Anna Welsh has lived about nine yoga lives. She started as a high school basketball player who got dragged to her first Bikram class by her mom and thought she was witnessing a cult—sweaty adults in various states of undress, doing synchronized breathing on disgusting carpet, doors locked so nobody could escape. She didn't touch yoga again for a year. Classic origin story.

Fast forward through a college breakup (the gateway drug to yoga for so many of us), a 200-hour training, a 500-hour with the legendary Jen Jones, and Anna found herself moving to Lima, Ohio for a relationship. Lima, Ohio—where the nearest Target was two hours away. She makes it very clear she will never again live somewhere without a Target. Noted.

But here's where it gets interesting. With no yoga studios and no infrastructure, Anna got creative. She worked at a cupcake shop. She prepped jackfruit in the middle of soybean fields for a vegan food truck. And she handed out her yoga business cards with every taco she served at the AutoZone parking lot—eventually teaching a class right there in the lot for the AutoZone guys. She got paid in hot peppers by a line cook named Fritz. She worked one-on-one with a woman whose only goal was to walk down the church aisle for communion without falling over. They started with toe lifts while holding a chair.

This is the yoga they don't show you on Instagram.

When that relationship imploded (her dog Lobo was the wake-up call—long story), Anna came back to St. Louis and hit the ground running. At her peak, she was teaching 25 to 30 classes a week at nine different locations, from Illinois to South City. No days off. Running on fumes and passion and probably not enough White Castle. And then the universe intervened in the most dramatic way possible: she slipped on ice on the way to teach a retreat in Costa Rica, her foot got wedged under a truck tire, and she broke her leg in four places.

She asked the ER doctor if she could still make her flight. He thought she was joking. She was not.

Ten weeks non-weight-bearing, no health insurance, and a $50,000 surgery later (shout out to Dr. Christopher Mudd for charging her $1,500 because he's a good human), Anna had to reckon with what wasn't working. The pace. The hustle. The fact that yoga teachers can't actually make a living teaching yoga unless they're running themselves into the ground—or into a truck tire.

We get into all of it: why studio economics are broken, why teacher trainings and retreats exist mostly to keep studios afloat, why the rate of pay hasn't caught up with inflation, and why Anna was one of the lucky ones who could take unpaid gigs because she had a partner supporting her at the time. Most teachers don't have that. Most teachers are choosing between rent and doing what they love.

Anna's not teaching in studios anymore. She pivoted to medical device sales—she now works in surgeries helping teams use equipment for wound debridement and grafting. And here's the thing: she says her yoga teacher training prepared her perfectly for it. Reading a room. Communicating clearly. Helping people work together. She's still teaching, just not asanas.

But she's got the itch. And by the end of this episode, Roxanne and Anna are half-seriously, half-not-seriously talking about opening a studio together. We'll keep you posted.

Other things we cover: the real history of downward dog (it comes from Indian wrestling, not ancient yoga texts—thank you Mark Singleton), why there are no standing poses in the original yoga sutras, what it's like to teach blindfolded yoga using peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as a training exercise, the ethics of addressing a wardrobe malfunction mid-class, Gary's TSA "jacket off" prank, and our pitch for a yoga studio on a blimp.

Anna's favorite curse word will get her in trouble with HR, Roxanne's is "sugar snappers," and we learn the origin of "jabroni" (it's from Italian-American slang for "big ham" and was popularized by The Rock in the 90s.