The Meditation Board

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First World Championships Challenge Yoga Karma
Fri Sep 26, 8:19 AM ET

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Muscles rippled, heads appeared in impossible places and the sweet smell of incense wafted in the air as the first World Yoga Championship ever staged in the United States got off to a mind-boggling start on Thursday.

Some 70 contestants limbered up for a four-day pose off in a contest aimed both at challenging the concept that competition is anathema to the ancient spiritual practice of yoga, and laying the groundwork for yoga to become an Olympic event.

"Yoga doesn't mean just sitting and meditating and eating health foods," said championship organizer and "hot yoga" guru Bikram Choudhury at the Los Angeles Convention Center, where the event is taking place.

"There have been yoga championships in India for hundreds of years. Competitions have also been held in Japan, Uruguay, Brazil. Argentina and Italy," Choudhury told Reuters.

"It is a combination of body-building, Miss World (news - web sites), Mr. Universe and gymnastics," he added.

The very notion of a yoga competition has disturbed the karma of some U.S. yoga enthusiasts, who bristle at the concept of selling what they consider an essentially mind-healing way of life.

But Choudhury, a former multiple Indian Yoga Champion who is as short on humility as he is long on ambition, shrugs off the critics.

Competition, he says "serves the higher purpose of inspiring people to take up the health-promoting practice of yoga ... The time is right for a show that puts yoga in the spotlight."

The four-day championship and Yoga Expo is the culmination of a dream for Choudhury, who has exported his Beverly Hills-based Bikram Yoga method worldwide in the past two decades.

His copyrighted 26 pose sequence, carried out in a room heated to 105 degrees, have brought him gold watches and Rolls-Royces as well as a string of celebrity clients including John McEnroe, Madonna (news - web sites) and former NBA star Kareem Abdul Jabbar who value its therapeutic properties.

"It saves people's lives. It is a creation better than the Taj Mahal, antibiotics, Apollo 11 and computers together," Choudhury said.

Practitioners of all forms of yoga are taking part in the championships. They will be judged (by experts flown in from India) on grace, proportion, flexibility, endurance and balance for five compulsory poses and two optionals carried out in three minutes. The winner will receive a two-week trip to the country of their choice and $3,000 in cash.

"Competition is a medium in which you can explore your dynamic skill. The sport and the mind is not in competition. The competition is about the body only," said Professor P.S. Das, a Calcutta-based yoga and physical therapy consultant who is one of the judges.

The next stop for Choudhury is the Olympics.

"Why not yoga at the Olympics?. I'm told you need to have at least 8 countries competing for an event to be admitted. Now we have 20 countries," he said.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/nm/20030926/od_n...