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The guru to the stars who is tying the yoga world in knots

By Andrew Buncombe

Feb. 15— Bikram Choudhury likes to get people hot and bothered, and he likes to get them in a twist.

The yoga guru, who lists Madonna, Raquel Welch and Serena Williams among his celebrity followers, is also hugely protective of his famous and controversial style. Anyone thinking of adding, altering or in any way changing his 26 copyrighted and trademarked postures, each to be performed twice in a heated room, has received a “cease and desist” letter from his lawyers.

The letter is curt and pointed: if a yoga teacher has not attended a $5,000-per-person training program and is not paying a studio franchise fee, he or she should not be teaching “Bikram” yoga. The letter threatens penalties of $150,000 for any infringement.

But now the yoga teachers are hitting back and a federal lawsuit has been filed against Choudhury claiming yoga is a 5,000-year-old tradition that cannot be owned. And if Choudhury doesn’t like it? Well, say the enthusiasts, he’s flexible enough to know where to shove it.

Elizabeth Rader, a copyright lawyer and a fellow at Stanford University, is representing the group Open Source Yoga Unity. She said: “We’re not disputing that Choudhury did something creative and useful in putting the postures together in a certain order. Our belief is that you can’t treat the poses as private property. Right now, people are trying to teach yoga but are not sure what is going to get them sued.”

The growth of Choudhury’s form of yoga has been phenomenal. Since he arrived in the US from India in 1971 his yoga has developed a cult-like following. He claims that he is opening two new studios every day and that worldwide he has more than 800 schools in 220 countries, including Britain. His yoga’s success has been aided by its popularity among celebrities such as Raquel Welch, who ironically also fell foul of Choudhury’s lawyers when she published a book on yoga.

Choudhury, 57, is quite blunt about his decision to go after those teachers he believes are infringing his copyright. He told Business 2.0 magazine: “I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

The guru claims that his yoga -- ideally performed in mirrored rooms at a temperature of 105F (40C) -- can cure everything from heart disease to hepatitis C. And he claims that he has no alternative but to protect his livelihood. “I’m not happy about it,” he recently told reporters. “When I first came here I never charged a dime. But my students said, ‘You have to charge something or else nobody will believe you know something.’”

There are plenty who think Choudhury is not only going too far but also has lost sight of what yoga is supposed to be about. Mark and Kim Morrison, who opened a small yoga studio in northern California and invested more than $100,000 in the project, were last year sued by Choudhury’s lawyers. Although they had planned to fight the action, their insurance company opted to settle out of court for an undisclosed sum. Morrison said yesterday: “In his book he talks about how his guru told him to go to America and teach yoga. That is what we are doing and he is trying to stop us.”

The Morrisons no longer advertise themselves as practitioners of Bikram yoga, which they say was restricted to a list of postures including the half moon pose, the eagle, the triangle, the tree, the cobra, the half tortoise and the rabbit.

Morrison said: “We would have students saying, ‘Do you have anything other than these 26 postures,’ and we’d tell them that actually, yes, there was a lot more.”

Others support the guru. Lynn Whitlow, who teaches Bikram yoga in San Francisco, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “His desire is not to police yoga but to maintain the purity of his teaching. People who are suing him over this take his class to teach his yoga, and then decide they want to change the yoga. If you want to change it, do it, but don’t call it Bikram yoga. It’s like Starbucks. You go in knowing what you want.”

No one from Choudhury’s headquarters in Los Angeles was available for comment yesterday.

Source: Independent (UK)

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I was worried about vaginas

By Finn Finneran

Feb. 18 (AGR) -- Isn’t it interesting how a production all about a human body part can raise so many eyebrows, cause a room full of people to bust out laughing, gasp or perhaps even cause a few tears to shed? Cover your children’s ears folks; the body part I’m talking about is the vagina. As students (and one professor) preformed stories based on interviews with women about their vaginas on UNCA campus last weekend, the crowd couldn’t help but perk up at the very word: vagina.

The Vagina Monologues, compiled by Eve Ensler, is a direct challenge to those who do cover their ears to the V-word. The whole project which included collecting stories, recording them and performing the stories as monologues is about calling attention to the experiences of women with vaginas; its about telling some of the stories that all too often get ignored. Continuing this challenge to society’s blind eyes, this performance of The Vagina Monologues benefited Our Voice, a local rape crisis organization. Obviously the production went much deeper than a critique on one simple medical term.

The production itself was quite mixed. Acting talent varied all over the place, with some struggling to get their lines out and others flooring me over how well done their performance was. One of these amazing performances was called “The woman who loved to make vaginas happy.” This piece was from the perspective of a dominatrix who particularly loved to make other women moan. She loved it so much in fact that she was able to impersonate all the different moans she’d heard throughout her sex life including the “right on it” moan, the “Irish catholic” moan (“oh please forgive me!”) and “the surprise triple orgasm” moan. Other performances were less humorous like the “Crooked braid” monologue about a Lakota woman who was repeatedly beaten by her husband that ended on this line: “They took our land. They took our ways. They took our men. And we want them back.” All of the monologues struck different cords in me, be it out of sadness, laughter, or just being able to relate; but I’m sure that all of the monologues could have been much stronger had the actors not had cue cards, especially in some cases where it seemed as if the person on stage could not take their eyes off the card in front of them. Although the cue cards proved to be a distraction, there was something that worried me more.

The night’s performances began on the same concerned note that I had before the show: “I was worried... I was worried about vaginas. I was worried about what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don’t think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas – a community, a culture of vaginas.” Only I was worried about what The Vagina Monologues thought about vaginas, and also what they didn’t think about them. I was even more worried about writing a review of this production when I knew that despite their efforts to tell silenced stories, a major one would still be left untold. Who’d they leave out? Transgender folks.

I couldn’t write this review without shedding light on the fact that as a transgender person I am not a woman, but I do have a vagina. I also couldn’t skip over the fact that many women in this world don’t have vaginas. The Vagina Monologues made the mistake of assuming that vaginas and women were synonymous. That although some of us have the very same experiences as being women or cunted creatures, such as the reality of rape and other forms of abuse in our lives, The Vagina Monologues’ attempt at empowering people and creating community left us to be the marginalized group just as biological women have been for so long.

Society has learned, and still has a lot to learn, from what feminism has taught us over the years. Feminism has brought many beautiful things to our culture, like The Vagina Monologues as a small, but worthwhile example. I do hope, however, that feminism continues to learn itself, and push us all to be free from the patriarchy.

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David Orr speaks at Warren Wilson College

By Gretchen Davidson

Feb. 16 (AGR)— David Orr, author or Ecological Literacy, Earth in Mind, and Nature of Design spoke to a large audience Thursday night at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa. The topic of his speech was “The Corruption of Patriotism and the Environment in the Age of Terror” and heavily focused on the political events of the last four years that have denigrated our society’s democracy and through that, devastated the environment. Orr’s overwhelming emphasis, throughout the address, remained on the pressing importance of reversing the current flow of US politics in the 2004 elections.

Orr began by recognizing three current political documents that he feels have destabilized US democracy: the Patriot Act, the Bush administration’s energy policy, about which Bush is quoted as saying, it “must encourage consumption,” and the National Security Policy which declares the right to pre-emptive war.

These documents are able to exist as government policy, he explained, because of the veil of secrecy that has been thrown around the current administration. Orr described how the above-mentioned documents were drawn up behind closed doors by undisclosed parties, in some cases without allowing Democrats to have any influence in the drafting.

Orr also drew a connection between the destabilization of our democracy and the way that collective concepts, such as patriotism and personal rights have been redefined or distorted. Orr gave the example of patriotism, which, he believes, in Thomas Jefferson’s day meant active citizenship. Orr quoted Jefferson saying, “with liberty comes constant vigilance.” Today, Orr said, patriotism means a SUV driving to the mall “sporting two American flags and a God Bless America bumper sticker.”

Individual rights, such as property rights, Orr asserted, have also been distorted so that individuals who own land feel they should be able to do anything they want with their land regardless of whether it endangers the ecosystem. Orr maintained the importance of coupling rights with responsibilities. People with a right to own land also have a responsibility to ensure the ecological integrity of that land.

Additionally, Orr discussed how politicians in Washington are making it harder and harder for the average voter to have a voice. The 2000 election notwithstanding, Orr outlined redistricting policies, which allow politicians to guarantee votes based on demographic data. He also explained how incumbents hold the majority of seats in Congress, making the composition of Congress actually change very little during election times.

Orr went on to argue the importance of active citizens taking a greater role in politics and running for office in an attempt to subvert systems that maintain political stagnation. He showed poll results that displayed how the majority of the US population is interested in alternative energy sources and is concerned about the environment and juxtaposed that with Washington’s actions, which in regards to the environment are in no way reflecting majority opinions. His solution to this discrepancy is active citizenship.

The ecological consequence of our undermined democracy continuing on with its current rate of consumption is grim. Orr illustrated data describing global temperature shifts and species extinction rates. His data, which he deemed conservative, showed global temperatures increasing, at the high end, 8-10°F in coming years. This would cause some places to become “a literal Hell,” as Orr described it.

Audience members challenged some of Orr’s tactics of poking fun of the Bush administration and speaking aggressively about the immanent threats of environmental crisis. He quickly counteracted stating that “now is the time to be blunt, direct, and honest, and if you can, humorous.” Orr feels that the urgency of our situation warrants instilling fear in the population and definitively ousting the current administration. One audience member, Joy Proctor, a student at Warren Wilson was struck by the urgency in Orr’s speech. She stated, “It was definitely very motivating. I got a feeling of internal shaking, in a let’s do things kind of a way.” Another student, Austin Wright, felt that the talk was “hopeful and urgent.”

Orr serves on the faculty at Oberlin College in Ohio where he is Director of their environmental studies department. In 2000, with Orr’s design, Oberlin completed construction on the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for environmental studies, which is purported to be a pioneer in ecological construction.

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