Uptown’s upscale yoga bunnies are buzzing after a hot instructor at luxe Pure Yoga was ordered by the studio to roll up his mat and leave through the back door this week.
Marco Rojas was “treated by his clients as kind of a deity,” according to a source. But he wound up in an un-Zen-like clash with the studio that blew up this week.
Sources say Rojas was bringing in up to 500 students weekly at Pure’s West 77th and East 86th Street locations, but he irked the studio by becoming a bit too big for his yoga pants.
“He thought he wasn’t expendable, and they thought he wasn’t worth it anymore,” said one Upper West Side novelist and yoga mom. “They started to marginalize him and push him out.” Sources said Rojas further antagonized Pure because he was also teaching at rival Ishta Yoga.
A source close to Pure said the split with Rojas “was mutual.” But when we contacted Rojas, the downward-dog doyen told us, “Yoga is about the truth. It was not a mutual decision.”
He said the clash came when Pure owners weren’t receptive to his ideas for workshops and retreats. “Management thought I was difficult because I was trying to teach them how to do things in a yogic way,” he said. “Managers are not yoga practitioners. I came to them with projects, and some of the managers didn’t want to do it. They don’t understand what it is to do a yoga retreat.”
A rep for Pure said she couldn’t comment, but a source said Rojas was not kicked out. Rojas countered: “They [gave me] just 45 minutes before [a] class, [and] fired me without having consideration . . . It was disrespectful. They escorted me . . . to clear out my stuff, and took me out of the back door. It might be the protocol, but this is yoga. They are supposedly running a company called Pure Yoga, but this is impure yoga.” However, “[I’m] not interested in starting a war, but an evolution,” he said.
One devotee lamented the development via Facebook: “Marco, I am devastated . . . You have made such a difference in my life. Namaste.”