Let’s face it, yoga teachers have never exactly been envied for their opulent
and exciting lifestyles. The road to spiritual enlightenment has
traditionally involved draughty ashrams, bowls of lentils and, if you were
lucky, the odd tantric levitation.
Now, though, the world’s elite yoga teachers are changing all that. Commanding
up to £20,000 a week, they live more like rock stars than the sandal-wearing
ascetics of old. The new breed includes the yoga power couple David Life and
Sharon Gannon (the co-founders of the celebrity favourite Jivamukti), Shiva
Rea (a flow-yoga practitioner) and Bikram Choudhury (the man behind the
Bikram hot-yoga studios that are franchised across the globe like a
fast-food chain).
These days, flying an A-list yoga teacher to your rainforest honeymoon or
Manhattan boardroom is the ultimate status symbol, much like hiring a
superstar DJ was in the 1990s. The reason is obvious. Movers and shakers who
also happen to be navel-gazers have an ever-growing yearning to salvage
their karma while continuing to live a lavish and privileged life.
Jivamukti’s London base is in Notting Hill for a reason.
“Yoga teachers these days are a bit like pop stars,” says Robin Catto, who
runs Breathe, a London agency that finds teachers for stars such as Helena
Bonham Carter. “There’s a mystique around teaching yoga, and with that comes
power. You have something they want and you know how to pass it on to them.”
Catto spent one summer being jetted around Mustique and Antigua by a wealthy
client. He said they made him feel part of the family. He has also taught
Madonna. He won’t say how much he gets paid for this kind of work, but one
London teacher has heard of hedge-fund and A-list types paying five-figure
sums. The Wall Street Journal has estimated the value of the international
yoga industry at $42 billion (£21.6 billion).
Being a yoga guru to the super-rich doesn’t exactly sound like hard work.
“Sometimes, you get a room in the mansion,” one American teacher says (he
works at the Gwynnie and Brad level). “Or, if they’re in the south of
France, there are usually a few spare apartments attached to the house.” He
also says that, more often than not, he has to work with the client for only
an hour a day. “These are busy people — that’s all the time they’ve got for
yoga.” And what does he do for the rest of the day? “Practise my own yoga,
get the chef to fix me sushi and try not to sleep with their teenage
daughter.”
For these superyogis, hard sell comes with the territory. The majority have
released DVDs and books and have websites. The power-yoga guru Baron
Baptiste even sells his DVDs on QVC. At the other end of the spectrum is
Rea, whose DVDs feature her bathed in golden sunlight like a goddess and
posing on a Californian beach. The end result is not unlike a Madonna video.
Some of the jet-set teachers’ homes are equally glam. David Swenson, a
globe-trotting ashtangi, lives in a house in Texas surrounded by beautiful
gardens with palms, ponds and large sculptures of the Buddha and Ganesh. The
Mexico-based Michael Gannon is turning 30 hectares of Mayan jungle into a
“yogi village”, with indoor waterfalls and swimming pools. Gannon and Life
own a 76-acre ashram with an animal refuge in the hippie idyll Woodstock.
“It is a wooden home built from trees harvested on the land,” Life says. “It
has an organic garden and is surrounded by trees and bears, coyotes and
deer.”
To date, there has been only one yoga multi-millionaire, Choudhury, who is
reputedly worth more than $7m. The Bikram guru is said to collect Bentleys
and wears a diamond-encrusted Piaget watch with his black spandex briefs
when he gives classes. His private clients include the Clintons, Quincy
Jones and Brooke Shields.
All of which raises the question: is it possible to be both a yogi and a
millionaire? “Yes, you can be a seriously rich yogi,” Catto says. “Just so
long as you aren’t attached to the money.”
What he’s talking about is a thoroughly modern dilemma. How do we square a
comfortable life with an ethical outlook? Many star teachers resolve the
issue by living a luxurious life in public while maintaining a regular
spiritual practice in private. “My daily practice focuses on remembering God
when I first wake up,” Gannon says. Despite living part-time in a loft in
TriBeCa, New York, and working with Uma Thurman, Willem Dafoe and Christy
Turlington, she remains true to yogic teaching. “I engage myself with
meditation, prayer and japa chanting immediately after waking up,” she says.
“After this ritual, which includes some very simple asanas [yoga postures]
to tune the instrument, I wash my face and make tea.”
It’s possible that the best thing about being a yoga Alister is that you get
paid for trying to live like a saint. Gannon is involved in ethical work,
which is part, she says, of the yogic way of living. She is a huge supporter
of Peta, the animal-rights organisation, and has shown antiwar movies at her
New York studio. She is also involved in pet activism and wrote the book Cats
and Dogs Are People Too!. Such is her commitment to animals that she
even feeds her eight cats home-prepared yogic food. “Grandma loves steamed
broccoli, and Lilac Fairy prefers millet mixed with flaxseed oil and green
spirulina algae. Every morning, Miten eats a salad of grated carrots, while
Tee Tee loves a big mixed green salad.”
Despite the superstar yogis’ best efforts, however, it can be hard to remain
selfless and calm when bombarded by modern life. “I have found that, for me,
the difficulty of yoga is not the study of spiritual texts, pranayama or
asana practice,” says Swenson, who spends 10 months a year travelling to
far-flung locations. “The greatest mountain we have to climb is to find ways
to turn whatever we do into yoga. How do I react to delayed flights, lost
baggage and other daily stresses? A truly mature yoga practice is one that
permeates all aspects of life.”
The ethics of jetting around the globe, getting paid a fortune to create a
yoga hole in the ozone layer, are also becoming a big issue. Life says he
and Gannon can’t fly without a plane “yet” and so buy CO2 offsets for their
travel. Catto says his family are driving to France for this year’s holiday.
Swenson is looking at a product line that will put money back into
environmental causes.
So, is being a superyogi the ultimate route to having it all? It certainly
looks it. What other profession offers a body beautiful, endless riches and
karmic reward points? A word of caution, though, for any aspiring gurus.
Actually, three words: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Known as “the rich man’s
guru” because of his collection of 93 Rolls-Royces, he died from a heart
attack at the tender age — in yogic terms — of 58. Rather than being
celebrated for his ground-breaking meditation techniques, the founder of the
Osho movement is best remembered for the following bumper sticker: “Jesus
saves, Moses invests, Bhagwan spends.”
