At a meeting between the studios and government officials, leading Ashtanga yoga teacher Eddie Stern led a chant to Ganesha.

He is a remover of obstacles,” said Eddie Stern, the director of Ashtanga Yoga New York. “Even obstacles like the tax department.”

Here’s how bad it got:

The New York State Department of Taxation audited and fined some studios for not collecting a 4.5 percent sales tax on classes. The New York City Department of Buildings has fined at least two studios for not having a proper permit. And the state’s Labor Department has audited some studios for listing their instructors as independent contractors rather than employees. Some yoga studio operators say that financially troubled agencies are looking for ways to squeeze money out of an industry that is estimated to earn over $6 billion a year in the United States.

For now the agencies have backed off and determined that studios don’t owe the taxes and fines. But this post will not be the end of the story. In an age of tight state and local budgets, attention will be paid to the burgeoning yoga industry. Studio owners will have to factor in a risk of increased tax bills as part of their business planning. And it could result in yoga class prices getting ever higher — and they are already too expensive.

Ashtanga Yoga Center’s baseline is the ninety minute class. The introductory class focuses on basic postures and breathing; it’s a clipped version of the full primary series. Here’s what I’ve been looking for: Ashtanga Prep-level 2 and an Intro to First Series-level 2/3. Once you’ve mastered the asanas or poses and are able to move through the entire first series at one breath per movement, you’re ready for First Series-level 3, a two-hour class.

Cool. Dive in, Robin.

Image by Michelle Haymoz

If you weren’t there, or even if you were, you may be interested in listening to audio of the ceremony. It was outside, right on the beach, so there are the hoots of volleyball games, a helicopter roaring overhead, and of course yogis talking and clapping. The whole thing is 54 minutes, so it’s going to be a big file. (Oh, and you might want to turn the sound up for easier listening.)

Somewhere on the path to enlightenment — or, at the very least, lowered blood pressure — the famously nonjudgmental and inward-looking practice of yoga became a public performance.

Like in every class you’ve ever been to. As Anna says, “ugh, the showoffs. Like the bald guy at the beginning of some classes who loudly practices his handstand when everyone else is trying to relax. Or the Mila Kunis-look-alike who smirks at everyone else in the room after successfully standing head-to-knee.”

Certainly, the competition, put on by Bikram’s wife, Rajashree Choudury, has earned the scorn of serious teachers. At least in the West – Choudury herself is a five-time winner of the all-India Yoga Competition. (And modern yoga, as I understand it, was developed at least in part to show the colonial British that India had a tradition of strength, as well.)

“The more you separate yoga from its real intention, the more you center it on the physical, you might was well go to the gym,” says Linda Sparrowe, a yoga instructor based in Rhode Island. “That’s not really what yoga is about. And it’s certainly nothing that I’m interested in.”

Sparrowe wrote a piece, Making Friends with Your Body for Yoga International that warned, “a yoga practice that focuses primarily on the physical body can actually exacerbate any preexisting body issues.”

In any case, worrying about the other people in the class, whether to admire or quietly complain, does not help one’s growth.

Later that day, I take an evening class with one of my favorite teachers, Danielle, who makes it a point to create a calm and accepting atmosphere. She puts us through an exhausting series of poses before instructing us to squat on the back of our mats to prep for crow, a difficult arm-balancing maneuver.

“Lose your ambition,” she says. I’ve been trying for months to achieve the pose, in which one’s body weight is fully supported by one’s arms and core. I suck in my gut, push into the ground with my palms, then lift my right foot off the floor. “Lose your ambition,” Danielle calls out again. My other foot comes up off the mat and I take a peek to my left to check on the progress of a woman who made a big show of balancing in tripod five minutes earlier.

Then I fall forward, flat on my face.

Reading YogaDork’s coverage of the Vanity Fair article on the expansion of Jois Yoga (fronted by Sharath Jois and bankrolled by the wife of a multibillionaire hedge fund manager) into the backyard of beloved Ashtanga teacher Tim Miller, we were struck by the following comment:

I think I’m just about disgusted by yoga studios and yoga ‘lifestyle’ and yoga boutiques and cut-throat yoga teacher competition and yoga festivals and yoga facebook networking and celebrities that do yoga and the whole nine yards. And don’t forget yoga gurus ready to capitalize on all of this under the banner of maintaining a lineage. I have definitely reached that tipping point. Thank you, Vanity Fair. I was focusing disgust on John Friend and his minions, but now I see it’s bigger than that.

.. If this yoga is such a smooth fit for privileged assholes that treat revered teachers like shit, and for megalomaniacal empire builders that screw their employees and promise me an opening from their new Soulmat (TM), then I start to question if this yoga is so valuable.

This reminds me of a sweatshirt I saw at the AshtangaYogaConfluence: Keep Yoga Weird. I loved it. In the aftermath of the John Friend meltdown, the rise and fall of Bikram and now a mass influx of capital into the pretty darn pure world of Ashtanga, there is clearly a real hunger to stop the commercialization, the mass marketing, the mainstreaming.

Yoga is not a gym class; it’s not even a physical practice. Asana practice is but the first (critically important) limb of yoga, which is an Eastern philosophy of experiencing pure consciousness. “Penetration of the mind is the object of yoga …” BKS Iyengar famously wrote.

Clearly, things have been pushed too far and while no one at the power yoga class may ever notice, a whole lot of people who take yoga seriously appear to have reached their limits.

Did Guruji tell Sonia Jones to spread ashtanga yoga?

At the amazing Ashtanga Yoga Confluence this weekend, I had dinner with a fellow Ashtangi, who studies with Tim Miller, who said this: “The elephant in the room is what’s going on with the Jois Foundation.” This was news to me. “What’s going on?” I asked.

He told me, although not in such salacious detail as a piece just published in Vanity Fair, Yoga-for-Trophy-Wives Fitness Fad That’s Alienating Discipline Devotees..

Trophy wives? Ashtanga? What’s that all about? Well …. the trophy wife in question is one Sonia Jones, who’s married to a multi-billionaire hedge manager. Jones, a devoted follower of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, has started spending millions to create the Jois Foundation, which has opened four shalas, launched a yoga clothing line and is working with nonprofits to bring Ashtanga yoga to the world.

All great stuff, except the Foundation opened its first shala in Encinitas, California, home town to Tim Miller, one of Guruji’s very first Western students, and treated him pretty dismissively as well. And more than that, it feels to some that the Jois family and the foundation are moving aggressively to market Ashtanga.

Jois Yoga, which from the outside can seem like one part Lululemon (the hugely successful line of high-end yoga clothing) and one part Yogaworks (the California-based chain of yoga studios), is a challenge to all of that. It feels like a commercial enterprise—or worse. “I believe it’s about power, and I don’t want to be part of it,” says Lino Miele, a senior teacher, about Jois.

The article reports the outrage over the Jois Foundation’s opening in Encinitas, “down the street from Tim.”

“It blew my doors off,” says the owner of another yoga studio. “Tim was one of Guruji’s primary guys in America and was totally devoted to him. He sponsored Guruji every time he came to America. I was aghast.” One teacher says it seemed like a “fuck you” to Tim.

It wasn’t just the opening but the fact that the foundation apparently didn’t give Miller a heads-up, tried and succeeded at stealing some of his teachers, and then, when he considered working with the Jois facility, was offered a fitness-teacher-style contract.

Longterm Ashtangis are upset with Sharath and with the Jois Foundation. People have stopped going to Mysore. Lino Miele asked to have his name removed as an approved teacher.

Right now, it looks like a salient moment in the post-Guruji development of Ashtanga yoga. Will a new generation consider Sharath a worthy transmitter of the practice? Or will they find a deeper transmission from the Western teachers who were studying with Guruji when Sharath was in diapers?

Ultimately, that’s how it will be decided, by whom the students choose to sit before. “The future of yoga is decided by the students, and whoever will bear the torch of Ashtanga yoga will be decided by the students. I don’t think we need to try to control it. We just need to sit with the uncertainty of it,” Miami-based Kino MacGregor says.

To a very large degree, though, Ashtangis don’t like uncertainty. The method provides the certainty of series in which you always know what pose comes next, where the drshti is, and so on. It may have taken a few years, but losing Guruji may mean Ashtanga faces a full-blown identity crisis.

Bottom line, it comes down to teacher ethics. Says one of the people quoted:

“My guru was very clear on this point,” he says. “When you teach yoga, there’s a mantra you say before you teach. ‘I am not a man. I am not a woman. I am not a person. I am not myself. I am a teacher.’ When you step into a yoga studio and you’re the teacher, there needs to be a boundary there.”

After the John Friend/Anusara debacle in the last few weeks, another in a long line of guru misuses, I would like to emphatically state that the whole celebrity guru yoga thing must stop. Branded yoga must end. It is about personal transmission and the enhancement and development of each individual’s awareness of their own power and connection, not giving up that power to others. No deification!

In this context comes a letter from Douglas Brooks, who apparently is a Tantra philosopher and godfather of Anusara. Brooks fancies himself a latter-day Tom Paine, calling for common sense in the radical sense. To wit:

From John’s every public statement, I have found myself beyond credulity with the absence of disclosure, by the insensitivity towards the true victims of this crisis (i.e, the members of the community), and, frankly, what I can only describe as a disingenuous lack of candor on John’s part. I cannot doubt John’s sincerity, which I take to be more alarming for the facts that we already possess.

As someone who doesn’t care about Anusara particularly, I was more interested in Brooks’ statements about the larger damage the situation has caused.

the conversation about yoga’s benefits, the history of teaching and teachers, and the study of Indian spiritualities, especially Tantra, has suffered a significant setback due to John’s actions. The Anusara community and the yoga community at large suffers that degradation by association, implication, and public perception.

Brooks concludes that Anusara is inextricably linked to Friend and that continuing the organization, even under a new CEO or being a teacher-based organization fails to repair the damage.

So long as there is Anusara, Inc., even one organized by teachers or established as a non-profit (the business of which I understand is complex and would involve enormous resources of community effort), there will be direct association with John Friend. Call this a mistaken perception or even a misunderstanding of the “new” Anusara, any such reorganization will further fracture community, harden feelings, and create the tangible impression that John’s actions and choices are supported and being represented. In my opinion, any re-formulation of Anusara as a teacher’s co-operative, a non-profit organization, etc., can only result in these unwanted consequences.