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STRETCHING THE DEFINITION OF A YOGI

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SHE’S GOT HEART

SHE’S GOT HEART

STRETCHING THE DEFINITION OF A

THE JOURNEY OF A FEMALE-OWNED YOGA STUDIO IN A POST-BIKRAM CHOUDHURY WORLD STORY BY KAYLA RUTLEDGE | PHOTOS BY LUIS CHAVEZ

In 2013, two civil lawsuits alleging rape were filed against yoga’s then omnipotent Bikram Choudhury. By the next year, more women came forward and another three lawsuits were filed, sending Choudhury into panic. He fled the country with off-shore benefits, leaving those he instructed who relied on the use of his famous name for business to fend for themselves against huge corporate yoga entities. “Back in the day all it took was a sign saying ‘Bikram Yoga’ in your window to get people to come in. But this changed everything about the yoga businesses and how we viewed our teachings,” says owner of Pasadena Hot Yoga Val Sklar Robinson, who was featured in the newly released Netflix documentary “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator - Inside his Empire of Abuse.”

There was a time of euphoria for instructors under his teachings before the surfacing of his mistreatment of women, homophobia and racism. Choudhury was known as a pioneer of the intersection between age-old yoga teachings and modern takes on the practice. Aspiring instructors would sometimes pay upward of $16,000 to endure a grueling nine-week seminar with the man himself.

Hopeful students braved Choudhury’s teachings of hot yoga in 104-degree tents, sometimes with up to 500 bodies sharing a space. As one of the most renowned yogis at the time, Choudhury sat in the front with an air conditioning unit blowing on his back as he called instructions, only leaving his podium when necessary. It was a common occurrence to look around the room and see several students passed out in a pool of sweat during a session.

“He was very brash and politically incorrect. He had a very tough-love thing going on. But when he spoke to you it was like he could see into your soul. He moved you,” Sklar Robinson says.

In a time before her knowledge of Choudhury, Sklar Robinson suffered an undiagnosed hip injury at 13, which lead to her eventually breaking her hip. “I’ve carried it with me ever since that Western medical doctors don’t know everything about you, and we sometimes need to take some responsibility for ourselves,” she says. After her hip injury, Sklar Robinson was diagnosed with early signs of degenerative arthritis and would someday need a hip replacement when she was older. “When you’re 13, old is, like, 50. So I was shocked when at 28 I had severe pain in that same spot just from simple tasks like walking, and was put on three prescription medications,” Sklar Robinson says.

The then-corporate head in the shoe industry was on a business trip to Denver, where her friend’s parents brought her to a Bikram class to kill time, “and I instantly found it fascinating.”

“When I came back to LA I looked into it a little more and found Bikram’s studio was right down the street from me so I started going. What I found was as I started to learn how to breathe properly and do the stretches. What looked complicated was actually pretty simple, and I started to feel better,” says Sklar Robinson.

Soon after, she began practicing regularly and was off her medication and her limp disappeared. Sklar Robinson was so inspired by her progress and her new, more positive mindset, she left her corporate job.

“In 1998, people thought that I was insane and that I lost my mind. Seriously, my mother was a wreck. But I was single, I was 30, so I quit everything and moved out to Pasadena to pursue my dream of opening my own studio,” says Sklar Robinson.

The first six months were some of the toughest for her business. Only one to two students attended each class. But with the Choudhury sign in her window, as the practice of hot yoga became more popular, so did her studio. “All you needed was that sign,” says Sklar Robinson.

After 14 years, business was reaching new heights at Hot Yoga Pasadena, but it was also booming for large corporate yoga studios. Sklar Robinson knew she would have to take a leap of faith to stay competitive in the yoga scene, so she opened a new location that was double the size of her first studio, built showers and a changing room, and upgraded all aspects of the studio’s aesthetics. “I was horrified. I was funding it myself for hundreds of thousands of dollars. I didn’t have investors, I didn’t have a hedge fund supporting me. I don’t have a wealthy husband,” says Sklar Robinson.

“I did it because I believe in this yoga’s ability to make people feel better and increase the overall quality of their life. I believe that to my core. And as much as I want to distance myself from Bikram, he is what got me to where I’m at and showed me how to get other people there, too.”

Just as her new studio was set to open, Choudhury’s first bout with allega- tions were in the spotlight and Sklar Robinson had a huge decision to make— stand with Choudhury, as many studios chose to do, or trust the reputation she had built within the community would withstand the changing times under a new name and absolutely zero association with Choudhury. Sklar Robinson bravely chose the latter. “It was nothing I saw or experienced, but I think there’s always been a problem for vulnerable women. I think this is something our society is grappling with as a society as a whole. It’s not unique to the yoga community or the world at large. I couldn’t get on board with being associated with that or being a bystander to that,” says Sklar Robinson.

Her studio was only one of thousands deciding how to move forward and away from Choudhury. Sklar Robinson says many yogis, “ran their businesses like a hobby,” and eventually lost it, but she wanted to make the most of the challenges set before the yoga community.

“We need guidelines and structure so we could survive against these corpo- rate entities and have a new identity in a world post-Bikram,” Sklar Robinson says.

In 2016 Sklar Robinson created the Original Hot Yoga Association (OHYA), a nonprofit that sets forth guidelines for instructors and classes that help small yoga enterprises have a solid foundation to run a lasting business without iden- tifying with Choudhury. At the organization’s core, the community maintains a standard of health, healing and respect for all. In the last three and a half years, nearly 175 studios and 500 teachers have met OHYA’s standards and are running successful businesses.

Since creating the yoga guild, opening a bigger and better studio, and even expanding her assortment of classes from a standard 90-minute Choudhury class to sessions classes of varying lengths and types and adding Pilates, Sklar Robin- son has also spoken her truth in “Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator - Inside his Empire of Abuse.”

“I think I was honest and strong in the documentary,” says Sklar Robinson. “If you don’t know anything about the yoga world, I think the documentary gives you a good understanding of how difficult it was to move away from Bikram, but ultimately why it was necessary.”

“I don’t regret a thing I have done. Even being taught by Bikram. Everything happened as it needed to for us to move on and go forward,” says Sklar Robinson. Choudhury still runs his teachings out of Mexico and Spain, but Sklar Robinson believes the yoga community is in the midst of “a beautiful transition,” without him.

“It’s no longer about if you can touch your toes or do a standing split. It’s not about losing weight, which, yeah, that happens, but it’s not at the core of what we do. Now, yoga is about making you feel good, and these locally owned studios are spearheading that,” says Sklar Robinson.

“It’s a movement I’m so proud to be a part of.”

Pasadena Hot Yoga

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