“I don’t even consider Jivamukti in my mind as anything, I just teach my teachings,” says Finger, a barrel-chested grizzly bear of a man with small, kind, hooded eyes and an ever-present necklace of meditation beads. “Where did we all get our techniques, Jivamukti and us? They were handed down from the seers of yoga through the centuries. They are tools, and they can’t be claimed. It’s not for someone to say, ‘My hammer is better than your hammer’; it’s how you use your hammer.”

Notwithstanding centuries of magnanimous hammering, the fact remains that within only months of each other, both centers are (a) opening megaspaces, (b) increasing their merchandising (Jivamukti boasts a new boutique; Yoga Zone has launched a mail-order catalogue that includes a line of clothing designed by Finger’s wife and co-founder, Greta Finger), and (c) producing their own videos (Jivamukti has enlisted devotee Willem Dafoe; Yoga Zone has joined forces with Buns of Steel maestro Howard Maier). In 1996-97, there was a 26 percent decrease in exercise-video sales, according to VideoScan, Inc., which tracks retail sales of videotapes. Yet Yoga Journal’s “Yoga for Beginners” was 1997’s seventh-best-selling exercise video in a pack of around 100 on the market.

For the past nine years, Gannon and Life have been trying to change the face of yoga in the West through their unapologetically God-centered method (Jivamukti comes from Jivanmukti, Sanskrit for “liberation of the soul”).

“Our project from the very beginning has been to respiritualize the practices,” says Life, whose deep, narcotic tones and hollowed cheeks lend him something of an Iggy Pop mystique. “Yoga is a tool for realization of the self, not for creating big muscles.”

Despite their cramped East Village studios and despite -- or perhaps because of -- their take-it-or-leave-it attitude, Gannon, 46, and Life, 47, have attracted a following that verges on the cultlike. Boldface acolytes include Dafoe and Christy Turlington; Sting and his wife, film producer Trudie Styler, recently hosted a ten-day Jivamukti retreat at their new villa in Tuscany, and are traveling with Gannon and Life to India in March.

“Someone said they’re the wild children of yoga, but if anything they’re the most traditional exponents in New York City because they teach it as a religious concept,” says Sting, who has practiced ashtanga for seven years and claims -- tongue loosely lodged in cheek -- that it enables him to make love for as long as seven hours at a go (“that’s counting dinner and a movie”).

Three years ago, however, he became a Jivamukti convert. “I’m pretty fit, and I was humiliated by the whole practice because I simply couldn’t do it,” says the 46-year-old king of pain, who these days commutes from his English country estate to New York more often than he does to London. “There are some people there who can twist themselves into a pretzel.”

Gannon and Life began their own tantric journey in 1983. He had been running Life Cafe on Avenue B since the late seventies; she was waitressing there and had broken a vertebra. After considering surgery and deciding it was too great a risk, she sought out yoga classes, which she credits with saving her. Life tagged along, too; four years later, they founded Jivamukti.

In 1992, despite his misgivings, Life became a monk at the prompting of his guru. After two and a half years of poverty, celibacy, and sartorial surrender, he renounced his vows, having found that instead of making life simpler, monkhood had made him a celebrity -- “the most sought-after bachelor in Manhattan,” Gannon says. Their own on-again, off-again relationship, they say, is “sort of” back on these days. “There’s a little bit of romance on the odd weekend,” Life quips, “but most of the time we work.”

Life says his years of celibacy were simply part of an overall commitment to Jivamukti’s principle of transcending the material world. As Christy Turlington puts it: “When you’re standing on your head, you can’t think about what you’ve just done or what you’re going to do, these little details in life that drive us all crazy. You shut yourself off from the outside world, and when you leave, you’re, like, floating.”

Transcendence is one thing; jeopardy is another. All but one of the six Jivamukti students I spoke with said they had been injured as a result of the center’s work-through-the-pain philosophy. One student claimed that different teachers taught contradictory moves. Several other students were hurt because of aggressive hands-on assisting when teachers trying to correct their posture had pushed them beyond discomfort. Another student confided that she had damaged her back: “I was so addicted to that place, it destroyed me. You want to know something really psycho? I went back and reinjured myself. The whole time, I was in pain, looking like an idiot, with these people who could be in the circus.” And, she says, she can’t wait to go back.

“This one woman was saying, ‘This is too much for me,’ but it was her head that was saying it,” says Marni Task, a Jivamukti teacher of a year and a half. “How do you grow in your mind if you’re constantly saying you can’t?”

That attitude is, in fact, part of Jivamukti culture; danger, Life tells me, is what Jivamukti is all about. “The practice of yoga is intended to be extreme,” he insists. “It’s not intended to make the body more healthy. The intention is to put your personality at risk.”

Jivamukti’s yearlong teaching program involves 2,000 hours of training. Nevertheless, Yoga’s safety problems today, says pioneering yogameister Mark Becker, who started out with Serenity in 1975 (perhaps best remembered for the nude, co-ed sauna), lie in the absence of a certification process. “I certified only 10 percent of all the people who wanted to teach,” says Becker. “It’s great that there’s more and more people teaching it these days, but I see more and more injuries.”

Having built a 36-year reputation fronting the most beginner-friendly schools around, Alan Finger recognizes the dangers, too. “You can hurt yourself very much from yoga,” says Finger, who sits on an advisory board at Oxford Health Plans, a health-maintenance organization that will subsidize some of the cost of yoga work with accredited schools and teachers. “We’re more concerned with the individual’s growth than with putting you through a gymnastic class.”

Having never taken a yoga class in my life, I recently attended an advanced-intermediate gathering at Yoga Zone’s Fifth Avenue studio. First I signed a release form absolving the place from responsibility for any injuries I might sustain (a convention of most centers and gyms). The instructor, Charles, introduced himself to the class of twenty, most of whom would not have looked out of place at Jivamukti. Unlike the Jivamukti leaders, he actually demonstrated the postures himself and, in between some of the more challenging ones, he made us run around, loosen up, and “get silly.”