Right off Greenwich Avenue in Greenwich, Connecticut, there’s an old, dilapidated building with a leaky roof that once housed a radio station. The building is an odd sight because Greenwich Avenue isn’t your average Main Street: lined with exorbitantly expensive stores, it’s the center of this famously moneyed enclave for New York’s financial elite. But the old radio station is being completely renovated, no expense spared, and in April it will open its doors as a modern yoga studio—and not the kind with stinky incense and smelly bodies, but rather with space, light, and a stylish boutique. The studio will bear the name Jois Yoga, in honor of Sri Krishna Pattabhi Jois, an eminent yoga teacher whose many students called him Guruji, and whose death on May 18, 2009, occasioned lengthy obituaries in such important newspapers as The New York Times and London’s Guardian.
The money behind the new studio comes from Sonia Tudor Jones, whose husband, 57-year-old Paul Tudor Jones II, runs the multi-billion-dollar hedge-fund empire Tudor Investment Corp. Tudor is one of the oldest and most respected hedge funds—its flagship fund, Tudor BVI Global, has averaged annual gains of 21 percent over its 25-year history, according to The Wall Street Journal—and while very little about it is public, Forbes has estimated Paul Tudor Jones’s net worth at $3.2 billion.
Jones is also a noted philanthropist, the founder of the Robin Hood Foundation, the oh-so-stylish charity for the hedge-fund set. The Joneses live in Greenwich. This will be his wife’s fourth Jois studio, or “shala” in yoga lingo, and that’s only part of her far-flung project. In partnership with Pattabhi Jois’s daughter and grandson and a friend, San Diego-based entrepreneur Salima Ruffin, she’s also launched a Jois line of yoga clothes, and she is setting up charities to bring yoga to everyone, from charter schools in Florida to villages in Africa. Ruffin likes to say that Sonia is the “Mother Teresa of yoga.”
Sonia Jones, as she likes to be called, is devoted to yoga not for the reason most American devotees are—the attainment of physical perfection, with maybe a little spiritual bliss tossed in—but because she thinks it restored her to health.
In 1986, Sonia moved to New York from Australia to further her modeling career. After a short time on the scene, she met Paul Jones—who was just coming to prominence after making $100 million during the 1987 stock-market crash—and they married in 1988. They have four children, all delivered by cesarean section, and by the time her son, Jack, was born, in 1999, she had a blown disk in her back and was numb from the waist down. “I wish I had photos!” Salima Ruffin said when we three were having coffee at Le Pain Quotidien on Greenwich Avenue. “You were so thin and frail.”
Through Paul’s friendship with self-help master Tony Robbins, the Joneses met Pete Egoscue, who is basically the guru of back pain. Pete’s wife, Troi, practiced yoga in Encinitas, California, with one of Pattabhi Jois’s best-known students, Tim Miller. Troi told Sonia that to get well she too had to practice the kind of yoga Jois taught, which is widely known as Ashtanga. In today’s yoga-mad America, Ashtanga can be a rubric for a lot of things, but Troi insisted that Sonia had to practice in the very specific manner Jois taught, and with a teacher he had approved. After the Egoscues interviewed teachers on her behalf, Sonia began working with an ashtangi named Maria Rubinate. “It was a huge turning point in my life,” recalls Sonia.
Ashtanga as Jois taught it is not a yoga where anything comes easily. John Friend, the creator of another popular form of yoga, called Anusara, likes to say that Anusara is the “yoga of yes.” Tim Miller tells me, only half-jokingly, that Ashtanga is the “yoga of no.” It is an unvarying sequence of physically demanding poses, called asanas, combined with flowing movements, or vinyasas, and deep, rhythmic breathing. You’re supposed to practice six days a week, ideally at dawn, and it is a solitary practice, even in a group setting: you do your set sequence of moves at your own pace, while the teacher offers “adjustments” to perfect the poses. There are six sequences of poses, called series, but the poses are so difficult and require so much flexibility and strength that few students make it past the first or second series, which are called primary and intermediate. (The physical poses are supposed to be merely a stepping stone to spiritual transformation.)
There’s an addictive quality to it, though, at least for certain personality types, and Ashtanga has had plenty of high-profile devotees. Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna both practiced at a Manhattan studio run by a dedicated Guruji student named Eddie Stern; Madonna even wrote herself a role as an Ashtanga teacher in The Next Best Thing. Other celebrities, from Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, to Beastie Boys drummer Mike D and fashion designer Donna Karan, are also ashtangis. Not surprisingly, Ashtanga is popular among financial types, such as Bill Gross, the head of the bond fund Goliath Pimco. Hedge-fund manager Adam Sender, who took up Ashtanga after years of hunching in front of his computer had made him so sore he could barely function, says of the practice, “It saved my life from countless back surgeries.”
These days, Sonia Jones, at 44, is a walking advertisement for the physical benefits of Ashtanga. She’s slim, but in a toned way rather than an annoyingly skinny one. Blonde and tan, she is warm and ebullient, more earthy Australian than uptight Greenwich grande dame. Every morning, she does her practice in a sunny studio—decorated with pictures of Jois and his family—in her Greenwich house, overlooking Long Island Sound. She’s so committed to Ashtanga that, if you’re in her life, you have to do it, too. (Ruffin, who runs a high-end travel service and first met Sonia in the late 1990s, is an exception: she’s unapologetic about liking spinning, and tells me that Guruji used to call her “bad lady.”) All of Sonia’s children practice—from Chrissy, who is a student at Stanford, to Caroline, who is a singer-songwriter attending New York University, to Dorothy, who’s in high school, to Jack. (Sonia admits that she has to bargain with 15-year-old Jack by telling him that if he does his practice he doesn’t have to read.) Paul does Ashtanga, too, although he gets to take the summers off. Sonia says that, after meeting Guruji, Paul concluded, “He’s the happiest person I know, and he’s not on drugs,” so, he thought, there had to be something to his system.
Sonia feels that yoga has given her not just her health, but her life. “I got married so young and didn’t have my own life,” she says. “Now I’m coming into my own.”
But Sonia’s involvement with Guruji’s heirs and their attempt to codify his teachings into something called Jois Yoga has created a current of unease and distress in the close-knit community of Ashtanga teachers, although few are expressing this openly, whether out of loyalty to Guruji’s memory, fear of the future, or hope that it will just go away. “People are talking about it quietly, but quietly loudly,” as one teacher puts it. Many Ashtanga teachers have not just their livelihoods but their very existence tied up in the practice, and 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.
‘Guruji used to say, ‘Look at a wall and see God,’ ” says Zoe Slatoff, a teacher in Manhattan, “which to me means we need to look with compassion at what’s happening.” But there’s a lack of clarity about Sonia’s goals and about how Pattabhi Jois’s daughter and grandson, who are also founders, fit in. Maybe there is jealousy. “A lot of old-school teachers resent Sonia because they perceive that she’s getting in the way of their special relationship with the Jois family,” says Russell Case, a teacher who is now working for Jois Yoga. And there’s also a feeling that Jois Yoga founders haven’t always acted in a very respectful way.
It all feels as if something very precious might be at risk. “The tradition holds such incredible things in it,” says one teacher. “The last thing I want to see is that things get so complicated that damages are irreversible.” He adds, “When a glass breaks, you have the pieces of glass. ‘Shattered’ is maybe too strong a word for what’s happened, but the glass has been cracked.”
Jois to the World
In more ways than location, Greenwich, Connecticut, is a long way from Kowshika, India, the tiny village where Pattabhi Jois was born, in 1915. At 14 he left home, with only two rupees in his pocket, to travel to Mysore. While attending school at the Maharaja Sanskrit College, he became a student of Sri T. Krishnamacharya, who is considered the father of modern yoga, and who by the 1930s was developing a set of postures that would come to be known as Ashtanga yoga. (Other forms of yoga, including Iyengar, also grew out of his teachings.) In 1948, Jois established the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute, with the aim of “experimenting with the curative aspects of yoga.” Until 1973, when Jois retired, he was the head of Yogic studies at the Sanskrit College; after that, he taught from his small house, where he could shoehorn in about a dozen bodies in a tiny downstairs room. It was not lucrative.
Most people who practice Ashtanga think they’re doing something ancient and Eastern. But the provenance of the sequences is murky. The official story is that Krishnamacharya developed the physical postures after finding the remains of a 2,000-year-old manuscript in Calcutta’s library. He believed it to contain postures referenced by the sage Patanjali in a centuries-old text called the Yoga Sutras. Part of the appeal of Ashtanga is its authenticity; to uphold that, there isn’t supposed to be any modifying of the series.
But the remains of the Calcutta manuscript no longer exist, and recently work by a scholar named Mark Singleton has cast some doubt on how important physical postures were in ancient yoga. The Yoga Sutras are more about achieving detachment from your measly existence than about contorting your body into impossible positions, and Singleton posits that the postures we know as Ashtanga may have grown out of a “synthesis” during Krishnamacharya’s time in Mysore of Western and Indian “gymnastic forms.” In his view, authenticity is the wrong way to think about yoga, because yoga is an ongoing evolution, not something static.
In any event, there is no doubt about how powerful Pattabhi Jois and his form of yoga were for people. Westerners seeking truth began to find him in the 1960s and 1970s, and in 1975, when he was 61, he made his first trip to America. Accompanied by his son Manju, he went to Encinitas and taught a small group in an abandoned Episcopal church. David Swenson, who began practicing Ashtanga in Encinitas in 1973 and is now considered a senior Ashtanga teacher, later told Yoga Journal, “Though this yoga was so hard I couldn’t finish the first session, I loved it.” That’s a sentiment that would be repeated by many over the ensuing years, but there really was more to it than the physical challenge.
Pattabhi Jois was charismatic and compelling. He brought joy and humor to the yoga he taught, and he was a deeply wise and learned man. His English was limited, but his short, powerful bursts of it—for instance, that yoga was “99 percent practice and 1 percent theory”—took on a life of their own.
One of Guruji’s early American students was Tim Miller, a religious-studies-and-psychology major who, after discovering Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in college, began teaching a yoga class at the local psychiatric hospital where he worked, despite never having taken a yoga class himself. Of Ashtanga, which he began practicing with Jois’s students in the old church, he says, “It took me to a very deep place, and I never quite recovered. It seemed like the thing I had been looking for.”
When Jois returned to America in 1978, he taught for three months, and Miller was among his handful of students. “The adjustments were fairly ferocious,” he says. “You lived in terror of being adjusted, and also in terror of being ignored.”
In 1981, Miller quit his job at the hospital and took over the shala in Encinitas when the original teachers left for Hawaii. Soon, he decided that he needed to spend time with Jois in India, and scraped together enough money to go. The day before he left, he found out his wife was pregnant.
When Miller got to Mysore, Jois was working with an American family whose daughter had broken her neck in a diving accident. He also had Indian students, mostly overweight businessmen, who had been referred to him by their doctors. When the Americans left, Miller was the only one there; when he ran out of money, Guruji invited him to move into the tiny room adjoining the studio free of charge. “It was fairly intense,” he recalls. “I’d lie in shavasana [a posture where you lie flat on your back like a kid in nursery school at nap time] feeling like I’d been ripped open—not injured, but open in a very deep way.”
At the end of his trip, Miller asked Jois if it was possible to be certified by him to teach, which Jois had never done before. “He hemmed and hawed and finally consented, but said he would have to procure a government document,” Miller remembers. The certification, which was an official document of the state of India, cost $25. “I came home gung-ho to teach, feeling like I was walking 12 inches above the ground.” But not long after, his wife gave birth to a boy, Eli. “I saw my wife’s anxiety-ridden face. My father said to me, ‘Well, son, now that you’re a father, get a real job.’ ”
Miller didn’t get that real job. Instead, he taught Ashtanga. “It was dicey month to month whether I could pay the rent, and it stayed that way,” he recalls.
When Jois returned to America, as he did throughout the 1980s, Miller and a few other early devotees sponsored his trips. It was a small, intimate community back then. A 1993 video shows Miller, Eddie Stern, and several other of today’s well-known teachers practicing the second series with Guruji. It helps that they were all stunningly beautiful, but the practice is awe-inspiring.
In those early days, there wasn’t any official way one could receive Guruji’s blessing to teach. It loosely had to do with how often you’d been to Mysore and how advanced your practice was, but different rules seemed to apply to each person, and asking quickly became taboo. Some, like Miller, were granted official Indian documents certifying them as teachers. Others were merely authorized, a less official and less honored designation that came directly from Jois.
In the 1990s, the interest in Ashtanga began to mushroom, thanks in part to the celebrities who had begun to flock to it. By the time Guruji returned to America, after a seven-year absence, in the summer of 2000, for his 85th-birthday tour, he was like a rock star. On the West Coast, Miller had to rent a gym, instead of holding classes in his small studio. On the East Coast, Eddie Stern rented the top floor of the Puck Building, a landmark in Lower Manhattan. Some 800 students thronged to it to practice with Guruji and his young grandson, Sharath—the son of Guruji’s daughter, Saraswathi—who accompanied him for the first time.
In America, Ashtanga seemed to morph into something for the young, beautiful—and determined. You didn’t see broken-down bodies seeking rehabilitation at the Puck Building, but rather tattooed downtown hipsters, actors, and other assorted gorgeous people. Ashtanga, at its base level, can feed a desire for accomplishment—you can’t move on to the next posture until your teacher says you’ve mastered the one you’re doing—and that seemed to attract an aggressive, linear-thinking, type-A person. (Hello, Wall Streeters.) The general idea is that the practice itself teaches you how to practice—“Practice, and all is coming,” Guruji would say—and that can create a hard-core mentality. The specificity of the system can also breed a feeling of superiority among those who practice, a sense that this is it, and therefore everything else isn’t it. “People are often drawn to certainty,” says one well-known teacher, who used to practice—but never taught—Ashtanga. “Guruji and that style represents certainty. It feels good to drink the Kool-Aid and to not be in the gray area.”
In 2001, when Guruji came to America again, two students created a documentary film called Ashtanga, NY. It captured Jois’s healing spirit in the aftermath of 9/11—but also the feeling of being part of the cool crowd that seemed to permeate the Ashtanga world. The cover of the DVD reads, “Featuring Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, Sharath Rangaswamy, Willem Dafoe and Gwyneth Paltrow.”
In India, Jois replaced the decrepit old shala with a new one that could accommodate up to 70 students. Those who received the all-important certification could now expect to pay in the thousands for their document.
Some were turned off by the guru dripping with gold chains and other jewelry, some of it gifts from students. Others thought that Jois delighted in the material wealth mostly because it showed that so many found value in his teachings—and who could begrudge that to a man who had been poor until he was a very old age? Still, everything changed, because Jois couldn’t teach a room of 70 students in the same hands-on way he had taught the original students.
Maybe there was something else too. “As the Western mind began populating the room, it changed the room,” says Chuck Miller, one of Jois’s early students and one of the most advanced practitioners in the world. Miller stopped at the fifth series and, in 1996, ceased going to Mysore. “It was too much of a party for me,” he says.
If the feeling in an Ashtanga room could be the opposite of what yoga was supposed to cultivate, so could the practice itself deliver the opposite of the therapy it promised. One studio owner calls it the “shadow side” of Ashtanga. “If the primary series is done intelligently, it will do for the body what nothing else will do,” he says. “But Ashtanga can cure or kill.” Indeed, several older teachers tell me that they’ve been horrified by the injuries they’ve seen. Some think Guruji was misinterpreted by Westerners who didn’t have his decades of experience handling different bodies and didn’t understand the deep Sanskrit philosophy behind his seemingly simple statements. “Often imitated but never duplicated,” says one.
A Pose Is a Pose Is a Pose
Sonia Jones came to Ashtanga just as the practice was exploding, in the late 1990s. She recalls how nervous she was when her teacher, Maria Rubinate, told her in 2000 that she should go to the Puck Building to practice with Guruji. She was struggling through the first series, and she cried when she lined up with all the other students to touch his feet after practice. For her, as for so many others, the narrow lines of the practice were part of the appeal. “I love rules,” she says. “I went to Catholic school and would be really happy when I was told what I could and couldn’t do.”
From the beginning, there was gossip about Sonia. When she began going to India, Ruffin found her a special house, where a tennis court was built for her children. She showed up at the shala with a pink mat, and others felt she got a special spot at the front of the room. There was talk about yoga teachers who were lucky enough to be carted up to Greenwich to teach the Jones family.
In 2003, during one of Guruji’s trips to the States, his son-in-law—the husband of his daughter, Saraswathi, and Sharath’s father—died, and Guruji abruptly returned to India. It caused huge losses for teachers who had to return students’ money; Sonia graciously offered to help out. She also bankrolled Guruji’s 90th-birthday party in the Skylight Ballroom of the Puck Building and paid for his travel by private plane. By that time, Guruji was sick, and she and Paul were actively involved in finding doctors who could help him.
In 2006, the Tudor Joneses took Guruji on a visit to a property they owned in Islamorada, in the Florida Keys. Upon seeing the spot, Guruji told Sonia that he wanted a shala there—and she took him at his word. The shala, complete with a garden and a massive fountain of a dancing Shiva, was finished in the spring of 2007. The next spring, some 1,000 people, including Eddie Stern and Tim Miller, came there to practice with Guruji. Paul Tudor Jones, who spoke for the occasion because he said his wife was too shy, related how, when Guruji was in the hospital, he had said he just wanted to get well enough to see the shala open.
It would be easy and convenient to say that if Sonia had never gotten involved, or if she had stopped with the Florida shala, all would have been peace, love, and joy in the Ashtanga world. But that’s just not true. Discord and questions about the worthiness of the chosen successor are what great teachers, from Martha Graham to George Balanchine, leave behind when they die. This is particularly true in the Ashtanga world. In Sanskrit culture, parampara denotes an uninterrupted succession, and it is Sharath, born in 1971, who stepped into his grandfather’s place. (Guruji’s son Manju remained in Encinitas after that first trip and became a sort of peripatetic teacher of his father’s yoga.) Under Guruji’s tutelage, Sharath became the most advanced Ashtanga practitioner in the world, said to be the only person who has made it to the sixth series. In the early 1990s he started assisting Guruji in the shala and became more and more active as Guruji aged. Sharath eventually became the director of the Shri K Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute—basically the new incarnation of Jois’s Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute—in Mysore.
Handsome and boyish, he exudes sweetness. When I met him in San Diego last summer, he talked about the importance of family—he is married with two children—and the light shone in his eyes when he showed me his wildlife photography. It’s apparent that he and Sonia have a warm, close relationship. Sharath does not come across as a zealot. He talks about how Ashtanga should be part of your daily life, just like brushing your teeth, and he says that he doesn’t consider himself a guru. “It is my duty to transmit what I learned from my grandfather,” he says. “In the West, you make things very fancy. Yoga is not fancy.”
There are plenty of ashtangis who say Sharath should be accepted unquestioningly. “In Western culture we are guilty of taking what we want,” says Todd Boman, a teacher in Chicago. “If you’re really following tradition, Guruji was your teacher, and Guruji has passed it down. By not following Sharath, you are not following tradition.” Whether he encourages it or not, Sharath is a guru to a new generation of practitioners: on his 40th birthday, last fall, fans on Facebook posted adoring pictures of his feet.
But Sharath is not a scholar in the way that Guruji was, nor has he walked down the hard road of life in the same way. He was born into comparative luxury and got his degree in electronics, not Sanskrit, from JSS University, in Mysore. For those who started going to Mysore when Sharath was just a kid, it’s hard. “Sharath is not a teacher to me,” says one old-school practitioner. “He is barely even a peer to me.” Sharath has also spread some fear and discontent by instituting new rules about what people have to do to be “authorized” by the Jois family to teach Ashtanga—or to keep their existing authorization. (The small number who are certified can’t have it taken away.) Among other things, those who want to be authorized now have to take a teacher-training class in Mysore taught by Sharath, and they have to sign a paper promising that they will teach only as they were taught.
Both he and Saraswathi say they are simply trying to reclaim Jois’s teachings before they get annihilated by the West. “We are trying to keep the tradition alive,” says Sharath. That’s no longer a simple thing. Indeed, Jois’s Ashtanga is the basis for such popular—and to some, unthinkable—modifications as “power yoga.” In fact, the term “power yoga” is the title of a 1995 book by an early student of Pattabhi Jois named Beryl Bender Birch. She took a couple of poses out of the first series, changed some others, and renamed it. Birch says she was simply trying to translate something she found beneficial for a broader group of students—and let fitness-minded Americans know that yoga was more than stretching. But the book got her kicked out of the club, which she says was a painful but necessary experience.
Birch is far from the only one who has used pieces of Ashtanga. Another of Jois’s former students, Michael Gannon, has created his own brand of Ashtanga. Gannon calls himself the “yoga dealer.” He just launched an app called Ashtanga Yoga with Michael Gannon. (“It’s like having your own teacher there with you.”)
But if Sharath and his family are merely trying to take back Ashtanga, their actions aren’t always translating well. The training that teachers have to take in Mysore has felt to some like a stamp that shows someone has gone through the right motions, but doesn’t mean anything about that person’s real qualifications to teach—especially to teach those whose bodies aren’t so gifted. In addition, some teachers see their authorization to teach as their livelihood, and they are now worried about offending Sharath, especially because it’s not always obvious to the community why certain people are in or out; there are a handful of high-profile teachers whose names are no longer on the official list of authorized teachers that is issued by the Shri K Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute.
Underlying all of this is a small but growing schism, one that can take on the overtones of a holy war, about how faithful teachers should be to Guruji’s sequences. Nancy Gilgoff, one of Jois’s early students, pointed out in a recent open letter that even Guruji changed things; other teachers say that, particularly for aging, deskbound Westerners, Jois’s sequences may need to be modified to be therapeutic rather than harmful.
Downward Dog Fight
Tim Miller, at 61, can still press up from a standing forward bend into a handstand. (Try it.) When he does workshops, he talks about how few of the Yoga Sutras even mention the physical aspects of yoga. In his shala, there are props (forbidden by traditionalists), and he’ll sometimes lead a class that is Ashtanga-based but does not adhere to the set sequences of moves. He has heard too many complaints about how hard Ashtanga has been on people’s bodies. “I’m interested in what works, what is effective,” he says. “I’m not stuck in some model that says, You can’t do that, that’s against the rules.”
But for Sonia Jones, changing it up is akin to heresy. After all, it worked for her exactly as advertised. “I just want to honor Guruji and take care of this family,” she says. “I love them.” Sonia, to her credit, does not seem to have an exaggerated sense of self-importance about her role. As she, Ruffin, and I walked on the beach in San Diego one afternoon, Ruffin said, “Guruji just loved Sonia.” Sonia laughed. “He loved everyone,” she said. “He told everyone they were special. And the problem is that some people believed it, and thought they were more special than other people.”
If her intentions are pure, her actions haven’t always come across that way. “Sonia loved Guruji, and she is very serious,” one senior teacher says. “She loves the practice, and she wants to do good in the world. But I don’t agree with the way she’s going about it. She is lacking in sensitivity to the community as a whole.” And although she and Ruffin say that nothing, no matter how small, is done without the approval of the Jois family—Sharath and his mother, Saraswathi—it is Sonia’s money at work.
When the Jois Yoga Web site launched, in mid-2010, it featured a picture of Sharath, Saraswathi, Sonia, and Salima, who were identified as the “Jois Yoga Founders.” A banner over the whole site said, “Coming soon, Jois Yoga apparel.” It was abrupt, coming so quickly after Guruji’s death, and it seemed overly commercial. Loyal teachers felt displaced and excluded. Several of them tell me that Guruji was always adamant about the fact that yoga was universal, not one man’s property, and that his yoga was Patanjali yoga, not Jois Yoga.
Maybe such sentiments are too noble for the modern world. After all, branding is survival. Other successful teachers have boutiques, and some have even launched clothing lines. For instance, Kino MacGregor, an extremely popular certified teacher in Florida, sells a line of shorts and T-shirts. Maybe people might have shrugged and gotten past the Jois heirs doing so.
But the real dismay set in with the opening of the gorgeous new shala in Encinitas—the very place where Tim Miller has had his studio for three decades. Encinitas may not be big enough to support two Ashtanga studios. “Why open in Encinitas?” one senior teacher asks me. “Why not Los Angeles? Anywhere but right 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.
Then there’s the way it happened. Miller says that the first he heard of the studio was when Ruffin called him to say it was happening and she asked, “Oh, didn’t Sharath call you?” (Ruffin says that Miller was the one who voiced surprise about not having heard from Sharath.) Then teachers who helped him in his studio said that the Jois people were approaching them about jobs.
Miller, who is reluctant to complain, says his first thought was that, since there was so much bad feeling about Jois Yoga already, maybe he was in a position to be “harmonizing.” He decided to talk with Ruffin about working with them. But a person close to him tells me that the contract e-mailed to him by Jois Yoga treated him like an employee at a 24-hour fitness center, with stipulations that required him to pay for a substitute if he missed a day of teaching. And so, he decided that he would trust the bad feeling in his gut and walk away. Says Ruffin, “We honestly did try to have him join us.”
In the summer of 2010, the gleaming new Jois Yoga shala opened in Encinitas. I’m told that it cost $1 million to build out the space, and that the rent is $11,000 a month. When I was there, to get to the studio, you walked through a boutique selling all sorts of clothes, including the new Jois line but also clothes that look suited more to a night on the town than to a yoga practice. There were pictures of Guruji and Sharath everywhere, but also a picture of Sonia’s daughter Chrissy in the window, and inside a picture of Paul doing a backbend. There was a big opening party, which Sharath came in for.
Miller did not go.
There is now a Jois Yoga shala in Sydney, Australia, which is run by Sonia’s sister. There was also talk that one would open in Manhattan, the home of longtime teacher Eddie Stern. According to several teachers, Stern eventually opposed the idea; a source close to him says he felt the proposed location was too close to other teachers’ existing studios. The idea has been dropped for now.
But damage has been done. Friendships have splintered, and while much of the disquiet is under the surface, there is a noticeable rent in the fabric of the community. For instance, Lino Miele told Sharath to remove his name from the list of approved teachers. “Guruji said that Tim was a good man, and that means no one touches Tim,” says Miele. “I look at what is happening—I do not understand. I move out.”
When Sharath came to the United States in the spring of 2011, Jois Yoga sponsored him. Sharath taught a class that was available around the world via a live Webcam, but there was also a small private class for Sonia and a few others. It was wonderful and intimate, yet strangely unsettling. Should money plus dedication get you more yoga than dedication alone?
Despite the widespread feeling that Miller was treated badly, and all the other queasiness, many think that if Sonia can help spread the word, more power to her. Those who work with her and have gotten to know her are supportive. “All she asks is ‘What does Sharath want? What does Saraswathi want?’ ” says Andrew Hillam, a former student of Miller’s, who now teaches at the Jois shala in Encinitas. “She says, ‘I just want to do it in the right way, how Guruji would have wanted it.’ ”
Sonia, for her part, says, “I wouldn’t be doing this, trust me, if he hadn’t said, ‘Will you open schools for me all over the world?’ ”
Encinitas is, after all, the first place that Guruji came to in the United States, and the Jois family voices support for everything Sonia has done. “He [Guruji] would be thrilled,” says Manju Jois. “I don’t think it’s proper for others to say how this is wrong or this is right,” says Sharath. “Everyone has their own rights to share the knowledge with others. Nobody owns this.”
The discord might blow over as Jois Yoga matures. Both Sonia and Salima say they will never make money on the studios, and they are concentrating on philanthropy.
But several teachers say they think there will be a split. And if that happens, maybe it’s not all bad. “These kinds of things have happened throughout human history,” says Chuck Miller, who points out that Ashtanga was not the only kind of yoga that grew out of Krishnamacharya’s teachings. “A big teacher passes, and there is some kind of splintering.”
A slightly different perspective comes from Kino MacGregor. She points out that Krishnamacharya taught hundreds, maybe even thousands, of students, and there are only six who are well known today. “The students chose them,” she says. “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.”
The ultimate yoga portfolio (Amy Fine Collins and Michael O’Neill, June 2007)
The perils of exercising in New York City (A. A. Gill, December 2004)
