In 1971 Choudhury emigrated to America and began to teach yoga. He opened his first studio in Los Angeles, teaching his own style of yoga. The author Brigid Delaney describes the atmosphere around him as "fawning": he was, she writes, treated reverentially, as if he were a guru, though he was a "braggart" openly boasting about the film stars he had taught and the money he had made. He was rude and insulting to students; in Netflix's 2019 documentary film, "" directed by Eva Orner, he uses abusive language and jeers at overweight pupils. The critic Adrian Horton writes that the film "visually synthesizes decades of archival footage with first-person testimony and filmed court depositions into a devastating portrait of an abusive narcissist protected from consequences by his own inflated cult of personality, wealth and professional power within the niche world of hot yoga."