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The Yoga of Business: Goals, Clarity, Values & Commitment, Part 1

December 12, 2011 By 4 Comments
Greeting students at the front desk of Healium, a holistic health centre and yoga studio on Lambton Quay

by guest author Jenifer Parker, business owner of Healium, Wellington In recent weeks, numerous blogs around the web have brought up issues around yoga and business. For many, the common perspective is that yoga and business don't mix, and that going into business with yoga not only denigrates yoga but makes it impossible to be a "true" teacher of yoga. My perspective, however, is that by running any yoga teaching as a business, you better embody the principles of yoga in practice, or … [Read more...]

Filed Under: The Business of Yoga Tagged With: , , ,

Economically, yoga doesn’t make any sense at all

December 1, 2011 By 21 Comments
Can yoga teachers make a decent income?

We've all heard about those wonderful yoga studios delivering fantastic yoga to the community, but struggling to pay their overheads, let alone make any profits. On the flipside of the coin are the corporate yoga studios and centres paying yoga teachers as little as possible in order to maximise profits for the business owners. Somewhere in the middle are the yoga teachers that schlep themselves all over town teaching in community halls, gyms, offices and other studios, with low overheads … [Read more...]

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How to take your teaching even further – assist!

November 24, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Assisting trikonasana

by guest author Elissa Jordan As a yoga teacher, over time, a funny thing starts to happen. Walking down the street you stop seeing people covered in their clothes and shoes and hair. Instead you start seeing collections of muscle and bone, alignment and postures carried around in a thin casing of skin. The knocked knees, the hunched shoulders, the sunken chests taunt us. I’ll sometimes mouth the suggestion of taking your shoulders back and down. Sometimes whispering the instruction … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Insights to teaching, Teacher Training Tagged With: , , , ,

Who knew? There isn’t just one right way to do things. Even in Yoga.

October 30, 2011 By 3 Comments
Assisting trikonasana

by Elissa Jordan One of my Dad’s favourite stories to tell about me as a little girl is the one about my favourite word: why? I carried the word with me everywhere until it was a scraggly, worn-out dirt-encrusted version of itself. There’s some discrepancy as to whether or not this was, in fact, my first word. Dad says yes. Mom thinks it was second, after no. Either way, right from the start I’ve wanted to know the why behind things. Not one to be happy with a ‘because I said … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Insights to teaching, Physical Practices, Teacher Training Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Suggestions on ways to market yoga with integrity

July 6, 2011 By 2 Comments
Happy people doing imperfect yoga is great marketing!

It's so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that marketing is a dirty word. Especially as a yoga teacher. Yet, there are so many people out there in the world who have been meaning to do yoga. Some of them have been meaning to do yoga for a year. Or five years. Or even ten. They know they want to... ... but they never quite make it to a studio. These are the people that we as yoga teachers need to reach out to. They already have desire... there's just something stopping them … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Yourself

Why I wouldn’t offer donation-style yoga classes again

May 26, 2011 By 29 Comments
Donation-style yoga classes devalue yoga

Back when I first started this website, I was teaching Prana Flow Yoga classes where students paid whatever they thought the class was worth. This was an interesting experiment which generated a series of articles on how much a yoga class is worth. Recently I received an email from a teacher in Namibia who'd found these articles via Google and was excited about doing the same thing with her yoga classes. I've been thinking of switching to a donation based class and... I want the students … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Marketing Yourself, Musings from the Mat Tagged With: ,
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