A Yoga mogul who sells an American cocktail of spirituality and exercise

John Friend, trained in India, has turned a cult figure in a country with 16 million practioners and $5.7 b business a year

That Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles of yoga, has an assistant is itself significant; many people still picture yogis as serene guys who live in respectable deprivation in places like Mysore or Pune, India, and wait for disciples to find them. Not Friend.

Consider one afternoon in early June when he had just left a meeting with potential investors in Seattle, having flown to the West Coast after several months of giving Anusara workshops in Tokyo, Taipei, Bali and Morrisville, and was making a brief stopover in the Woodlands on his way to teach more workshops in Copenhagen, Munich, Paris and Park City, Utah — stops on his ‘Melt your heart, blow your mind tour’.

Friend’s modest, two-story faux Tudor home (filled with statues of Hindu gods, prayer flags and other souvenirs of his myriad travels) was a semimaelstrom of recently washed clothes, piled-up mail and stacks of unread publications with headlines like ‘Nine life-altering lessons’ — a reflection of the semimaelstrom that is his life.

On the road and at home, Friend also keeps tabs on all the ancillary businesses he has created in the last 13 years, since Anusara was born: his global Anusara expansion (Studio Yoggy, one of the biggest yoga-school chains in Japan, will be offering Anusara yoga classes); his Anusara publishing ventures (he has commissioned a history of yoga and continues to work on his own book, albeit sporadically); and his Anusara yoga-wear business (Friend has his own line, but also works with Adidas, which is using Anusara yoga trainers in its worldwide yoga push). He is also financing historical yoga research in Nepal and Kashmir.

Simultaneously, Friend is trying to raise money for his most ambitious project to date, the Centre, which he is planning to locate in meta-crunchy Encinitas, California. Friend expects the Centre, with art, music and theatre, in addition to yoga, to expand the Anusara ‘community,’ which currently includes 2,00,000 students in 70 countries and about 1,200 licenced-by-John-Friend teachers.

Friend, who is 51, has close-cropped curls that are snowy white; there is a significant crease between his slate blue eyes; and he is just a little doughy. Though he is frequently described as charismatic, he is a bit distracted in repose. But once he starts talking about Anusara, his boyish energy returns. You almost expect him to levitate.

Friend’s yoga is based on classic hatha-yoga postures — he has refined them using what he calls ‘universal principles of alignment’ — but it can be as challenging as a student wants it to be. His classes are less about toned abs than about self-expression and enjoyment. (Adjustments don’t make the poses ‘right,’ for instance, they make them ‘more beautiful.’) You don’t have to be a vegan to become an Anusaran, and unless you want to be an Anusara teacher, you don’t have to master complex texts.

He uses just enough Sanskrit to be exotic without being incomprehensible. Friend’s ‘dharma talks’ — short sermons — are based largely on simplified tantric principles (not, he stresses, the ones relating to tantric sex): students learn that they are divine beings, that goodness always lies within, that by opening to God’s will — opening to grace, Friend calls it — “you actually become vastly more powerful than the limited person that you usually identify with.”

Brought by Indian gurus

Friend’s timing could not be better. Some 16 million Americans now practice yoga, a 5,000-year-old mental, physical and spiritual discipline brought to us by Indian gurus. Nowadays there aren’t just hourly classes in major American cities but also in places like Deephaven, and Hattiesburg. ‘Namaste’, the traditional end-of-class blessing, has become a punch line.

If yoga began as a meditation technique for people all too familiar with physical as well as mental suffering — with poses, or ‘asanas’, devised to assist in reaching a transcendentally blissful state — it has taken on a distinctly American cast. It has become much more about doing than being. More about happiness than meaning.

It’s a weight-loss technique and a stress-management tool, a gateway to an exploding market for workout clothes and equipment. Spending on yoga classes, books, clothes, Om amulets, mats and more has increased 87 per cent since 2004, to $5.7 billion a year. As yoga has developed a vigorous capitalistic side, traditionalists have expressed their dismay. “We need introspection, and this yoga” — commercialised yoga — “is not about introspection,” says Judith Hanson Lasater, an author of eight yoga books and a founder of ‘Yoga Journal’.

Not surprisingly, Friend’s detractors — and there are at least as many as admirers — claim that he has watered down and commercialised a hallowed tradition for his own gain. Anusara Inc currently has about $2 million a year in revenue, though Friend says, “We spend as much as we bring in, so we have little profit.”

An Anusara prospectus from the spring predicted that revenue could double by 2012. Friend is the sole stockholder in the company and pays himself a salary that is just under $1,00,000 — a fortune in the yoga world. Friend, of course, is not ashamed to sell this new American cocktail of spirituality and exercise.

As much as Friend preaches the gospel of openness, he’s relatively guarded about the story of his own life. Like a lot of celebrities, he tells a version of his history from which he never deviates: his father, a former sportscaster and marketing executive, had economic troubles and so moved the family from the Rust Belt to Texas; his mother was an intellectually gifted Southern belle and a Juilliard graduate with a theatrical flair.

Colleagues told me, and Friend concurred, that when his mother was ill — she died of cancer in 2002 — Friend, the older of two boys, strived to cheer her up with his wisecracks. It was she who introduced Friend to yoga.

Critical point in history of yoga

Friend may not have known it at the time, but he connected with yoga at a critical point in its history in America. As Syman notes in ‘The Subtle Body’, yoga in the United States dates to the late 19th century, when it was first propagated by Indian yogis like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’.

But the yoga that ultimately prevailed here was not the stringent, meditative practice supposedly leading to spiritual bliss that was more common in India; its health and beauty benefits were always a better sell. (A nice yoga-fan through line runs from Gloria Swanson to Ali MacGraw to Christy Turlington.) By 1976, five million Americans had signed on.

Friend was never content to be just another yoga enthusiast. Horatio Alger could have been one of his swamis. By 1987 he was teaching Houston housewives and, he likes to joke, the occasional farmer in overalls. He also began travelling to workshops all over the country, including one with Judith Hanson Lasater, who introduced him to Iyengar yoga. Within a few years, Friend had taken workshop with B K S Iyengar himself and with Pattabhi Jois, the creator of Ashtanga.

In other words, Friend was aligning himself with the greats of contemporary yoga, Indians whose teachings were then shaping the yoga world. (Lineage is as important in yoga as it is to Boston bluebloods.) By 1989 he was in Pune, for a month of study with Iyengar. That year, at age 30, he gave a confounding performance on a rickety wooden platform at the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Ganeshpuri, India.

As Friend rose to higher positions in the Iyengar organisation — he spent four years on the board in the 1990s — he also observed and absorbed Iyengar’s exacting standards of teacher certification, which require the study of anatomy, physiology, philosophy and ethics, as well as teaching a demonstration class and passing a written exam.

From the leader of the Ganeshpuri ashram, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — no stranger herself to American celebrity — Friend learned how to give intimate, inspirational talks to crowds of thousands. He also befriended American scholars of Eastern spirituality studying in India. In each of these encounters, Friend was the yogic equivalent of a sponge, or as one associate recalled, “He was a man with a mission.” The mission then was to reclaim yoga from the many US teachers who were so consumed with the physical practice — it was all about the workout — that they sweated out any trace of spirituality.
Equally important, Friend wanted to create a new yoga school that wasn’t just accessible but commercially sustainable. In the ensuing years, Friend, restless, eager and supremely confident, broke with Iyengar and distanced himself from Chidvilasananda as he began to refine what he saw as his own yoga technique.

As he wrote in 1995, “Finally I realised that I was not fully aligned with Iyengar’s philosophy and method, so it was not dharmic of me to continue to use his name to describe my teaching style.” Their philosophical differences — the kind of intrayogic argument best left to the professionals — were compounded by mentor-disciple issues.

He merged his entrepreneurial nature with his yogic one. Friend wrote his own teacher-training manual, which is about as detailed as an oil-refinery operations handbook. Like Iyengar, he created a teacher-certification programme; his students must complete a minimum of 200 hours of training at workshops — an expense that can require extensive travel — buy his training manual ($30) and pass his 30-hour take-home test. A $195 training DVD is also recommended. There are licensing fees of around $100 that must be renewed annually.

In this way, Friend maintains quality control and an income stream, but this standardisation has cost him the loyalty of older teachers who find the new rules somewhat unyogic. Friend also discourages Anusara studio owners from including other forms of yoga at their schools, lest they dilute his brand.