Anusara School of Hatha Yoga
school of modern yoga
Anusara School of Hatha Yoga, also known as Anusara Yoga (Hindi: अनुसार योग) is the successor of a modern school of hatha yoga founded as Anusara, Inc. by American yoga teacher John Friend in 1997. Friend derived his style from the Iyengar style of yoga and reintroduced elements of Hindu spirituality into a more health-oriented Western approach to Yoga. The school changed its name in 2012 after a scandal and Friend's departure.
Founder
John Friend (born May 30, 1959) started practicing yoga postures as shown in the book Integral Yoga Hatha by Swami Satchidananda at age 13. He lived in Ohio until 19 years old, and then moved to Texas. Before becoming a yoga teacher, Friend worked as a financial analyst until he quit in 1986 to teach yoga full-time. In the years following he traveled to California to study with Judith Lasater, and began to focus on Iyengar Yoga. Friend taught in the Iyengar style and, during the 1990s, served on the board of the Iyengar Yoga Organization for four years.
Style of yoga
Friend set up Anusara in 1997 as a style of hatha yoga intended to combine what he called Shiva-Shakti Tantra and his own "Universal Principles of [bodily] Alignment".
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Anusara School of Hatha Yoga” is school of modern yoga. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anusara, School and Hatha, not as a finished interpretation.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2545700. The first chronological checks are 1997, 2012, 1959 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anusara School of Hatha Yoga” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.