K. Pattabhi Jois

About K. Pattabhi Jois

On November 14, 2017, Karen Rain published a first-person account on her dedicated WordPress site Ashtanga Yoga and #MeToo describing years of sexual assault by K. Pattabhi Jois during the adjustments he gave her in his Mysore yoga shala in the 1990s. Her account was joined within months by Anneke Lucas (assaulted in a 2001 New York workshop), Jubilee Cooke, T.M., and several other named former students; their testimonies were synthesized in Matthew Remski's investigative book Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond (Embodied Wisdom Publications, 2019). K. Pattabhi Jois (1915-2009) was the founder of the Ashtanga Vinyasa system of yoga, a long-time student of Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, and the head of the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, Karnataka, from 1948 until his death. He systematized the six-series progression that became the spine of much of modern flowing yoga and authored Yoga Mala (Kannada original 1962; English translation by Eddie Stern, Patanjali Yoga Shala, New York, 2000; North Point Press edition 2002). The documented assaults, the named institutional silences that followed, and the July 2019 statement from his grandson and successor R. Sharath Jois are now inseparable from the lineage record.

Contributions

The technical contribution Pattabhi Jois made to modern postural yoga was a system: a fixed, sequenced, breath-linked progression of asanas taught in a self-paced format with individual adjustments from the teacher. The system has six series — Primary (Yoga Chikitsa, 'yoga therapy'), Intermediate (Nadi Shodhana, 'nerve cleansing'), and four Advanced (Sthira Bhaga, 'stable grace,' A through D). Each series is taught one posture at a time; students are 'given' the next posture by the teacher when the previous one is steady. The whole structure is held together by tristhana, Jois's term for the three points of attention — breath (ujjayi with bandhas), gaze (drishti), and posture — and by the vinyasa system in which each asana has a counted entry and exit sequence linked by inhales and exhales.

His book Yoga Mala (Kannada original 1962, English translation by Eddie Stern first published by Patanjali Yoga Shala in New York in 2000, later editions North Point Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 2002) is the primary text in which Jois articulated this method. The book opens with a doctrinal section on yamas, niyamas, and the eight limbs from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras as Jois understood them through his lineage; the body of the text is a posture-by-posture exposition of the Sun Salutations and Primary Series, with the count, breath, and stated benefit for each asana. The text frames the practice as a religious and therapeutic discipline, not as exercise. The aphorism most often associated with him — 'Yoga is 99% practice, 1% theory' — appears in many forms in his oral teaching and is widely attributed to interviews with him in the 1980s and 1990s.

His institutional contribution was the Mysore shala itself. Renamed the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute (KPJAYI) in 2006 and now Sharath Yoga Centre under his lineage, the shala in Lakshmipuram (and later in Gokulam) became the destination for serious Ashtanga students worldwide for over four decades. The 'going to Mysore' pilgrimage — a one-to-three month immersion of daily Mysore practice in his shala — formalized in the 1980s and 1990s and shaped a generation of Western teachers.

He also formalized the system of authorization and certification by which Ashtanga teachers were licensed to teach. The two-tier system (Authorized, then Certified, the latter being rare) tied the global teaching network back to the Mysore shala and to his personal endorsement — a structure that, as Remski's 2019 book and others have argued, also functioned to keep public criticism of his conduct contained within the lineage for decades.

Works

- *Yoga Mala* — Kannada original 1962; English translation by Eddie Stern, first published by Patanjali Yoga Shala (New York) in 2000, later editions by North Point Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux from 2002. Treatise on Ashtanga Vinyasa philosophy and the Primary Series, written by Jois between approximately 1958 and 1961. - *Suryanamaskara* — short instructional text on the Sun Salutations, published in English translation by Eddie Stern, 2005. - Numerous interviews, lecture transcripts, and conference talks (Mysore, San Francisco, Stanford, Encinitas) preserved in audio and video; not collected in a single authoritative volume. - The codified six-series sequence itself is the primary 'unwritten work' — transmitted orally, embodied, and preserved through KPJAYI certification.

Controversies

The documented sexual misconduct of Pattabhi Jois is the central and load-bearing element of any honest account of his life. The record is specific.

Karen Rain studied with Jois at his Mysore shala from 1994 to 1998. In her account first posted in 2017 on her dedicated site Ashtanga Yoga and #MeToo and republished in revised form on GEN / Medium in 2018 ('Yoga Guru Pattabhi Jois Sexually Assaulted Me for Years'), she describes Jois digitally penetrating her, grinding his pelvis against hers, and groping her breasts and genitals during adjustments in front of full rooms of students, repeatedly, over years. She names specific postures (baddha konasana, upavishta konasana, supta kurmasana, urdhva dhanurasana backbends) in which the assaults occurred.

Anneke Lucas, a survivor of childhood sex trafficking who later became a yoga teacher, described in an essay published in 2018 being assaulted by Jois at a workshop in New York in 2001. T.M., Jubilee Cooke, and additional named and unnamed former students have published comparable accounts in various venues, several of them collected and synthesized in Matthew Remski's Practice and All Is Coming (Embodied Wisdom Publications, March 2019). Andrea Marks's June 2019 long-form piece in The Walrus, 'Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories,' carries the most extensive single journalistic treatment.

Photographs and video of Jois performing adjustments of the type the survivors describe — straddling backbending female students, sitting on their thighs in seated forward folds, pressing his groin into theirs — are in the public record and have been reproduced in news coverage and analytical writing. The behavior was visible to senior students throughout Jois's career.

The institutional response history is part of the controversy. Yoga Journal and other large yoga publications were largely silent until late 2017, when the cumulative weight of survivor accounts forced a public reckoning. Yoga Journal published a statement and an essay by senior teacher Mary Taylor in December 2017 acknowledging Jois had touched students inappropriately. Several senior Ashtanga teachers including David Garrigues, Tim Miller, and Greg Nardi published personal statements in 2017 and 2018; their statements were received with mixed reactions, with many survivors and observers (including Karen Rain in her January 2018 reply) criticizing them as too late, too vague, or self-protective. The Jois Foundation, which runs Ashtanga-based programs in public schools, has issued public statements during this period.

In July 2019, R. Sharath Jois, K. Pattabhi Jois's grandson and the head of the Mysore lineage at that time, posted an Instagram statement acknowledging that his grandfather had given 'improper adjustments' and expressing his sadness; he encouraged students to forgive. Survivors and commentators (Karen Rain, Matthew Remski, Theodora Wildcroft, Andrea Marks, others) widely characterized the statement as a euphemistic non-apology that named no specific acts, named no survivors, and called for forgiveness without institutional reform. It is nonetheless part of the lineage's own public record.

There is also a secondary historiographic dispute about the accuracy of Jois's account of his own training. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body (Oxford University Press, 2010) and others have shown that some of the lineage claims around the *Yoga Korunta* — the manuscript Krishnamacharya is said to have studied that supposedly grounds the Ashtanga sequences — are not independently verifiable; no copy of the manuscript has been produced for academic examination.

Notable Quotes

1. 'Yoga is ninety-nine percent practice, one percent theory.' — K. Pattabhi Jois, widely-cited aphorism preserved in oral teaching and quoted in multiple interviews including the 2007 documentary *Guru* (dir. Robert Wilkins). 2. 'Do your practice and all is coming.' — K. Pattabhi Jois, oral teaching to Mysore students, widely attested; the phrase Matthew Remski used as the title of his 2019 critical study. 3. 'In the beginning, the body is hard like a stone; later it becomes soft like a flower.' — K. Pattabhi Jois, *Yoga Mala*, opening section on the practice, English translation by Eddie Stern (North Point Press, 2002 edition). 4. 'The body is not stiff; the mind is stiff.' — K. Pattabhi Jois, widely attributed oral teaching, quoted in numerous student accounts from the 1980s and 1990s including those collected in Guy Donahaye and Eddie Stern, *Guruji: A Portrait of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois Through the Eyes of His Students* (North Point Press, 2010). 5. 'It brings me immense pain that I also witnessed him giving improper adjustments.' — R. Sharath Jois, public statement on his grandfather's conduct, Instagram, July 2019.

Legacy

Jois's legacy is now structurally bifurcated, and any serious teacher in the Ashtanga lineage today has to decide how to hold both halves.

The practice itself continues. The Mysore tradition was carried after his death in 2009 by his grandson R. Sharath Jois (until Sharath's death in November 2024) and is now continued by Sharath's daughter Shraddha Jois and other family members at the Sharath Yoga Centre in Mysore. Thousands of Authorized and Certified teachers run Mysore programs worldwide. The Primary and Intermediate series, the tristhana method, the count, the drishti system, and the breath-linked vinyasa grammar are all in active transmission. Many senior teachers report that the technical practice — done with informed consent, with adjustments either declined or explicitly invited, with attention to student autonomy — is a serious and valuable discipline.

The documentation of harm has also reshaped how the practice is taught. 'Hands-off' or consent-card models, in which students explicitly opt in or out of physical adjustments at the start of each class, are now standard in many Western Ashtanga studios. Trauma-informed yoga frameworks (Bessel van der Kolk, David Emerson, Hala Khouri, the Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga curriculum) have drawn explicitly on the Ashtanga survivor accounts as a case study in how a guru-led adjustment culture can become an abuse vector. Several senior teachers including Iain Grysak, Greg Nardi, and others have publicly stepped away from the Jois lineage or have restructured their programs to remove Jois iconography while continuing to teach the practice.

Matthew Remski's Practice and All Is Coming is now standard reading in critical-yoga curricula and in academic yoga studies programs. Karen Rain's site, her writing, her interviews on the J. Brown Yoga Talks podcast (2018), and her continued advocacy form a parallel canon that any honest survey of modern yoga includes. The 'going to Mysore' pilgrimage continues but is no longer the unexamined rite of passage it once was.

The long-term legacy question — whether a transmission that ran for decades through documented assault can be cleanly inherited, partially inherited, or only inherited with a fundamental restructuring of the teacher-student relationship — is open inside the Ashtanga community itself. The honest answer for a serious student is that the practice and the harm are part of the same record, and that practicing this method now means practicing it with that record known.

Significance

The significance of K. Pattabhi Jois cannot be written today without holding two things at once: the architecture he built for a generation of practitioners, and the documented harm he caused inside that architecture. Both are part of the record.

On the building side: Jois inherited a still-forming experiment from his teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya at the Mysore Palace in the late 1920s and 1930s, and turned it into a system. Krishnamacharya taught a particular grouping of asana sequences synchronized with breath and bandhas to a small set of young men, including the teenaged Jois. After Krishnamacharya left Mysore in 1953, Jois continued teaching a refined form of those sequences from his home shala in Lakshmipuram, which he had formally named the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in 1948. Over the next fifty years he codified the Primary, Intermediate, and four Advanced series — each a fixed sequence of postures linked by vinyasa, taught in the Mysore style of self-paced practice with individual adjustments from the teacher. By the time Western students began arriving in serious numbers in the 1970s and 1980s — David Williams, Norman Allen, Nancy Gilgoff, Tim Miller, Eddie Stern, Richard Freeman, Chuck Miller, Maty Ezraty, John Scott, and many more — Jois had a transmissible system. Power yoga, vinyasa flow, and large segments of contemporary studio yoga descend from this template.

On the harm side: from at least the late 1980s onward, Jois physically assaulted female students during the bodily 'adjustments' that are a structural feature of Mysore-style practice. The accounts are specific and dated. Karen Rain studied with Jois in Mysore from 1994 to 1998 and described in her 2017 account being digitally penetrated and dry-humped during adjustments to forward folds and backbends. Anneke Lucas described being assaulted by Jois at a 2001 New York workshop in an essay published in 2018. Jubilee Cooke, T.M., and others have published comparable accounts. Photographs and video of Jois performing assault-type adjustments in public workshops are also in the public record and are reproduced and analyzed in Remski's 2019 book. Senior students including David Garrigues, Tim Miller, and Greg Nardi have published acknowledgements; R. Sharath Jois, Pattabhi Jois's grandson and the successor head of the Mysore lineage, published a statement on Instagram in July 2019 acknowledging that his grandfather gave 'improper adjustments' — a statement that was widely received by survivors as inadequate but is part of the lineage's own admission record.

The significance for a serious student of yoga history is not that one figure was complicated. It is that an entire transmission ran for decades through hands that were causing documented harm, and that the response of much of the institution was silence, deflection, or reframing. Holding the system Jois built and the harm he did inside it together — neither erasing the technical inheritance nor sanitizing the conduct — is the honest treatment.

Connections

Jois sits at the center of one of the four major branches of modern transnational postural yoga that descend from Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. The other three are B.K.S. Iyengar (alignment-focused, propped, therapeutic), T.K.V. Desikachar (viniyoga, individualized, breath-led), and Indra Devi (early Western popularization). All four studied with Krishnamacharya in or around the Mysore Palace experiment between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, and each carried a distinct emphasis westward. Jois's emphasis was the vinyasa-linked fixed sequence taught in self-paced Mysore style.

Downstream of Jois the lineage forks again. Through David Williams and Nancy Gilgoff the practice reached the United States in the mid-1970s. Through Tim Miller, Richard Freeman, Eddie Stern, John Scott, and Chuck Miller it took institutional shape in California, Colorado, New York, New Zealand, and the UK. Power yoga (Bryan Kest, Beryl Bender Birch, Baron Baptiste) is an Ashtanga-derived adaptation. Vinyasa flow as a generic studio style draws much of its sequencing grammar from the Primary Series sun-salutation and standing-pose architecture. R. Sharath Jois carried the Mysore shala forward as Paramaguru after his grandfather's death in 2009 until his own death in November 2024, and his daughter Shraddha Jois has continued the family teaching role.

The survivor-and-investigator network around the documentation is also a connection in its own right: Karen Rain, Anneke Lucas, Jubilee Cooke, T.M., Matthew Remski, and journalists at The Walrus (Andrea Marks's 2019 long-form piece 'Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories') and Yoga Journal form a parallel lineage of public record that any honest student of the tradition now reads alongside the lineage's own texts.

Further Reading

• Jois, K. Pattabhi. *Yoga Mala*. Trans. Eddie Stern. Patanjali Yoga Shala, New York, 2000 (Kannada original 1962); North Point Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux edition 2002.
• Remski, Matthew. *Practice and All Is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics, and Healing in Yoga and Beyond*. Embodied Wisdom Publications, 2019.
• Rain, Karen. 'Ashtanga Yoga and #MeToo.' WordPress site, 2017-present. karenrainashtangayogaandmetoo.wordpress.com
• Rain, Karen. 'Yoga Guru Pattabhi Jois Sexually Assaulted Me for Years.' GEN / Medium, 2018.
• Lucas, Anneke. 'My Abuse by Pattabhi Jois.' Published 2018.
• Marks, Andrea. 'Yoga's Culture of Sexual Abuse: Nine Women Tell Their Stories.' *The Walrus*, June 2019.
• Singleton, Mark. *Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice*. Oxford University Press, 2010.
• Jois, R. Sharath. Instagram statement, July 2019, on his grandfather's conduct.