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The article focuses on CorePower, the largest yoga studio in the U.S. which offers teaching training as part of its program. Topics covered include how the company sells its teacher training program, a collective-action suit filed by about 1,200 teachers against the company for paying them less than minimum wage, and complaints about the lack of teaching opportunity for its students.

Reports on the growing number of middle-class Indians attracted to yogi Swami Ramdeve's “yoga made easy” approach. His emphasis on pranayama or breath control; Promise to his students of quick health benefits with minimal effort; Health problems associated with the affluent lifestyle of the Indian middle class; His warnings about the ill effects of Western culture.

LOS ANGELES -- Silence prevailed during the yoga asana routines of the ninth annual Bishnu Charan Ghosh Cup -- except for one distinct sound: the low engine rumble of airplanes lifting off and landing at the Los Angeles airport. This international competition has made the noise of momentum, too, but just where it is heading is hard to predict. Will it become a sport recognized on the Olympic stage as Rajashree Choudhury, the founder of USA Yoga and the International Yoga Sports Federation, hopes? Or is it destined to remain a quirky transplant from India practiced by an exclusive set of Bikram yogis? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TO the fans who thought they knew him George Harrison was both omnipresent and enigmatic. Of the four members of the world's most famous band, the Beatles, Harrison made the least effort at being a public figure, and though he shared himself in recordings as disparate as the catchy pop of ''Taxman,'' the desolate strains of ''While My Guitar Gently Weeps'' and an album of spiritual chants and music that he produced for the Radha Krishna Temple, he could be inscrutable and distant behind it all. Even as he sang ''Got My Mind Set on You,'' his consciousness seemed to be focused somewhere else entirely. To Olivia Harrison, who married him in 1978 and remained with him until his death in 2001, her husband was contradictory in different ways. He was, she said recently, her ''scoundrel yogi,'' who partook of the pleasures of this life while he contemplated the next one. And he preserved nearly everything he experienced, whether he was recording his first sitar lesson with Ravi Shankar or retaining fully packed suitcases from trips abroad that he kept as time capsules. But he wasn't concerned with how posterity would regard him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ONE night early this month, hundreds of yogis accustomed to grounding to the earth figuratively did so literally, on the green expanse of lawn near Pier 63 along the Hudson River. Schuyler Grant of the Kula Yoga Project, a founder of the event, Wanderlust Yoga in the City, made in situ additions to the yoga canon, suggesting, ''Reach your heart to the water,'' and encouraging participants to try handstands on the forgiving grass. Traditionally practiced outdoors, yoga obviously is not a hothouse flower to be confined to a studio, yet for years urban yogis tended to relegate open-air practice to retreats in places like Bali or Mexico. That began to change in recent years, and while an exact timeline of the New York outdoor yoga movement is tough to pinpoint, one of the early pioneers was Dana Flynn of Laughing Lotus, who started holding classes in a West Village park in 1997, moving them to a rooftop in 1999. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Ten years ago, with yoga transforming into a ubiquitous pop culture phenomenon from a niche pursuit, yoga teachers banded together to create a voluntary online registry of schools meeting new standards for training instructors. But that list -- which now includes nearly 1,000 yoga schools nationwide, many of them tiny -- is being put to a use for which it was never intended. It is the key document in a crackdown that pits free-spirited yogis against lumbering state governments, which, unlike those they are trying to regulate, are not always known for their flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents the views of various people about yoga and about those interlopers who use yoga classes to hit on a succession of toned regulars. Hillary Raphael, a writer who has done 20 years of yoga practice and has found inappropriate yoga guys, said that there is always a guy who wants to put his mat next to an attractive girl. According to Lama Sumati Marut, President of the Yoga Studies Institute in Tucson, yoga is a discipline designed to achieve enlightenment in the lifetime.

Announces the six-city author tour of yoga teacher B. K. S. Iyengar to promote his book "Light on Yoga," across the U.S. in October 2005.