Twelve years ago, Jim Keegan stumbled into yoga.
He was living on Martha's Vineyard, an island off the East Coast, when he started doing poses and breathing techniques that his then-girlfriend, now fiancé, told him were part of the Indian form of meditation and exercise.
"I just spontaneously combusted into it," he said.
In 1999 Keegan moved to Arizona to study kinesiology at ASU, and a few years after that he started teaching yoga on campus.
And after seven and a half years of teaching at the Student Recreation Center, Keegan was fired earlier this month.
Keegan taught Monday, Wednesday and Friday yoga classes from 12 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. His classes usually drew 50 to 60 students, while the other instructors' classes averaged 10 to 12.
Though representatives from the SRC cannot comment on personnel matters, Keegan said the reasons he was fired were more personal than anything.
On June 2, Keegan was told he was being fired after influencing students to complain after his class was reduced to two days a week.
"It was just the straw that broke the camel's back," he said.
After six years of teaching at ASU, Keegan said he asked for a raise, which was met with tension.
Keegan also took to promoting his business Yoga Expeditions — where he takes people on yoga trips at a fraction of the price most companies charge — in class.
Administrators told him he couldn't pass out fliers, so he verbally promoted the trips.
Keegan said he would tell his students when yoga masters he respected were coming to Arizona, something he said the administration didn't like.
Julie Kipper, associate director for the SRC, said in an e-mail that she cannot comment on personnel matters.
"I may not have left on my own terms," Keegan said, "But I left with the students feeling so powerful [toward] me. That's really my passion — to help people change their lives, to transform their lives."
After students learned he was fired, Keegan said the calls, e-mails and even text messages started to roll in.
"If the SRC was really for students, why wouldn't the students' voices count?" Keegan said.
"It doesn't matter how good of a teacher I am," he said. "It's that they want this teaching."
Religious studies graduate and yoga instructor Erika Levin said in an e-mail she has known Keegan for a few years and was shocked to hear he was fired.
"He is by far one of the best yoga teachers I have learned from in my eight years of practicing yoga," she said. "Jim's understanding of yoga philosophy and anatomy are astounding and his classes are always full of adoring yogis and yoginis."
Not only was Keegan's release a bad business decision for the SRC, she said, it's a blow to the community he created with his class.
SRC yoga instructors are not ASU staff and are only on campus to teach, Kipper said. There are currently 11 instructors on staff, seven of whom teach during the summer, she said.
Laura Parker, marketing coordinator for campus recreation, said in an e-mail that students who don't wish to continue the summer yoga session can receive a 50 percent refund.
The five-week session pass to unlimited mindbody classes costs $40 for students and $50 for non-students, she said.
Fifth year biology graduate student Manuela Gonzalez said she regularly attended Keegan's class for about a year and a half.
Gonzalez has been doing yoga for five or six years and has tried a few different instructors, but said that Keegan is one of the best.
"One of the things I really liked is that he appeared really knowledgeable," she said.
Keegan also took the time to correct people's poses and offered suggestions — something some instructors don't do, Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez said she was surprised when she read an e-mail saying Keegan had been fired.
"I haven't heard any complaints," she said. "I didn't see anything he did wrong."
And of the other classes she takes at the SRC, Gonzalez said Keegan's was always the most attended.
"Regularly his classes were always pretty full," she said.
Economics junior Michael Kaminsky started taking Keegan's class in March.
The Wednesday after Keegan was fired, Kaminsky went to class to find a notice on the door. An SRC representative outside was telling people they couldn't talk about why Keegan was fired, he said.
"People were upset about it because people had paid money, essentially, to study with Jim," he said. "It's really not fair to switch out teachers."
He also said the SRC was reluctant to give students refunds.
"That, combined with the lack of info, made people pretty upset," he said.
While Kaminsky said he's been in the class with a new instructor for a few weeks, he said it's not the same.
"Even if you do basically the same things, the instructors can make a huge difference," he said.
"Everybody was [surprised] because he was generally regarded as the best yoga teacher," Kaminsky said. "Nobody saw it coming. He brought in huge crowds to do yoga."
Reach the reporter at: allison.denny@asu.edu.
