Economically, yoga doesn’t make any sense at all

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...]

How to take your teaching even further – assist!

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...]

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

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...]

Suggestions on ways to market yoga with integrity

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...]

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

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...]

An interview with Lance Schuler on INSPYA Yoga Teacher Training

INSPYA Yoga Director Lance Schuler

Born and bred Kiwi INSPYA yoga teacher Lance Schuler may make his home in Bryon Bay, but like most Kiwis, he's always looking for an excuse to come back home. Over the last three years, he's been coming to Studio Sangha in Queenstown to hold workshops. Now he's found a way to spend an entire month here - hosting New Zealand's first INSPYA Yoga teacher training this October. And hey, who wouldn't love to spend a month in Queenstown during spring time? The Yoga Lunchbox fired off some … [Read more...]