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From the moment Dallas lawyer David Buckner discovered Bikram Yoga, he was hooked. "It just helped me in so many ways — I lost weight, I was clearer and I could work better," he says.
The more he did it, the more serious he became about it until he finally realized it had become more than just a class. It had become a calling.
Today Buckner and his wife are co-owners of Bikram Yoga Dallas, a centrally located studio that touts itself as the first and largest in the Big D. He left the practice of law for good in 2005 and says he has never looked back.
"The best thing about my job is that when people come in, no matter how bad they feel when they come in, they always feel better when they leave, and I never got that in the law," he says.
Bikram Yoga isn't stereotypical yoga, meaning there's no clanging gong, sun salutations or repetitive ohming. Created in the 1970s by yoga master Bikram Choudhury, it involves a series of sitting and standing poses plus two breathing exercises, all done in a room that's heated to approximately 105 degrees. For that reason, it's often called "hot yoga." Each class lasts 90 minutes, and the series of poses is always the same, Buckner confirms. "It's a very transcendent experience," he says. "The heat forces you to turn your mind off." Job concerns, worries about children — they must all disappear, he says, to endure the heat of the room and the challenge of the poses.
Buckner says he always had been interested in the mind-body connection and in working with people on a transformational level.
He believes this interest arose from his struggles as an overweight child and his effort to lose weight during high school. At the start of his junior year, he weighed about 220 pounds; by graduation, he'd brought his weight down to around 150. "I just didn't want to be overweight anymore. I was miserable, and it made me depressed," he says. His father, a matter-of-fact accountant, sat him down and explained the simple math of losing weight, and he says that gave him the motivation to get moving and get healthy.
Buckner says the experience taught him discipline and imparted a new sense of self-esteem. It also taught him something that would eventually change his life: "It got me interested in exercise and psychology together," he says.
Buckner went to Stephen F. Austin State University. He says he remembers searching for a major that combined sports and psychology, but couldn't find what he was looking for. He became a psychology major instead, and upon graduation joined the staff of a Houston psychiatric hospital, he says.
There, Buckner worked with kids who were suffering from severe psychiatric problems or from the mental effects of abuse, he says. It wasn't even close to his original interest, and he says he didn't enjoy the job.
Then he happened to watch a lawyer intervene in a difficult situation involving a child and the hospital administration, he says. The lawyer was able to influence the outcome of the matter, he says, and that inspired him to look into law school. The financial rewards that came along with law certainly sounded nice. "I had a psychology degree and was married with a kid and needed to make money," he says. Besides, he adds, "my mom said I could argue with a fence post."
Buckner entered Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law in 1993. After a rocky start, he says he hit his stride, made a "huge comeback" and ended up doing well.
But Buckner admits he was never in love with the law. "When I started, I could feel from the first days of criminal law, I was in the wrong place," he says. "I made a lot of friends, but I knew it was not my path."
He stuck with it. With three kids and student loans, he says he felt he had to. He graduated in 1996, passed the bar exam and became an associate with the Dallas office of Jenkens & Gilchrist doing corporate finance work. (The firm closed on March 31, 2007.)
"I loved the firm; I loved the big-firm environment. It was an exciting place to be," he says. "I worked on some big deals and worked with some incredible lawyers who taught me the value of a work ethic, taught me attention to detail and taught me a level of professionalism that I wouldn't have gotten anywhere else."
By 2001, however, he had become disenchanted with the lifestyle of a busy corporate lawyer. "I just could not see myself working like that for the rest of my life. I saw guys still putting in those hours after 30, 35 years, and I thought, 'When does it get better?' " he says. "For some of them, it was their passion, but that was just not me. I wanted to see my kids, I wanted to be able to go on vacations and not be on a conference call all the time. I saw these guys who were successful — they were on the phone all the time, even on vacation — and I thought, 'I don't want that life.' "
And the weight Buckner had worked so hard to lose as a teen had come back. Once an avid runner — he had qualified for the Boston Marathon during law school — he says the combination of too many take-out meals and not enough time to exercise had piled on the pounds.
Then a friend, a commercial banker who worked for one of Buckner's bank clients, introduced him to Bikram Yoga. Buckner took his first class in January 2001, and by the fall of 2002, he was up to four classes a week.
"Even though I had put on weight, I had the stamina, but it was definitely brutal," he says of his first foray into the sauna-like studio. "I ended up losing 30 pounds in two months."
Buckner says his connection to Bikram Yoga was more than skin deep. "It changed me emotionally and psychologically," he says. "I was just depressed all the time, and I didn't feel that way anymore. I thought, 'This is what I want to do.' "
Yogi Wear
Although Buckner had made the decision to pursue a life in Bikram Yoga, he says he didn't yet know how that was actually going to happen. But he did know he had to learn more about the business end of it, so he started networking with studio owners across the country, offering them free legal advice on typical small-business matters. "It was on the side, helping them set up partnerships or corporations, reviewing leases," he explains.
Meanwhile, Jenkens downsized in March 2002, and Buckner was among those who left. He lateraled to the Dallas office of Munsch Hardt Kopf & Harr, where he worked on corporate finance and some real estate bankruptcy matters.
In September 2002, his networking paid off: The owners of a yoga studio in California whom he had helped with a legal matter introduced him to the owners of Bikram Yoga Dallas. Buckner says the Dallas people were looking to sell the studio, and they offered to sell it to him. He accepted.
"It was a very successful studio in Dallas, and I got it for a great deal," he says. By the end of the year, he had quit Munsch Hardt, become the owner of a yoga studio and was off to Southern California for an intensive nine-week class to get his Bikram Yoga teacher certification.
Returning to his new business, however, he found he was working harder than he ever had as a lawyer. "When I left the law to go to yoga, I thought it would be an escape. I thought I'd wear shorts to work and it would be very easy," he says. Instead, "I had to wear so many different hats. I had to manage people, manage teachers, do sales, marketing. I had to learn how to be the plumber, the electrician, fix the washer and dryer — all the little things — plus I was the IT guy and the payroll guy."
Buckner says he became disillusioned and stressed out. When he bought the studio, it was the only one offering hot yoga in the area. "Then a bunch of others opened, and this competition came in," he says. "We were diluted in the marketplace, and all of a sudden, it wasn't as successful and it wasn't as fun because it was a lot of hard work."
In April 2004, he made the difficult decision to return to Munsch Hardt on a part-time basis. Although he stayed for about a year, he likens the experience to having a foot in two different boats and getting split down the middle. "I couldn't give my love and attention to either one," he recalls.
Then Buckner had his "a-ha" moment. "I was having a conversation one night with my wife and another friend who owned a studio in Grapevine, and we were talking about how it really takes commitment to be successful, and how the minute you commit to something, the universe really opens up to you," he says. "I thought, 'Wow, I never really committed to owning this studio,' and I realized I had to quit my law firm job and go full time with the yoga."
He did, leaving Munsch Hardt in the spring of 2005. "I thought, 'Whatever it takes, if I have to live in the studio, I will do that,' and from that moment, everything grew. We made changes to put ourselves on track, our income went up and our student [numbers] went up because we were more committed."
Former Jenkens partner Joe Mathews says he has taken classes at Buckner's studio and reports that the business certainly seems to be thriving. "He's got a nice location," says Matthews, now a partner in the capital finance and real estate section of Hunton & Williams in Dallas. "It looked pretty successful. There were a lot of customers."
Munsch Hardt lawyer Ed McQueen says he wasn't surprised when Buckner made a final break from practicing law. "David was a very good lawyer, and we hated to see him go, but of course we wished him well and were excited about his success," says McQueen, a partner who worked with Buckner when both were associates at the firm. "David is a very entrepreneurial spirit — in fact, to be a good business lawyer, you have to be somewhat entrepreneurial — but he was also passionate about yoga and its benefits."
McQueen says Buckner had talked with him while making the decision to leave the firm. "This was something he really had a heart for, and he believed he could make it work. I think initially it was hard to make it work like he wanted, but he was certainly willing to do what it took to make it work, and his work ethic was unquestionable," McQueen says. "For David, helping people in the realm of holistic health and physical fitness was so much more important than helping people make money."
Fellow SMU Law classmate David Criss agrees. "I think David followed his heart. He really and truly just believed that this was a much less stressful path, and he recognized there was a reasonable likelihood that he wouldn't make as much money," says Criss, a litigator who now heads the Law Office of David Criss in Dallas. "I think he's got a much healthier existence now, and he's in a much happier place."
Criss recently attended Buckner's 40th birthday party, and he says the soiree brought back memories of their early days as new associates, when Buckner was at Jenkens and Criss was at Burford & Ryburn. "[The party] was primarily attended by people who have known David since he was in the yoga business, and they talked about how disciplined and at peace he is, and I sort of laughed at what a difference it was, [because] when we were starting in the law practice, we'd call each other daily to talk about the mistakes — small mistakes that all young associates make — and how we were convinced that our futures were doomed."
Buckner acknowledges that he could have just sold the studio and gone back to the firm full time, but he didn't want to. Instead, he decided to stop sweating the small stuff and totally commit himself to the venture. "I thought, 'I need to take the risk and have no fallback and do whatever it takes," he says. Once he adopted that attitude, he says, the business took off.
Today Buckner says he's having the kind of fun he'd hoped for all along. "My wife and I are just enjoying what we're doing and taking it slow," he says. "We have a staff of teachers and employees who are phenomenal, we've become very active in the yoga community, we've become mentors to people who want to become teachers, and we teach people to become teachers," he says. Expanding the studio in some way remains an option, he says, but for now they're focused on growing the existing studio. "We'll see where things go," he says, "but we're having a ball, and we're finally feeling like now we're getting into the groove of what we're doing."
