As much as Friend preaches the gospel of openness, he’s relatively guarded about the story of his own life. Like a lot of celebrities, he tells a version of his history from which he never deviates: his father, a former sportscaster and marketing executive, had economic troubles and so moved the family from the Rust Belt to Texas; his mother was an intellectually gifted Southern belle and a Juilliard graduate with a theatrical flair. Colleagues told me, and Friend concurred, that when his mother was ill — she died of cancer in 2002 — Friend, the older of two boys, strived to cheer her up with his wisecracks. It was she who introduced Friend to yoga. He wore braces as a child to correct his pigeon toes; after the braces came off, his mother started him on the practice, and he never stopped. His mother gave him books about yogis too, and soon Superman and Batman had little allure. “I wanted to be a yogi because they knew the mysteries of life,” he told me. “They could dematerialize.” He was obsessed with magic (the word is on the vanity plate of his silver BMW, which he inherited from his mother) — and followed raptly the tales of miraculous transformations he heard in the different churches his mother insisted they visit every Sunday. As he grew older, Friend played drums in a rock band, a portal to another kind of transformation to be sure, but one that still spoke to a desire for a very public life.

Friend may not have known it at the time, but he connected with yoga at a critical point in its history in America. As Syman notes in “The Subtle Body,” yoga in the United States dates to the late 19th century, when it was first propagated by Indian yogis like Swami Vivekananda and Paramahansa Yogananda, who wrote “Autobiography of a Yogi.” But the yoga that ultimately prevailed here was not the stringent, meditative practice supposedly leading to spiritual bliss that was more common in India; its health and beauty benefits were always a better sell. (A nice yoga-fan through line runs from Gloria Swanson to Ali MacGraw to Christy Turlington.) By 1976, five million Americans had signed on.

Friend was never content to be just another yoga enthusiast. Horatio Alger could have been one of his swamis. He bought himself a car when he turned 16 with money he made working after school. In 1983, he graduated from Texas A&M University — no bastion of any counterculture — and paid his dues as a financial analyst until he took the leap and began teaching yoga full time. By 1987 he was teaching Houston housewives and, he likes to joke, the occasional farmer in overalls. He also began traveling to workshops all over the country, including one with Judith Hanson Lasater, who introduced him to Iyengar yoga. Within a few years, Friend had taken workshop with B.K.S. Iyengar himself and with Pattabhi Jois, the creator of Ashtanga.

In other words, Friend was aligning himself with the greats of contemporary yoga, Indians whose teachings were then shaping the yoga world. (Lineage is as important in yoga as it is to Boston bluebloods.) By 1989 he was in Pune, for a month of study with Iyengar. That year, at age 30, he gave a confounding performance on a rickety wooden platform at the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Ganeshpuri, India (the same one Elizabeth Gilbert described in “Eat, Pray, Love”). In videos taken that day, Friend looks barely beyond his teens: his brown hair and beard were scraggly, and he was so slight from a bad intestinal virus that he seemed incapable of moving, much less contorting into a lotus position while balancing in handstand. But that is what he did. Friend’s skill was impressive — he was then practicing for a minimum of three hours every day — but what really set him apart was his style, which conveyed both bravado and vulnerability. The hundreds of Indians and Americans present that day gave him a standing ovation, and from then on, the story goes, John Friend was not just the Iyengar teacher for the ashram but a bona fide yoga star, with invitations to teach around the world. “There was a lot of grace involved,” he told me.

As Friend rose to higher positions in the Iyengar organization — he spent four years on the board in the 1990s — he also observed and absorbed Iyengar’s exacting standards of teacher certification, which require the study of anatomy, physiology, philosophy and ethics, as well as teaching a demonstration class and passing a written exam. From the leader of the Ganeshpuri ashram, Gurumayi Chidvilasananda — no stranger herself to American celebrity — Friend learned how to give intimate, inspirational talks to crowds of thousands. He also befriended American scholars of Eastern spirituality studying in India. In each of these encounters, Friend was the yogic equivalent of a sponge, or as one associate recalled, “He was a man with a mission.” The mission then was to reclaim yoga from the many U.S .teachers who were so consumed with the physical practice — it was all about the workout — that they sweated out any trace of spirituality.

Equally important, Friend wanted to create a new yoga school that wasn’t just accessible but commercially sustainable. In the ensuing years, Friend, restless, eager and supremely confident, broke with Iyengar and distanced himself from Chidvilasananda as he began to refine what he saw as his own yoga technique. As he wrote in 1995, “Finally I realized that I was not fully aligned with Mr. Iyengar’s philosophy and method, so it was not dharmic of me to continue to use his name to describe my teaching style.” Their philosophical differences — the kind of intrayogic argument best left to the professionals — were compounded by mentor-disciple issues. In essence, Friend wanted a kinder, gentler yoga school — though his critics say he simply wanted to build his own empire, and grafted a touchy-feely teaching method onto what remains, essentially, Iyengar yoga. (Whether you believe Friend felt constricted or Iyengar felt betrayed, a residue of bad feeling remains.) By 1997 Friend had come up with a name, Anusara, and a mission statement. “Anusara yoga is a hatha-yoga system that unites universal principles of alignment with a philosophy that is epitomized by what I call ‘celebration of the heart,’ ” he wrote.

He merged his entrepreneurial nature with his yogic one. Friend wrote his own teacher-training manual, which is about as detailed as an oil-refinery operations handbook. Like Iyengar, he created a teacher-certification program; his students must complete a minimum of 200 hours of training at workshops — an expense that can require extensive travel — buy his training manual ($30) and pass his 30-hour take-home test. A $195 training DVD is also recommended. There are licensing fees of around $100 that must be renewed annually. In this way, Friend maintains quality control and an income stream, but this standardization has cost him the loyalty of older teachers who find the new rules somewhat unyogic. Friend also discourages Anusara studio owners from including other forms of yoga at their schools, lest they dilute his brand. As one former associate, Douglas Keller, put it, “If a particular McDonald’s store chooses to start serving spaghetti, McDonald’s can decide to revoke its franchise.”