Working in Yoga

This is the conversation Rebecca wishes she could have had when she owned her studio. In Part 2 of this conversation with Jessica Patterson, they move from theory into the deeply personal territory of what it actually costs to own a yoga studio — and why the industry has made studio owners into villains when many of them started this work trying to build a sanctuary. Jessica and Rebecca talk about the shift in power dynamics that comes with ownership and the isolation it creates, the heartbreak of telling a community you've evolved when they've frozen you in a particular moment in time, and the difference between self-agency and self-determination in an economic climate that nobody chose. They also get into the latent shame that comes with business difficulty, why blaming individual owners for systemic problems is both unfair and counterproductive, and the simple but radical truth that you don't have to keep doing the things you're good at. One of Rebecca's favorite conversations on the podcast. It earns that. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine The Network Checklist Jessica’s Website

Tweedledum and Tweedledee look identical from a distance — but they’re not the same, and the real stakes are happening just out of frame while everyone argues about the rattle. Menopause and perimenopause content is a real, legitimate growth area for yoga professionals — the demand is genuine and the science backs it up. But this episode is about the difference between a teacher arriving at this work because it’s where their career has been heading, versus a teacher pivoting because the topic is trending. From the outside, the content can look the same. From the inside — for the women being served — it’s everything. The One Thing: a self-check for anyone considering menopause-focused content, regardless of which side of that line you’re on. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine

Jessica Patterson is doing something rare — she's working through a PhD in religious studies focused on yoga and yoga bodies while remaining fully embedded in the yoga professional world as a teacher, studio owner, and trainer. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, she and Rebecca get into the ideas that don't get enough airtime in the industry: which bodies come to matter in yoga spaces, how proximity to authenticity functions as a marketing strategy, and the purity culture that quietly shapes how yoga professionals judge each other and themselves. They talk about Orientalism — the idea that the East is pure and the West corrupt — and why that framing isn't just intellectually lazy, it's actively harmful to the profession. They get into the difference between training yoga teachers and training yoga performers, the franchising of bodies and teaching styles, and the mob mentality that can emerge when cultural appropriation anxiety meets social media. This one is dense, honest, and worth every minute. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine The Network Checklist Jessica’s Website

If Part 1 was about the stale tea party, Part 2 is about what’s actually on the other side of it: not another niche, not another container — depth. Philosophy, breathwork, meditation, movement, put back together rather than stripped for parts. This episode is about the small but real number of teachers building something rooted, and what that looks like in practice — including the uncomfortable homework of treating your career like it just started, because in the market that now exists, in a lot of ways, it did. The One Thing: an honest audit question — was your career built for expansion, or for depth? And what would depth look like on a specific Tuesday? RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine

There's a real and underexplored difference between the people who walk into a general yoga class and the people who seek out a certified yoga therapist — and if you're trying to fill your yoga therapy practice, that distinction matters enormously. Maile Wicklander, longtime yoga studio owner and recent yoga therapy graduate, joins Rebecca to work through what that difference actually looks like in practice. They get into referral strategy, including Maile's straightforward approach to getting the right clients through the door, the particular challenge of psychotherapist referrals, and why handouts and connections to adjacent fields are still some of the most underrated tools in a yoga therapist's toolkit. They also talk about what's missing in the yoga professional community space, why boundaries inside collective networking groups make them more useful rather than less, and what studio owners need that nobody's really providing. A practical, grounded conversation for yoga therapists building or expanding a practice. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Maile Wicklander’s Website

The Mad Hatter quarreled with Time, and now it’s always six o’clock — a permanent tea party, moving from seat to seat around the same stale table. That’s the soloist career model: niche something, workshop it, build a following, move to the next container. Repeat. This episode names how that model came to dominate yoga careers in the 2010s — not by accident, but by design, modeled and reinforced by the most visible voices of that era. And it names, gently but clearly, that the market that made that model work doesn’t exist anymore — even for the teachers who are still running it. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine

Most yoga teachers can name two or three colleagues they'd actually call if something went sideways. Not people they follow, not someone from a training years ago — people they could actually call. In a profession that runs on referral and reputation, that's not a personality problem. It's a structural one. In this solo episode, Rebecca walks through five stages of building a real local yoga professional network — getting honest about what you're actually building, finding your first five people, planning a low-stakes first gathering, setting ground rules that will hold when it gets real, and keeping the thing alive past the fourth meeting, which is where these groups almost always fall apart. This episode comes with a free companion checklist in the show notes. No email wall. Just the thing you need to actually start. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine The Network Checklist

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” For yoga professionals who left online teaching without a plan, that’s exactly what happened — they ended up somewhere, just not somewhere they chose. Meanwhile, a small number of platforms kept building online and now dominate the space. This episode reframes the question most teachers get stuck on — “how do I compete with a channel that has a million subscribers?” — into the one that actually matters: what can a working teacher offer in an online space that a content platform structurally cannot? The One Thing: a single reframing question to sit with this week about your own relationship to online teaching. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine

This is the kind of conversation Rebecca wants to do more of — two people parsing out the nuance of how we actually do this work, in real time. Deb Flashenberg is back, and this time she and Rebecca get nerdy about scripts, responsive teaching, and what it really means to be present with the people in the room. They talk about why giving teachers a framework serves them better than handing them a script, what gets lost when AI writes your sequences, and the particular challenge of self-paced courses that have no relational feedback loop built in. They also get into the reps — the honest reality that there is no shortcut to learning to teach, and that teacher training exists precisely to give people a safe place to mess up and figure it out. If you've ever wondered whether scripts are a crutch or a tool, or how to develop the skill of actually seeing your students, this one is for you. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Deb Flashenberg’s Website

For one strange year, online was the whole game. Then studios reopened, and most yoga professionals quietly walked back — leaving behind a channel that still exists, a profile that’s still live, content that’s technically still there. This episode is about presence without substance — what happens to the online version of a teaching relationship when the relationship part leaves but the page doesn’t get taken down. It’s not about deleting anything. It’s about noticing what’s actually still working, and what’s just… still there. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe.

Kellie Adkins did her homework — including a close look at the IAYT's 990s — and she brings the receipts. In this conversation with Rebecca, they get into the financial reality behind the C-IAYT credential: what yoga therapists are actually earning (around $10K a year, against the cost of a yoga therapy degree), why significant numbers of credentialed yoga therapists are choosing not to renew, and what the IAYT's own financial losses over recent years say about the organization's trajectory. They also talk about the structural problem at the root of all of it — an industry that trained far more people than it ever built jobs for, and the obligation legacy professionals have to charge enough that entry-level yoga therapy can actually be a livable wage. Kellie also brings something genuinely useful to the conversation: a working accountability model built around DEIA, lineage, and codes of conduct with real removal processes — and hire.yoga, her platform designed to connect yoga therapists with actual employment opportunities. Plus a conversation about AI tools and how yoga professionals can use them well. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe. Kellie Adkins’ Website

A therapist tells a client in crisis to “notice the present moment.” The client destabilizes — and the therapist has no idea why, because they read about mindfulness. They never built a practice, and nobody who has is in the room to say: that’s not how this works. This episode is about the difference between fields that hire yoga professionals (integration) and fields that borrow yoga’s tools without yoga professionals (extraction) — and why that distinction isn’t territorial, it’s a safety standard. The One Thing: a simple way to start the referral conversation with allied health professionals in your own network. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe.

A lot of you have had questions about the American Yoga Council — what it is, what it does, and whether it's worth your attention. So Rebecca went straight to the source. AYC founder and CEO Andrew Tanner joins the podcast for a straightforward conversation about what the organization is building and why: certification vs. registry, accountability reporting, access to data, retirement funds, and what it means to advocate for yoga professionals at an institutional level. Rebecca isn't doing gotcha journalism here — the goal is to give you the information you need to make your own call. She also gets into something she's been developing for the magazine: a theory about why yoga professionals are so cynical about organizations in the first place, rooted in counter-culture identity, 2010s individualism, and the specific kind of betrayal that comes from entering an industry you believed would be different. This is a conversation about whether institutions can actually serve us — and what it would take to find out. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe. American Yoga Council Website

There’s a chart that gets passed around constantly — yoga and Pilates, lumped together, showing a growing market. The problem: one of those is actually growing. The other isn’t. And they’re reported as one number. This episode unpacks why that matters, who benefits from the blur, and why an organization sitting on yoga-specific data has no incentive to separate it out. It’s not a conspiracy — it’s just what happens when nobody asks the industry to see itself clearly. The One Thing: a concrete, low-effort way to start treating wellness-industry data with the skepticism it deserves — and where to look for numbers that are actually about yoga. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Tick, Tock The Trend Report

Rebecca has a name for this kind of content: boring. And she means it as a compliment. The boring stuff — insurance, disability coverage, retirement planning, banking relationships — is exactly what protects you when something very non-boring happens. Financial planner Felicia Laab joins the podcast to talk about what yoga professionals are consistently leaving on the table when it comes to protecting themselves and their futures. They get into disability insurance specifically, which most yoga teachers never think about until their body has a bad year and suddenly it's all they're thinking about. They talk retirement — how to stop working before you die, as Rebecca puts it — and what it looks like to start building real financial infrastructure when your income has never been predictable. This is also the conversation that connects directly to what major trade organizations like Yoga Alliance could be doing for their members and aren't. Worth every minute. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Connect with Felicia on LinkedIn

This episode opens a new series — one that’s a little different from the others. Less “here’s a number nobody told you” and more “here’s the shape of the thing we’re all standing inside.” The premise: the yoga industry isn’t approaching a turning point. It already turned. Most of what this series will describe over the coming weeks has already happened — it’s just not been named out loud, in order, in one place. This episode sets the frame and names the urgency without pretending to have all the answers yet. If you’ve had the feeling that something shifted and nobody sent the memo, this is that memo. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Tick, Tock The Trend Report

Amara Miller is back, and this updated conversation goes to some places the original didn't. The yoga industry is contracting — fewer participants, a flooded market, and more companies chasing a shrinking pool of practitioners. Amara and Rebecca talk honestly about what that means for the profession, including the regulatory conversation the industry has been reluctant to have and why the libertarian anti-regulation instincts of the 2010s may be genuinely outdated in the current landscape. They also get into something Rebecca hadn't fully considered before this conversation: the yoga teachers and lineage holders who carry the deepest knowledge of this tradition are aging, and the professional associations haven't built any meaningful infrastructure to preserve that wisdom before it walks out the door. It's a conversation about what the industry is at risk of losing — and whether we're organized enough to do anything about it before it's too late. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Amara’s Website

Most yoga professionals have no employer contributing to their retirement. No pension. No automatic savings. Whatever gets built for the future is built entirely through individual planning, out of an already stretched income, in a profession that culturally treats financial planning as spiritually suspect. In this episode we do the retirement math — what you actually need to save monthly at different ages to retire at sixty-five, what that number looks like against average yoga professional income, and why starting now matters more than starting right. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine

Leslie Pearlman is back, and this update to their 2024 conversation covers even more ground than the original. Rebecca and Leslie dig into online and hybrid teaching not as a lesser alternative to in-person but as a genuinely distinct skillset that requires its own curriculum — one most YTTs still aren't providing. They get into the internal regulation work required to teach well in any format, and the largely unexamined tendency to moralize the absence of in-room co-regulation as an automatic loss. They also tackle one of Rebecca's long-running preoccupations: the difference between professional training and personal development, and why the yoga industry needs to get honest about which one it's actually offering. And they go somewhere most conversations don't — into the urgent need for yoga teacher trainer training and studio owner training, including the relational dimension of what it means to be for a community without being of it. Rich, honest, and covers a lot of ground in fifty minutes. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Good Ground Yoga

The online yoga business is sold as the answer to everything — unlimited reach, passive income, freedom from the studio model. The reality has a specific math that most of the people selling online business courses are not showing you. In this episode we build the honest financial picture of what it costs to build an online yoga offering — in time, money, and the long runway before it generates meaningful income — so you can make decisions about digital offerings based on what is actually true. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine