's guess how he missed finding out about the dire consequences of doing this. 'Cause around these parts at least it's common knowledge that Bikram will eat you alive if you teach anything that smacks of "his" yoga without first forking over to its namesake his hard earned and well deserved pound of flesh. As I perused the email the suspicion gradually snuck up on me that our teacher had been trying to pull a fast one, hoping not to get caught in flagrante delicto. Why did I suspect this, other than the fact that I'm a naturally suspicious person? Well, the letter from the lawyers also demanded that YT quit HIRING BIKRAM CERTIFIED TEACHERS. There was considerable concern on the part of the obviously overly protective lawyers that YT was leading these innocents down the road to ruin by enticing them to teach at a non-certified school. Imagine that. Here's somebody sticking his head in the lion's mouth, and at the same time hiring the LION'S PROGENY to back him up. Do you mean to tell me that not one of these little Bikrams ever hinted to YT that, gosh, maybe you're asking for, ah, trouble here?
Anyway, once exposed and chastised and threatened by the lawyers with financial ruin, our teacher decided it was high time to put a foot down. It might have helped his credibility if the foot had descended sometime before the confrontation, thereby demonstrating his motivation was principle and not what seemed like, I hate to say, self-interest. But to paraphrase the old saying, better wait than never. Whatever his ultimate motivation YT wasn't going to take this in Shavasana, the bik, er, big bully had to be stopped before he copyrighted every last one of the estimated 8.4 million asanas and forcibly extracted tribute from every yoga teacher on the planet. But YT couldn't slay the evil dragon single-handed. He needed was a vorpal sword, what he described as a yoga "heavyweight" willing to enter the fray, you know, a teacher whose stature equaled or even exceeded Bikram's (if such a one existed). Did someone reading this letter know someone like that, someone who could put Bikram in his place (and of course in the process save YT's as..ana)? Here I had to stop and re-read the paragraph, just to make sure I wasn't having a 60's type flash-back. The thought that one of our venerable yoga "heavyweights" would appear in shining armor to deliver him from the dastardly clutches of Bikram Whiplash was pure fantasy. All the heavyweights I can think of are too busy defending their own turf to invade someone else's. And besides, despite all the self-righteous huffing and puffing about Bikram's method, his lavish lifestyle, and his sponsorship of "yoga competitions," the attention he gets in the mainstream press for his "bad boy" image attracts lots of people to yoga and so is good for business. Not bloody likely anyone in the biz would go after him. At least YT showed he hadn't completely tumbled off the deep end: he understood that going toe-to-toe, mano-a-mano, with a team of legal beagles hired by a multi-gazillionaire was likely to be expensive. Was anyone reading this email willing to drop a coin or two in his begging skull?
At first I thought, why get involved, YT is making a Mount Meru out of a molehill. There must be a few thousand asanas, so the number of possible sequences has to be in the tens of millions. Why was YT so fixated on Bikram's? Again that ol' demon suspicion reared its ugly head. Hmm. Was it because Bikram had marketed his brain child so well-the copyright not only legally protected the sequence, it also marked it off from all others as something "special"-that it established itself in the admittedly less-than-rigorous minds of many yoga students as THE sequence, when in fact no concrete evidence exists it's any different from-or better than-say, the sequences our Deep Yoga trainees make up as their homework? And could it be that teachers, who have a slightly better grip on this than their students, want to cash in on the sequence's cachet, without of course dealing with the messy details of buying off the person who actually turned this simple string of asanas into his own personal money printing machine? Could that be it? Nah, not in Yoga Land.
So finally I couldn't help myself, I had to stick my nose in. I emailed YT and advised him to drop this battle like a hot potato, that he had about as much chance of winning as Custer did at Little Big Horn. Why fritter away time and money when he could out-Bikram Bikram. How? Dig into the old yoga books and use their asanas, all public domain, to MAKE UP YOUR OWN SEQUENCE. Then list all the many health benefits these books claim for their asanas, and convince a few retired jocks and Hollywood actors to endorse it-really, who do Americans trust more than a football player with bad knees or the latest blockbuster heart-throb dressed up like a bat or spider-AND THEN GIVE THAT SEQUENCE AWAY FOR FREE! Let anyone who wants to teach or alter the YT sequence do so. I say, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and provide a shining example of magnanimous generosity to counter Bikram's bottomless pit of greed. Finally be sure to send a copy to Bikram ... and all his lawyers.
