A famous and charismatic guru gives life to a new style of yoga that receives enthusiastic acclaim. What can break this picture? Well, the heavy accusations of a moral and ethical nature that fell precisely on the founder: questionable sexual behavior, financial troubles, administrative irregularities, compromises with environments such as neopaganism and wicca.
A public image, cleverly constructed, cut to pieces in a very short time, that of John Friend, the father of the anusara, one of the many modern yoga styles. At the opening we have outlined the salient stages of the rise and fall of this teacher and influencer, as he passed from adoring students to lawyers.
In any case, despite the founder's troubles, the anusara yoga has a group of affectionate people who carry on the positive and substantial contents of the discipline, in full blast. Get to know her better!
From the stars to the stables: the descending parable of John Friend, the founder of anusara yoga
The anusara yoga is a rather recent style, just of age: in fact it was born in 1997 from the conceptual starting point of joining the hatha yoga with a philosophical component of Hindu and tantric matrix well rooted in the practice.
In concrete terms, the anusara yoga is presented as a dynamic style characterized by the flow guided from one asana to the other according to the breath . The spiritual part is linked to the setting given by each individual master and escapes from a systematic cataloging, however it is possible to affirm his adherence to the universe of Hinduism.
A very strong sense of belonging distinguishes the increasing number of students, part of the great family guided and founded by the teacher Friend. This charismatic leader has managed to put together a substantial economic empire and an expensive school for teachers of the anusara method. He himself, in the golden years, was considered a sort of star, a celebrity with his retinue of fans who filled conferences and seminars held in the US and around the world.
In this picture, all the accusations made against him, exposed at the beginning, exploded with the force of a thunder. A pouring rain began to fall and the consternation, the blame, the disappointment, the embarrassment fell on the world built by John Fried.
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A style to try without prejudice
We are not interested in stirring up the troubledness of the events that led Friend to the temporary abandonment of teaching . We can say that many have left the anusara community and many others have closed ranks around the founder. Many have felt broken the relationship of trust between student and teacher, between theories disclosed and real life, many others have separated the master from the man, the philosophy from the practice.
Remaining on the "technician" the anusara yoga does not propose any Copernican revolution in the yoga field, but certainly it provides an interesting starting point, that is the attention also to the spiritual brought that the discipline brings with it. This is particularly relevant because in the West the practice is considered a sort of gymnastics, thus losing the philosophical and, dare we say, cultural depth that instead should strongly characterize yoga.
Fried has a multifaceted knowledge of the subject: a practitioner of hatha, ananda, iyenger yoga has drawn and borrowed elements from each of the mentioned styles, giving the anusara its own taste.
In Italy this style has an increasing number of certified masters. It will not be difficult for you to find a center to practice this gentle technique, whose name means poetically "to flow gracefully".
