Yoga’s fresh blend
ANUSARA students will tell you their style of yoga is more than just exercise.
It’s a community -- one of like-minded people who accentuate the positive as the route toward spiritual and physical well-being.
Among the believers is B.J. Galvin, who last month drove six hours from Carefree, Ariz., with her two sons so that they could attend founder John Friend’s weekend workshop in Los Angeles.
The L.A. stop of what Friend called his “Align With the Divine” tour packed students into the ballroom of the Park Plaza Hotel like sardines (or string beans, for the vegetarians). The 280 attendees came not just from Los Angeles, but also from San Diego, Yosemite, Vermont and even Spain -- all wanting to study at the feet of the guy who in 1997 trademarked his brand of yoga, Anusara.
Anusara is one of the fastest-growing styles of yoga -- but not one without criticism.
Nine years ago there were only 160 certified Anusara teachers. That number has swelled to 1,200, as the number of students has grown to nearly 200,000. And Southern California, which has more than 50 teachers, is one of Anusara’s biggest markets.
Los Angeles Anusara teacher Hillary Rubin attributes Friend’s popularity to his humility and humor. “There’s nothing pretentious about him,” she said. “Other teachers can make you feel like they’re above you or make you afraid when they walk around the room. John’s right there with you.”
At the Park Plaza workshop, Friend’s people skills were evident. His seemingly effortless charisma and his spontaneous cartoon-like sound effects made challenging poses such as a handstand seem less intimidating -- as did his encouragement. He got plenty of laughs too.
At the same time, he took Hindu tantra philosophy -- which promotes the belief that everyone has the freedom to see and experience the intrinsic good in themselves, in their lives, in others -- and made it accessible.
Followers of Friend, like Galvin, are sometimes called “Friend heads,” an affectionate term for people who revere him (he gets standing ovations) and are attracted by the spirituality. In most yoga traditions, the body is considered an obstacle that needs to be subjugated or disciplined so that one can transcend the physical and achieve enlightenment. In Anusara, the body is something to celebrate -- providing a connection with inner divinity, or goodness.
“In classical yoga, it’s all about renouncing and giving up materialism. Then you go into these fancy studios and they’re selling $70 yoga shirts. It was confusing to me,” said Galvin, a commercial real estate manager who is working toward getting an Anusara teaching certificate.
“With Anusara, we acknowledge that we live in this world where I have kids, a car payment, a mortgage and a job, but I can look at my life and try to make it better by embracing what’s good and by aligning to something that’s greater than me,” Galvin said.
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‘Flow with grace’
Friend, who is on the road 200 days a year teaching workshops and training teachers, emphasized such a worldview when his friend and collaborator Douglas R. Brooks, a Hindu tantra scholar at the University of Rochester in New York, helped him name his yoga style Anusara, which in Sanskrit means “to flow with grace.”
“I wanted to emphasize that the physical practice and the technical stuff were a way to foster spirit and celebrate the tantric view that the body is a magnificent embodiment of supreme consciousness,” he said recently by phone from Anusara headquarters in the Woodlands, Texas.
Anusara is based primarily on Iyengar yoga, which emphasizes precise body alignment and was founded by B.K.S. Iyengar, who has an institute in Pune, India. Friend taught Iyengar yoga for more than a decade but, as he studied Hindu Tantra philosophy, biomechanics and kinesiology, he realized Iyengar would not have approved of the way he was organizing the alignment principles or the injection of tantric philosophy.
Ultimately, he resigned -- sending Iyengar a resignation letter out of respect.
He did lose some students who, he says, didn’t want to be renegades. It wasn’t the first time Friend had risked his livelihood for yoga. A decade earlier, he had given up a successful career as a financial analyst and moved in with his parents so that he could teach yoga full-time. However, this time he had a loyal group of students all over the country -- ones who made the leap with him.
His resignation and his rise in popularity have not always been met with enthusiasm by those in America’s tight-knit yoga community.
Marion Garfinkel, a senior Iyengar teacher in Philadelphia who has been practicing and teaching in the system since the 1970s, said, “I certified John Friend -- and he’s a great teacher -- but I will also say you either base something on Iyengar and follow it through or you don’t. Now we have these self-appointed gurus here [in the U.S], people [like Friend] who take their own names and add yoga after it.... They have not contributed something significant to the tradition.”
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Not for purists
Yoga purists say the tradition originated in India and therefore any deviation from the Indian guru lineage dilutes yoga and commercializes it with American entrepreneurship.
Friend says the business aspects of the Anusara organization (the trademarking, the application process to get into a workshop, the licensing agreements teachers sign after certification, the selling of Anusara t-shirts) are mostly designed to protect the integrity of the style.
“I worked so hard building a high standard and curriculum that I need to maintain the credibility of my teachers and the system,” he said.
Friend’s supporters say he has added something that other styles have long neglected -- fun.
“Sometimes yoga can be a bit dry in the way it is taught,” said Yoga Journal editorial director Kathryn Arnold. “John is warm and fuzzy and big-hearted, and since he has blended the tantra philosophy into his yoga, it really celebrates life and it’s just joyful. That trickles down to his teachers, who approach their classes from an attitude of can-do encouragement. You really walk away from an Anusara class challenged, but you also feel a sense of accomplishment.”
City Yoga on Fairfax Avenue was Los Angeles’ first Anusara studio. Since it opened in 1999, it has grown from a small space of 1,300 feet to a bustling 4,000-square-foot studio that offers more than 75 classes a week.
A typical class begins with inspirational remarks by the instructor and chanting of the Anusara invocation in Sanskrit, which talks about the divine teacher within and without.
In most yoga classes, the only sound you’ll hear is the voice of the teacher, but during an Anusara class, students are asked to help spot each other by working with partners, and after the teacher asks a student to demonstrate a pose the whole room applauds to celebrate the accomplishment.
At first this support group-like atmosphere made Judith Lewis suspicious.
A journalist and longtime yoga practitioner, Lewis said: “I thought the applauding was so weird. I don’t know why I kept going back. I think I was desperate. I had been practicing Ashtanga yoga for five years, and my back hurt, my rotator cuff was ripping, and I had all these injuries from doing yoga. The Anusara system healed my body and made it possible for me to do yoga again.”
Lewis and Naime Jezzeny, Los Angeles’ first certified Anusara teacher, who helped open City Yoga, believe those in the yoga world won’t admit a dirty little secret: Yoga can cause injury. That was one reason Anusara resonated so strongly with Jezzeny, who has an undergraduate degree from USC in biomechanics and exercise physiology. When he was introduced to Anusara, he said from his new home in New Hope, Pa., “that was the first time yoga was taught to me in a way that I felt was biomechanically sound.”
The Anusara principles break down alignment into easy-to-understand components -- things such as inner spiral (rotating the legs, thighs and pelvis toward the core), outer spiral (rotating the legs, thighs and pelvis away from the core) and focal points (localized power spots from which the muscular energy emanates).
“I don’t care if you’re at the computer, or lifting weights, spinning, doing Pilates or yoga, it’s all about good alignment,” Jezzeny says, “and John is really a genius in his ability to systemize good basic alignment for yoga.”
This therapeutic approach to yoga is one of Friend’s passions. And although he has no formal education in kinesiology and there is no research examining the benefits of Anusara, he said his teaching yoga for more than 26 years, studying bodywork systems such as Hellerwork and Feldenkrais, and apprenticing with kinesiologists and physical therapists has given him the ability to identify good alignment. “But what’s most interesting to me is how alignment affects the body, the mind and the spirit.”
That conjuring of spirit is what Bobette Buster experienced during the Los Angeles workshop. “John put all the pieces together for me,” Buster said. “He explained the mind-body-spirit connection and did it in a folksy conversational way that was not at all intimidating.”
Another Friend head is born.