Bikram Choudhury built a global business on a sequence of twenty-six postures performed in a room heated to about forty degrees Celsius, and on a training system that produced the teachers.
The teacher training was nine weeks long, cost around ten to twelve thousand dollars, and ran with several hundred students at a time. The schedule is the part that matters here.
Trainees did two ninety-minute classes a day in the heated room. Between and after them were lectures, posture clinics and anatomy sessions, frequently running past midnight, sometimes until three or four in the morning, with attendance compulsory. Choudhury's own lectures, delivered from a throne-like chair, might last several hours and could begin late at night. Sleep of four or five hours was normal. Trainees have described dehydration, illness and collapse.
Presented as intensity, this is a physiological regime, and its effects are the ones this part of the guide has described repeatedly: sustained heat stress, sleep deprivation and exhaustion degrade prefrontal function, which is the resource required for evaluating a situation, maintaining a boundary and formulating an objection.
The second structure is economic. Certification came only from Choudhury, and the brand was protected aggressively — he asserted copyright over the sequence and litigated against studios teaching it without affiliation. A teacher's livelihood therefore depended on standing with one man, and a studio owner's business did too. That is not the ordinary guru relationship. It is economic dependency with a spiritual vocabulary attached.
The allegations that followed — six civil suits alleging sexual assault, harassment or discrimination — describe conduct during those trainings, and the pattern in them is the one this chapter is about: young women isolated from ordinary life, exhausted, financially committed, dependent on his certification, in an environment where his behavior was normalized and where objecting meant losing the investment.
Devotional framing supplied the reinterpretation. Abusive treatment was recast as guru-disciple testing — the teacher breaking down the student's ego for their own development — which is Bandura's moral justification, and which also converts the student's distress into evidence of their own resistance to growth.
Sunk cost kept people silent long after the pattern was widely known within the community. A teacher who had spent twelve thousand dollars, nine weeks, and built a career on the certification faced total loss.
In January 2016 a Los Angeles jury awarded Choudhury's former legal adviser, Minakshi Jafa-Bodden, more than six and a half million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages in a wrongful dismissal and harassment case.
He left the United States rather than pay, and a warrant was issued. He continues to run trainings abroad. Many studios have dropped the name and teach the same sequence under other titles.