K. Pattabhi Jois

Ashtanga yoga is the strictest and most athletic of the great modern lineages: six fixed series of postures, learned in order, one posture at a time, joined by breath-synchronized jumping movements that make a practice look like something between a dance and a martial art.¹ Its source is Krishna Pattabhi Jois, a temple priest's son from a South Indian village who spent nearly his whole life in Mysore and taught, by the end of it, students who came from every continent to a single small room. The style's family tree does not stop at its own name, either. "Vinyasa," "flow" and "power yoga" classes are all, at bottom, loosened versions of what Jois taught.¹

Twelve years old, two rupees

Jois was born on 26 July 1915 in Kowshika, a village near Hassan in what was then the Kingdom of Mysore, the son of a Brahmin priest and astrologer.¹ At about twelve he watched Tirumalai Krishnamacharya give a yoga demonstration at his school and presented himself to the teacher the next morning.² Two years later he ran away to Mysore to keep studying with Krishnamacharya at the palace yogashala, while enrolling at the Sanskrit College. The family story has him leaving home with two rupees and a bicycle.¹

He never really left. In 1937, at the Maharaja's instruction, Jois established the Sanskrit College's first yoga department and directed it until his retirement in 1973.² In 1948 he founded the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in his two-room family home in the Lakshmipuram neighborhood, teaching before and after his college hours.² His book Yoga Mala, written in Kannada in 1962 and not translated into English until 1999, remains the method's founding text.¹

Mysore style goes abroad

Western students began finding their way to Lakshmipuram in the 1960s, and in 1975 Jois made his first teaching trip to the United States with his son Manju, who stayed.¹ What they encountered in Mysore became the practice's signature format, known everywhere simply as "Mysore style": students arrive in the early morning and move through a memorized sequence at their own pace, each receiving individual instruction and hands-on adjustment inside a shared room. Progress runs posture by posture, each new one given when the previous is ready, and very few people in the world have ever completed all six series.¹

By the 1990s the little institute had outgrown itself; in 2002 it moved to a purpose-built shala in Mysore's Gokulam neighborhood.² Celebrity students like Madonna, Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow gave the method a public profile out of all proportion to its austere routine.¹ Jois's own summary of it stayed the same for fifty years: "Ashtanga yoga is 99 percent practice, 1 percent theory," and, to students impatient for results, "Practice, practice and all is coming."¹

Jois died in Mysore on 18 May 2009, at 93. His grandson Sharath, who had assisted him from the age of nineteen and taken over the institute's direction in 2007, renamed it the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Institute in his honor.³

After Jois

The decade after his death brought a reckoning. Beginning in 2017–18, women who had studied with Jois described, on the record, sexual assaults committed under the guise of hands-on adjustments; the accounts were investigated and published at length, and in 2019 Sharath Jois publicly expressed sorrow for the pain caused by his grandfather's "improper adjustments" and asked forgiveness, an acknowledgment from inside the family itself.³ The Related coverage section below links to that reporting rather than retelling it; the practice of explicit consent for adjustments, now standard in Ashtanga rooms worldwide, is part of its legacy.

Sharath afterwards stepped away from the Gokulam institute and founded his own school, Sharath Yoga Centre, near Mysore, carrying the title of the lineage's Paramaguru. His mother Saraswathi Jois, Pattabhi Jois's daughter and the first woman admitted to the Mysore Sanskrit College, continued teaching at the Gokulam shala.³ On 11 November 2024, Sharath died suddenly of cardiac arrest, at 53, while hiking with students near the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia after a teaching visit to the University of Virginia.⁴ His death, coming with no announced successor, left the community weighing how authorization and succession should work from here.⁵

The lineage today

As of 2026 the tradition runs through two Mysore-area schools, both family-led. Sharath Yoga Centre continues under his widow Shruthi Jois and daughter Shraddha, teaching by application each season (demand is such that students are now selected by lottery), and it maintains the worldwide directories of teachers Sharath authorized or certified.⁶ The original Gokulam shala continues as the K. Pattabhi Jois Ashtanga Yoga Shala under Saraswathi Jois and her daughter Sharmila.⁷ Away from Mysore, Ashtanga is taught in nearly every city with a yoga scene at all, usually as a "Mysore program" in the early morning plus guided ("led") classes of the primary series. Any teacher who names Pattabhi Jois (Ashtanga) as their lineage is claiming this Mysore line.

Related coverage

Serious, well-documented accounts of sexual assault by Jois were published by his former students, and acknowledged by his grandson. This page links to that record rather than retelling it:

• The Walrus, April 2018: nine women's accounts of assaults during adjustments, the investigation that opened the subject.
• Yoga Journal, November 2018: a senior Ashtanga teacher's acknowledgment of how the community failed the women who spoke.
• The New York Times, November 2019: "Yoga Is Finally Facing Consent and Unwanted Touch", which carried the accounts, and Sharath Jois's apology, to a mainstream audience.
• The New York Times (wire), November 2024: Sharath Jois's obituary, recording his 2019 statement of sorrow and request for forgiveness.

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