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Yoga, Inc. - an opinion
By Christina | April 11, 2008
There is a movie premiering soon and it is about yoga, obviously.  John Philps, who made this documentary started yoga years ago to get away from the pounding of running and approached yoga as a way to keep in shape physically. As many Westerners do, he wanted to the workout to be intense so he turned to Bikram Yoga, 26 poses done in a very hot room.  Bikram is named for its creator, Bikram Choudhury who in India was involved in competitive yoga and has shown himself to be a competitive type of person or at least one who believes in fighting for what he believes to be true, regardless of what others think.
Bikram has been involved in litigation claiming he owns the rights to the sequence of poses he put together and the fact that it is done in a hot room. Personally, I don’t think you can put ownership on that because to make something your own there must be no prior art and all the poses were already in existence and heat has been around for awhile now I believe. At any rate, he did win his case and to perform the sequence in a hot roon, you must pay Bikram.
I am not sure what Mr. Philps feels about making money from yoga, I know he feels no one should own yoga and that the path to enlightenment is for everyone therefore no one should own it. The film is centered on the topic of competitive yoga which I for one disagree with. Yoga by its nature and name is meant to link the mind and the body. It centers around letting go of thought, of pride of arrogance. How then can you compete and try to perform the perfect pose in the name of yoga?
It seems a contradiction to me to walk on a stage as the eilte of your field when your field is about not being elite. The film will delve into the world of making yoga an Olympic sport, why it is so popular now, the exploding business that is yoga and much more. It is certainly a timely film that will be played at countless studios and watched by enthusiasts as well as novices.Â
