Nobody fucks with me." Perhaps because of his erratic, grandiose behavior, the hundreds of cease-and-desist letters he sent to studios across the country were remarkably effective.
"It's ridiculous to have someone claiming that these are their postures."Ĭhoudhury, 56, is a yoga guru so brash that he has been known to compare himself to Superman and Buddha, teach from a throne wearing nothing but a tiny Speedo and a headset mike, and proclaim his style as "the only yoga." When asked how he could make such drastic statements, he told Business 2.0 magazine: "Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. "Yoga is an old philosophy and an old tradition," says Tony Sanchez, who opened a Bikram Yoga studio in San Francisco in 1985. "But from the yoga side I think it's really sad." Mom-and-pop studios across the country, owned by people like the Morrisons who feel they are doing a service by helping to disseminate the teachings of yoga, are outraged by Choudhury's hubris. "From the business side, I kind of understand it," says Judith Hanson Lasater, a prominent Bay Area yoga instructor who has been teaching since 1971. Choudhury says that yoga studios that want to continue teaching Bikram Yoga must pay franchise and royalty fees, change their name to Bikram's Yoga College of India, stop teaching other styles of yoga, use only Bikram-approved dialogue when instructing students, refrain from playing music during classes, and a host of other stipulations.
To start this process, he recently obtained a copyright for his particular sequence of yoga poses - a 90-minute series of 26 postures and two breathing exercises done in a room heated to 105 degrees. If Choudhury has his way, every Bikram Yoga studio in the world will soon be franchised and under his control. "Yoga is something really personal, something that we love.
"We're not just scared about what this could do to our finances," Mark says. The warning, the Morrisons say, makes a mockery of yoga's ultimate promise of both peace of mind and freedom. The missive alleged that the Morrisons were violating a recently acquired copyright and insisted that they comply with a long list of demands and pay fines starting at $150,000 - or risk a lawsuit. "It was a dagger of a letter - long, nasty and filled with allegations," says Mark, who is also a lawyer. The correspondence came from lawyers for Bikram Choudhury, founder of the fastest-growing style of yoga in America, Bikram Yoga. The studio - with its meditation room, yoga programs for kids and pregnant women, spaces for baby showers and weddings - has become the nexus of a small but devoted community.Ī year ago, the Morrisons received a letter that threatened the future of their beloved business. After years of working long hours, and investing more than $100,000 in expensive renovations, the Morrisons' venture, Yoga Studio Costa Mesa, has become more than just a place to bend and stretch. Eight years after Kim borrowed $25,000 to open a tiny yoga studio in Costa Mesa, Calif., it has grown into a bustling enterprise that employs 12 instructors and offers 40 classes a week in several styles of yoga. Kim and Mark Morrison thought they had achieved small-business nirvana.