Asana™

Bikram Choudhury, founder of the popular Bikram's Yoga College of India, has copyrighted his sequence of poses and threatened to sue any teacher who doesn't abide by his terms. But yoga is thousands of years old. Can he really do that?

By James Greenberg

In fact, Ashtanga Yoga--which was created by Jois--has very few restrictions. Some teachers are certified by Jois, but many more who teach the system are not. There is no governing body, and nothing is formalized. "As a teacher, I feel I don't own this; I'm just passing it on," says Chuck Miller, senior Ashtanga teacher and cofounder of Yoga Works in Santa Monica, California. "But as a business owner, there's a certain sense of wanting to protect the entity and not let people siphon it off."

And while Miller reluctantly defends the YogaWorks trademark as warranted, he's no longer prepared to be a cop for Ashtanga Yoga. When he began teaching in Los Angeles in 1987, he was so worried about people going off and distorting the method that he tried to stop it. "I found myself playing the role of a yoga policeman," he says, "which mostly aggravated me and appropriately pushed people further into finding their own expression." He adds, "I realized all I could do was my own practice and present what I know and what I learned from my teacher, and let the next generation of students make their own choices."

The Iyengar response has been markedly different. Early this year, Theresa Rowland, owner of Studio Yoga in Chatham and Madison, New Jersey, sent an e-mail to Terri Updergraff, who runs the Yoga Company in Sonoma, California. The note was about a workshop Updergraff had scheduled with Sarah Powers--who draws on various styles of yoga, including Iyengar, as noted in the workshop description. In the e-mail, Rowland informed Updergraff that "it is no longer possible to use the word Iyengar in a workshop description unless the workshop is only Iyengar yoga" and that this restriction was being imposed at "the request of Iyengar," who was said to be considering making it "a legal distinction."

If this wasn't the yoga police, it was certainly the advance guard. The Iyengar Yoga National Association of the United States (IYNAUS) has indeed been concerned about uncertified teachers using the Iyengar name to express or define what they teach.

This differs from Bikram's attempt to control not only the use of his name but of the postures themselves. But on at least one point, the Iyengar community and Bikram agree. "If individual teachers have told Bikram, or the head of any school, that they agree to teach what they have been taught without mixing methods, then that's what they have to do," says Gloria Goldberg, member of the certification committee of IYNAUS.

Still, the Iyengar approach is much gentler than Bikram's. A few years ago, IYNAUS trademarked Iyengar logos exclusively for certified teachers and Iyengar Associations. But the money it charges for membership and use of the logos is minimal--more like professional dues than a franchising fee--and much of the revenue it raises is pumped back into the organization. Other trademarks and copyrights of the Iyengar name are being investigated. "I think we've all talked about doing something legally," says Goldberg, "but how to do something that's not detrimental to teachers, students, and the yoga community at large--all that needs to be considered."

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