Namaste it’s not.
A renowned Queens-based yogi has slapped three men who run a national music and yoga festival with a lawsuit claiming they stole her teacher-training secrets.
Alanna Kaivalya, known as the “JivaDiva” for her background in the Jivamukti style of yoga, says she was lured into meetings in 2012 with organizers of the Wanderlust Festival under the false pretense that they planned to hire her to develop a teaching model for their events.
“She is a recognized specialist in the area of creating, developing and directing teacher-training programs,” her Manhattan civil suit says.
More than 5,000 yoga instructors across the world have learned from Kaivalya’s method, the suit says.
The guru says in her suit that she bent over backward to teach festival heads Jeff Krasno, Sean Hoess and Jake Laub about her techniques, methods and plans for training yoga instructors.
The lessons were subject to a strict confidentiality agreement that the men would not share her Kaivalya Model Program.
She even “spent countless hours working closely with Laub in order to create the digital manual,” court papers say.
Then the men kicked her to the curb claiming an unnamed investor didn’t like her work.
But in 2013, Kaivalya was shocked to learn that Wanderlust was running a teacher-training program “entirely based on, and in most respects identical to, the Kaivalya Model Program,” the suit says.
Wanderlust “is using the confidential information for its own commercial advantage, and to compete with” Kaivalya, the suit says.
Kaivalya has taught at the gym chain Equinox, where her “Rock Star” yoga classes blend with sing-a-longs to hits from bands like the Jackson Five and Led Zeppelin.
The guru also hosts international conferences and writes for fitness publications including Yoga Journal and Mantra Magazine.
She wants Wanderlust to cancel the 25 programs it has left in 2014 and pay unspecified damages for fraud and for swiping her trade secrets.
A spokeswoman for Wanderlust, which holds its festivals in ritzy resort locations like Aspen, Colo., and Tremblant, Quebec, declined to comment because she had not seen the lawsuit.