| In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors. |
LOS ANGELES (AP) A hush fell over the crowd as Lesli Christiansen coiled her legs into a pretzel while balancing atop two arms tucked to her chest, pulling off the difficult peacock-lotus position.
``I'm very competitive about this,'' the 27-year-old San Diego woman said after finishing her semifinals routine. ``I totally want to win.''
Christiansen was among dozens of yoga buffs who gathered for what organizers billed as the first international yoga championship held in the United States, a three-day competition to see who could best achieve inner peace or at least one the discipline's impossibly knotted poses.
Competitors from as far away as Japan twisted and stretched before a panel of judges scoring for posture, grace and proportion in the First Annual International Yoga Asana Championship, scheduled to end Sunday. First prize was $3,000 and a free trip anywhere in the world, but many said there was much more to the contest than beating out the competition.
``I don't like the word competition. This is more of an exhibition,'' said Austrid Audet, 30, of Boca Raton, Fla. minutes after rolling herself into cylinder shape known as the full camel position. ``I'm looking to do my best and support others. Win or lose, it's the same to me.''
Yet the contest inevitably produced winners and losers. And the idea of introducing a spirit of competition into the ancient meditative practice struck some as paradoxical.
``A yoga competition is an oxymoron,'' said Max Strom, director of the Sacred Movement Center for Yoga and Healing Los Angeles. ``It's like saying 'let's have a Christian competition and see who's the best Christian.'''
Still, competitions are nothing to new to yoga, said Nora Isaacs, a senior editor at Yoga Journal. India, for example, has held contests for years.
``But when you bring the competition to the West, we have such an intensively competitive culture the contest takes on a new meaning,'' she said.
Bikram Choudhury, the contest's organizer and flamboyant guru behind a popular form known as ``hot yoga'', was himself a childhood yoga champion in his native India. He now plans to use competitions to promote the practice in the United States, particularly among kids.
Choudhury was untroubled by yoga purists critical of turning what they view as a search for higher consciousness into a sport.
``It doesn't bother me. They just don't know,'' Choudhury said in an interview. ``They believe yoga means sit and eat, meditate and look like a hippie and smell bad. No.They just don't know.''
Choudhury even hopes one day to get yoga into the Olympics, a feat he says he's ``100 percent'' confident will happen.
Becoming an official Olympic sport would round out yoga's rise from a 5,000-year-old ascetic pursuit to a mainstream fitness craze practiced by more than 15 million nationwide, complete with a booming side industry for yoga apparel, yoga how-to books and yoga music.
The industry was on full display at a convention held simultaneously with Choudhury's competition in the downtown Los Angeles convention center. A fashion show featuring the latest in yoga clothes was among the highlights at an expo that included all things yoga and alternative for the self-realization set.
But the main action was in a hall next door, where more than 50 yoga enthusiasts took turns striking a series of seven poses five compulsory and two optional for judges flown in from India. Though competitive, the contest wasn't exactly cutthroat and participants tended to root one another on.
Helena Springer, who runs a yoga studio in Melbourne, Fla. and was coaching her little sister through the contest, went agog over one woman who did a near-perfect full cobra, arching her back until her toes touched her head.
``She's the bomb,'' Springer said. ``It looks so beautiful, very balanced.''
Christiansen finished her set with a fish-in-lotus maneuver by crossing her legs and bending her head back to the floor. She said the pressure of competing helped her enter her most ``meditative state'' while allowing her to share ``her soul with the judges.''
Christiansen said she hoped to make the finals Sunday but wasn't approaching the event with the same aggression she brought to the soccer field years ago.
``There's a lot of respect for competitors,'' Christiansen said. ``Otherwise, you're not practicing your inner peace.''