Re: The downside of yoga

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In the eighties, while Friend worked for a few years as a financial consultant for oil companies after graduating from Texas A&M, he became a part-time yoga teacher at a local YMCA. Soon, he decided to switch professions—he wanted to be a yoga teacher, and studied the Iyengar method. But he wasn’t entirely happy. “Iyengar believes that to gain freedom from suffering, you must strongly discipline the mind-body to the point where you actually create isolation between them,” he says. “The teacher would hit us, physically, to say, ‘Why are you getting hooked on your body? You’re not your body.’ I thought, Wait, I love my body. It’s temporal, but it’s still a manifestation of God.” He also felt that this style of yoga was too complicated. “I’m an American,” he says. “I wanted to make things simple.”

Now Friend had the technical skills to teach, but he needed to connect with his spirit. In 1989, he took a trip to Ganeshpuri, India, where he visited Swami Muktananda’s ashram, now led by Gurumayi Chidvilasananda (Muktananda, an authority so revered that members of his Catskills ashram sat in his bathwater and saved the trimmings of his haircuts, is thought to have sexually preyed on young women). Gurumayi would later become a controversial figure, but when Friend first laid eyes on her, on this “magically mind-bending day of grace,” the energy around her was so thick that her mouth moved but the words came out in slow motion. In her presence, he was able to rise up into a handstand without effort. “It was like someone took a blanket, wrapped it around me, and lifted me up,” he has explained. “I felt totally supported. It was magic.”

At the ashram, he started to connect with people who also felt like they wanted to swap out of Iyengar and other older, didactic systems of yoga into something more fun. Someone needed to innovate here—why couldn’t it be him? In 1997, after some help from Douglas Brooks, a Tantra scholar, Friend revealed a new yoga system at a retreat of about 30 teachers at Feathered Pipe Ranch, a center in Montana run by a devotee of Sai Baba, the Indian guru known for manifesting gold trinkets in his palm.

Certifications were offered at very favorable terms—Friend wanted to keep the merry band happy. “I remember a friend wagging his fingers at me, saying, ‘You’re letting them run, and one day you’ll say, “Come back in the corral,” and they’re going to say, “Fuck you, man, I’m not going back in there,”?’ but I didn’t believe it,” says Friend.

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Friend wanted to be ethical about dating his students, too: In 2009, he even changed Anusara’s guidelines about sex between students and teachers. A bylaw that used to say that teachers should “avoid sexual relationships with students” now stated that a romantic relationship was permitted, as long as the role of teacher and student was maintained within the classroom. This raised eyebrows among some of the senior teachers, but they kept their mouths shut.

Friend was always a bit of a weird guy, with his love of magic and Madame Blavatsky, but he never really flirted much with the edge, at least until about 2010. Yoga was exploding in the U.S., and Friend met a couple of branding entrepreneurs in Southern California who told him that they could take him to the next level. Their grand vision for Friend was his own institute for the study of Anusara, in an 8,000-plus-square-foot building that once housed an ad agency in Encinitas, California. The beachy enclave is considered one of the most important yoga towns in the U.S.—Yogananda wrote his Ur-text, Autobiography of a Yogi, there; Ravi Shankar and George Harrison collaborated there; not only was it the first place in the U.S. that the Ashtanga guru Pattabhi Jois stopped when he came from Mysore, India, in the seventies, it’s also home to the Jois center, which billionaire Paul Tudor II’s wife has just built.

Friend quickly became bewitched with the idea of the Center, a place where he could become less of a traveling teacher and more of a curator—it would be a new Esalen Institute, the experiment observed. But there was a problem: He needed money. Another yoga paradox is that for all its popularity and the celebrity of its leading practitioners, it’s never been much of a cash cow. The gear and clothing companies, like publicly traded Lulu­lemon—which has promoted a Landmark Forum–based system for its employees and whose founder recently relinquished his operational role after the bad PR around commissioning a line of shopping bags bearing the words “Who Is John Galt?”—may make a mint, but there are very few yoga teachers who have become wealthy from teaching. In its best years, Anusara Inc. took in about $2 million in revenue, 80 percent of which was composed of Friend’s teaching fees—but almost all it went to overhead. His annual salary was roughly $100,000.

When Friend began raising money for the Center, he praised the auspicious gods, because he soon had a $1 million loan from an Anusari in the Seattle area and had entered discussions that he thought were promising for $3 million to $5 million. To buff the company’s balance sheet, Friend froze his employees’ pensions. He says he didn’t realize that he had to send certified letters to each employee informing him or her of the change.

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Desperate for cash, Friend had started to think it was time for the children to pay back the parent. He asked some teachers for a 10 percent cut of videos, books, or other products made by teachers in exchange for allowing those products to bear the Anusara trademark. Unhappy with this request, the senior teachers started to talk among themselves: Who was John Friend anyway? He had been their teacher, but they’d been on their own for so long; they were in their forties and fifties now, too old to be under anyone’s thumb.

And they had started to hear odd rumors of Friend’s secret life, of what he was doing in California. The core of this group were conservative, quiet yogis focused on building serious careers, not interested in being part of an organization that was starting to feel like “sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll yoga,” as one put it.

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Notsurprised Apr 17, 2012
I think John Friend is really just the tip of the iceberg, he just happened to be unlucky enough to get caught. I have known plenty of lascivious male and female yoga teachers who are out there "behaving badly" (in quotes for a reason). They are usually psychologically immature and impulsive and act like kids in a candy shop who can't resist all the acolytes who idealize them and fall at their feet. I still don't know why this surprises people, like somehow espousing yoga philosophy makes you less human? I do feel a little bad for the weak minds that they often unwittingly (John Friend is nothing if not unwitting, I truly think he is just so unwittingly narcissistic the idea of harming others with his behavior has not yet crossed his mind) prey on, but then the world is full of fragile people who get pulled in by superficial charm and charisma....I guess the true lesson is never abandon your faculties of reason and be your own teacher first...

anotherwhoknows May 16, 2012
@Notsurprised - Yogis behaving badly deserve to be exposed because they are totally counting on the people who "follow" them to "love" them anyway. I cannot wait until the next yoga master is exposed - I fear he won't be for a long time to come, not because people don't have plenty to expose him with, but because he threatens to destroy whomever speaks up against him. Will his students have the courage to do what the anusara yoga students did? I applaud the strength it took for those most senior teachers and all of the merry band to stand up and admit that something had gone very wrong. Why won't those of you (and you know who you are) whom have been wronged by another "guru" come forward now? The time is now . . . stop protecting a predator!!

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knickerbacker Apr 17, 2012
I am genuinely surprised at how the article seems to minimize one thing: seeing the "freezing of employe pension contributions" as the JF talking point of a paperwork error. His employees were receiving a pension, not a 401k, governed by the US Department of Labor under the Employee Retirement Security Act.

ERISA governed plans are subject to specific protections because these are exactly the type of pension funds raided by corrupt employers, mafiosi, and union officials. Whether the proceeds go to "investing in our center" or investing in a continuing criminal enterprise, founding of a casino, etc. is irrelevant. It is a federal crime to misappropriate mandated defined pension benefit plan contributions and it doesn't matter if you are John Friend or Jackie Presser, it is still a crime.

JF was informed once by the DOL that he was in violation and STILL failed to meet his legally required duty of putting WORKER money in WORKER pension which required a second notice of violation. JF kept this secret. JF is ego run amok. As disgusted as I am by his lurid personal activities, I am more disgusted by his theft from the pension plan. Not putting money into it is the same as taking money out- it is illegal and if he was a union officer, he would be in jail now. ERISA was enacted to prevent this theft, which is what it is-plain and simple.

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ksmyer Apr 16, 2012
Yogaliving -- the idea that it was "mostly people who willingly gave away their own power" is misguided. John was in the seat of the teacher. He held all of the power over most Anusara teacher's careers. If he decided he liked you, you were made. If he decided he didn't, you were screwed. And that's just the teachers; some of his coven-mates were his direct employees.

This is a gross abuse of power.

I implore you and the others who keep downplaying the serious nature of his actions to stop telling others to be "mindful yogis" and start thinking about the many ways in which John abused his power.

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HarwoodRubin Apr 15, 2012
There are a few key issues that have been either lightly touched upon, or not yet written about, that I would like to post here. As one of the Certified Anusara Yoga teachers who resigned in mid-January, my reasons for leaving had more to do with an overall tightening of control in several major areas: Body, Heart, Mind, and Livelihood. This took many forms, and I felt that I could not in good faith remain in a system in which one person had such control over so many. I wrote on this in elephant journal, in addition to Amy Ippoliti's piece.

1. The tithing we received a series of emails from 2010-11 that were increasingly restrictive in terms of rules for any Yoga products that we might produce. At first, we were told that we could work with Anusara and would be promoted in exchange for 10%. Fair. Then this tightened to our having to offer our work to Anusara, who would decide whether or not they wanted to work with us. It would be their call. Eventually, we were told that we had to come to Anusara with our ideas BEFORE any product was produced, so that they could decide whether it was something they wanted to be involved in. In effect, our intellectual and creative property would not be our own. In addition, he held up certain teachers products, sometimes for years, which was damaging and disempowering.

2. The Shiva-Shakti Tantra Primer which outlined what we, as Anusara teachers, were told to teach as a spiritual world view. It was introduced well after we signed on to be Certified Teachers around 2010.

3. There was an ongoing manipulation in regard to which teachers were "allowed" to teach in certain countries and/or studios. Studios were told to work with certain teachers and not others. Blatant favoritism.

4. There was an ongoing intimidation issue with John telling us not to leave in order to go to the bathroom while he was teaching in the past 3 years. Considering that the vast majority of the people in the room were female, I always ignored this, as I dont let men tell me what to do with my body. Unfortunately, everyone did not feel equally empowered.

5. I found it to be highly insulting that John frequently harped upon what great studentship the Japanese students had, because, as he regularly said, they were quiet & did what he asked.

While this was not pleasant to write, I feel that it is important and needs to be said in order to have clarity about this situation. Thanks for reading.

yoganomad Apr 17, 2012
@SHarwoodRubin - Yes, the japanese are great students becuse they paid him a lot of money.....that and the geisha girl tradition which encourages submisison to the authority

emagenta Apr 15, 2012
I'm a formerly licensed Certified Anusara yoga teacher. My pal Angela Tomasetti, also a formerly licensed teacher (she was okay with me sharing this here), points out that she "completely disagree(s) with his quote, 'I always said Im not a saint, a prophet, a guru, a god mantheres no cosmic energy pouring through me to the point that I know all things.' John said on MANY occasions that he is so attuned to energy that he can feel what his students in the back of the room full of 399+ bodies are feeling, that he can tell whether you are vibrating with positive or negative energy, he could read anyone's energy, that he can heal any trauma, injury, pain, that his neighbors regard him as a healer and come to his house all the time with complaints that he can fix immediately with his knowledge of the body and its energy flows. What is that if not some god man?"