Some are bent out of shape over yoga competitions
Toolbox
By SARA ECKEL
The New York Times - Published: November 22, 2009
The competitors stood nervously on stage, awaiting the judges' decisions. As each name was called the crowd cheered, and the winner stepped forward to accept a medal.
"Wow, that was a miracle," said Kyoko Katsura, the winner in the women's division of the New York Regional Yoga Championship.
Yoga championship?
Yoga as a competitive sport has been almost unknown in this country, largely because the practice is seen as a spiritual quest rather than an exclusively physical exercise like gymnastics.
But now Rajashree Choudhury and her husband, Bikram Choudhury, who created the style of yoga known as Bikram, are trying to build momentum for competitive yoga in the United States. Rajashree Choudhury has set up two nonprofit organizations, the U.S. Yoga Federation and the World Yoga Foundation, and has been staging competitions for seven years.
The ultimate goal of the Choudhurys is to have yoga qualify as an Olympic sport. "It's far away," Rajashree Choudhury said. "A lot of work needs to be done before we really get into it, but this is our dream."
One big obstacle may be the yoga community itself. To many people, the idea of competition goes against the philosophy of yoga, which emphasizes self-acceptance and inner growth. Although yoga does tend to attract people who are limber, the physical poses, or asanas, are only one aspect of the practice; others include chanting, meditation and reading Sanskrit.
"The initial reaction from most people is always the same thing: competition yoga? Those things don't belong in the same sentence," said John Philp, a filmmaker in New York who directed a documentary film, "Yoga, Inc.," about the commercialization of Western yoga.
Also in dispute is the extent to which the Choudhurys could benefit if Bikram yoga were to become the accepted standard for competition yoga.
Bikram Choudhury has a U.S. copyright on a sequence of 26 postures and two breathing exercises. The Bikram format is the basis of the five required poses in the competitions.
But Jon Gans, a Bikram teacher who is a director of the U.S. Yoga Federation, said that the required postures are traditional hatha yoga postures.
Julie Kleinman, the vice president of programming for YogaWorks, a yoga studio chain based in Santa Monica, Calif., said she had mixed feelings about competitive yoga. She said she likes the idea that Olympic-style events could spread awareness of the practice. But a tournament "seems fairly antithetical to what yoga is all about," Kleinman said, adding, "I don't really understand how you would compete to be the happiest, most balanced person."
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