It’s always about money and power, isn’t it?

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Marc Maron Clip.

This is the final interview in our series about yoga organizations, how they operate, and our futures. And it is a good one. Jivana Heyman is nothing if not an expert in the operations of organizations, with such an amazing understanding of how they work and what they should be doing for us.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

*The point of an organization, any organization, is to speak for those who have less power.  Jivana put that beautifully.  If you are a non-profit organization that takes membership dues, even if your status doesn’t explicitly state that you are for the members, what is the point of you if you don’t speak up for those with less power?  

*PLEASE watch for orgs consolidating power.  When fewer and fewer people have more and more of the say, that is a KEY sign that things are not functioning properly in the organization.

*Accessible Yoga did best practices for online teaching.  I just need to repeat that as something that it is INSANE to me that the yoga alliance OR IAYT has not set forth.  This is going to be critical to us in the future as we look at a lot more of our work going online in the next 5-10 years.  Have YOU been thinking about online, AI and tech?  I have.  

*There IS something not working in the yoga space, and I agree with Jivana, I cannot quite figure it out either.  A lack of generosity, so much gatekeeping, resource hoarding, what else?  

*I will say this now until I die.  The Yoga Alliance and the IAYT have scope of practice issues.  What is best for yoga practitioners and yoga schools is not always the same.  What is best for yoga therapists in practice and best for yoga therapy schools are definitely not the same.  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE sort your scope of practice issues out!!

*Jivana pointed out some operational things about the Yoga Alliance that I find SO STAGGERINGLY awful.  The Yoga Alliance is allegedly taking the money they make from dues, funneling it into another organization that has tax-free status (c-6 trade orgs are not tax-free), and each org has the SAME board and CEO.  Talk about conflict of interest.  Whatcha need that money for Yoga Alliance?  Tell us what’s going on, boo.

*Let’s figure out how to support each other in the next four years if you are in the US.  By all accounts things are looking dicey for us as an industry that exists in the “extra” bucket of most people’s budgets.  When people have less extra money to spend, we tend to see our numbers dip.  So how are we going to support each other and get through what will likely be a difficult period for our businesses?

*Finally, I want to share a few of Jivana's ideas about what an organization could offer its members. Free training, continuing education, legal support, liability insurance, waivers, contracts, more information and data about our industry, marketing, and the role of supporting unions are just some of the things they could be doing. And if any organization was doing this, they would for sure have my money.

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Jivana’s Website1

We should all be watching and listing to Davy Jones.

Davy came into this conversation with more nuggets about organizing, connecting, and taking a stand against organizations than almost any other guest I have had on this podcast.

I can’t wait for you to listen.

KEY TAKEAWAYS 

*First, I would just really love to mention that the UK has a labor union for yoga pros.  This is a thing that happens around the world, and I am excited to explore this conversation more in the coming months.

*In spite of many objections by SO many (really SO SO many) people I have talked to in the yoga space, a union actually could help yoga professionals in North America.  The union could do for us what it does for UK workers–provide advocacy, health insurance, support, and accountability for the profession of yoga.  Collectively, we are better together.  Unions can be part of our solution.

*Ever since I started getting involved with advocacy work in regards to the IAYT (International Association of Yoga Therapists) people keep asking me some variation of the same question.  “Are YOU starting an organization?”  But this begs the question I asked Davy about the British Wheel of Yoga.  What is the point of an organization?  We have a lot of orgs that claim to be doing good work in the field, but very few can come to the table with receipts.  The British Wheel of Yoga is just one of many in this regard.

*Building community and service into our business models is SO crucial for aligning our businesses with yogic principles.  It is inevitable that we will need to price our services in such a way that we make enough money to keep our doors open, but unpacking the question of how we give back is key to going forward in our industry with integrity and respect for the tradition and practice of yoga.

*UK Community Outreach Network is the coolest idea I have heard in such a long time.  Honestly, can I interview everyone who is involved in this so we can tell the world how it works?  Please?  Also, does anyone in the States want to work on this with me?

*Let’s chat about an organization that keeps our students safe.  What does this look like?  How can we support this sort of organization? 

*I don’t know how many times I have referenced BREWED, a program I do at my studio for studentship, but please go ahead and steal my idea.  Studentship courses can offer people a deeper understanding of yoga and yogic principles without actually needing to train people to be yoga teachers. 

*What do you feel about regulation in our industry?  I do truly believe that we are doing good enough work to stand up overall regulation as an industry.  Does that mean licensing?  I don’t know if that is the answer but we certainly can stand up to general oversight as an industry.

*We ARE part of the solution of the crisis of public health.  Davy could not have said that better.  When you are feeling down, please remember that. 

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Brighton Yoga Foundation

Welcome to the first of many conversations on how we keep the Yoga in our yoga businesses.

This is a topic that keeps coming up for me as I chat with people and I think Lisa Pearson is the perfect person for this topic.

Lisa and I get into our personal practice,

running our businesses,

and how caring for ourselves and filling our own cups is critical to our work.

Take a listen to find out more.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

*How do we partner the business with the practice of yoga?  This is something that I think a lot of us struggle with.  But our sadhana, or personal practice, is really important.  The reason for this, I believe, is because it reminds us to center ourselves in the yoga first.  We have a lot of folks who sort of pull the strings in our industry who are not practitioners first, but we all are.  Let’s all decide to lean into our practices, utilize the full scope (especially the philosophy), and care for ourselves first so we can care for others.  Doing this allows us to model this behavior for our students too.

*How do we keep the yoga in our business?  Make the yoga part of your business plans.  Put yourself in your schedule, and take time for yourself.  This IS the yoga.  Do what my friend Amy Wheeler has done, and make standards for yourself that guide your principles for teaching, practicing, and being in business.  

*We want yoga to be a Disney movie.  But it isn’t.  This is so incredibly true, and I am surprised this is probably the first time this has really come up on the podcast.  We have this idea that yoga should always feel good, right, aligned, and wholesome.  But the truth is yoga, as a practice is hard.  And yoga as a business is hard too.  These things are not at odds with each other.  Sometimes sticking with your yoga practice is difficult.  It requires you to unlearn your previous patterns in order to evolve into the fullest version of yourself.  That isn’t all doe eyes and white knights.  It is hard work.  

(as an unrelated but related note, I do believe we want our organizations to be that white knight in our story.  They won’t be babes.  We didn’t design them that way.  Love you)

*Defining success for yourself is really important.  And make sure that you deep dive into whether you are deciding to just be satisfied with whatever you have, vs. deciding what would make you feel successful, cared for, and supported as a yoga professional.  And honestly, do this yearly.  

*Find where you want to serve and get really good at it.  Get so good your work is undeniable.  

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This is our 100th episode of Working In Yoga!

Find out a little bit about Rebecca’s life since starting the podcast, and what is coming next for Working In Yoga in 2025.

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We have some such innovative and intelligent humans in the yoga industry space, and Michele Lawrence is one of them.

Michele is one of the original people to advocate for the pause in the 300-hour LHCP, Q-designation, from the International Association of Yoga Therapists. And she and I get into it about what we thought the IAYT was, what we hoped to see from them in the future, and where we hoped to go as a profession.
I love that we get the opportunity to talk to people who run schools for yoga therapists, so we can see what they are projecting about our industry in the future.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

*It is true, most yoga therapists are not looking at hospital settings first and foremost.  Especially in the beginning, when your skillset is building the hospital doesn’t often seem like a likely place for us to land.  So why is there this focus on getting us into healthcare settings?
*Look, it is also undeniable that we seek some legitimacy within our profession.  I believe this is because in our cores we know the benefit of our work.  And it is normal and human for us to want to be taken seriously for that work.  But also…I do think that with that legitimacy leads to us making a living, if not thriving wage.  I have said this before–don’t conflate those two things.  Folks sell foot pics online for a lot of money, but it does not mean that “foot pic salesperson” is a respected profession.  Those two things are not necessarily connected.

*Portfolio careers are coming up again.  The reality of the industry as it stands right now is that you are either privileged to have another non-yoga income (a second job or a spouse, say) or you have to maintain a portfolio career.  Yoga therapists, even with our high level of training and experience, are required to do a lot of things.  A lot of us still teach yoga classes–I do, as much to test my material as anything, and we also see private clients, write, speak, train, travel, and run other businesses.  In order to make a living, many of us have to wear a lot of hats and do a lot of different kinds of work.

*OMG someone said it!!  There. Is. Enough. Work. For. Us. All.  We need to go fight for our work and spread the work amongst us.

*The IAYT has a responsibility to the professionals that it allegedly represents.  Sort of. Legally speaking, they actually have no responsibility to us, in spite of the fact they collect “membership dues” and have a “membership portal” on their website.  While they are walking like a membership organization duck, they are not legally defined that way.  Weird, huh?  

*What does member input in a yoga organization look like to you?  Other than the requisite “we are listening” posts and emails–how does an organization *Actually* listen?  What are some of your ideas?

*If the Q model goes forward, no matter what they call it, we need to call for a different model and organizational leadership to take charge of our industry.  Or, maybe we need to call for a real talk about the actual relevance of organizations in our industry.  

*Testimonials and the progress of your clients makes a difference.  Collect those if you can, because the best proof of being good at your job in this industry is when other people love your work well enough to say so, publicly. 

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Are there lessons we can take from other professions?

What is the IAYT doing well? What can they improve upon?

When will I get a vacation?

These are all questions we cover in our chat with Dr. Steffany Moonaz.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

*This point cannot be stressed enough when talking about license within the yoga therapy space.  Just because you have a license **Does not** mean you can necessarily bill insurance.  Let’s uncouple those thoughts, please.  Thanks.

*We can learn a lot from the journey of other professions.  We deep dove into acupuncture with Dr. Moonaz and it is fascinating to hear the stories of professions where there are restrictions about who they can treat, how they can treat, and who supervises the practitioners.  What are your thoughts here?

*Where the IAYT seems to missed the mark is in understanding how people in yoga therapy find their clients through the referral process.  I have said this before, but the amount of LHCPs (licensed health care providers) who have said “I will just get a 200 hour teacher training cert and do what you do, is staggering.  Now I still get referrals from those folks because eventually they realize that isn’t the case–but the fact that I have to explain this to an organization in our industry is wild to me.  That just isn’t how it works for any of us on the ground, taking clients as yoga therapists. 

*Gravitas and money.  Those are the things we want.  

*Steffany said something I really want to emphasize.  We can, as a profession, take the steps needed to become a licensed profession–and then decide not to do it.  But in my opinion, it is WELL WORTH taking the steps to professionalize as a whole.  It benefits us as an industry in the long run.

*We need to give the IAYT credit where credit is due.  The steps taken thus far in the area of self-regulation are significant.  The accreditation process, the credentialing process, continuing education requirements, core competencies, these are all important in the development of yoga therapy as a profession.  No doubt about it.

*How do we distinguish the difference in all of the different services in the yoga marketplace?  This is a huge question, especially in the context of yoga therapy.  What ideas do YOU have?  Email me, [email protected] and let me know.

*This is the time where I remind you that the International Association of Yoga Therapists has no legal requirement to advocate for us as professionals.  Their designation is a 501c3, which is a public serving organization.  Just as  a note.

*Just to update you, We still have no official stance from the IAYT as to weather or not the Q designation is stopped completely, now a month later after we recorded.  Just in case you need to know.

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This week on the podcast Stevie Ingram joins us to chat about all things licensure.

As a topic that is much discussed, and much lusted after fpr a few reasons, I have invited on several thinkers to talk about being a licensed profession would mean for us individually—and as a whole.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

*Gatekeeping is SUCH a problem for us as an industry. It is one of my biggest pet peeves, even in the organizing space.  We tend to keep secrets and say only the bare minimum while doing all the real information sharing behind the scenes with only a few people able to participate.  I reeeaaaalllllllly hate this practice.  We need to model transparency behavior amongst ourselves so that we can live up to the moral standards we claim are so important to us.

 *Yoga as a liberation practice. And it recognizing this, we must also understand that proximity to power is a thing.  This idea that licensure will get us closer to the power and financial wealth we perceive that the medical community has (this is not always the case) pushed conversations.  While perhaps we will decide as an industry that licensure is the way to go, deconstructing this idea is key for us being clearheaded when we make that decision.

*Gravitas is not inherent to us if we do get integrated into conventional medical practice. Being “accepted” by Western medicine will never mean we will be taken seriously.  I actually believe we need to do a lot of “inner work” as an industry to believe in our own value first.  

*We need to talk about license creep.  License creep is A common tactic is to broaden the definition or scope of practice of a licensed occupation, a practice we term “license creep.” Licensing legislation ordinarily describes the activities that define the practice of the occupation.

*insurance adds a lot of work behind the scenes.  I think a lot of people do not understand this, but insurance companies literally hire former nurses to comb through that charts of patients to see if they can get a “gotcha” moment where the healthcare system didn’t ask the right questions, do the correct protocol in the correct order, and more.  Hospitals also hire those people on the other side to combat this move by insurance companies.  If you are a yoga therapist consider if you are ready to take your charting and protocol up about 100 notches. 

*Residency and Peer-reviewed systems were two if the solutions that Stevie offered, that I love.  We do not need to consider other innovative ways for us to keep the status of a self-regulated industry.  

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Find Taylor Casey

Look. We need to get into it.

To ask all the questions, to unearth all the possibilities, to sit with some uncomfortable answers.

So I asked Leslie Kaminoff to come on, and we did just that.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

*” Fundamentally it is a governance issue” is my favorite quote about the IAYT issue that is on this entire podcast series.  Because they do have a governance issue, and it is important that we talk about it.  

To reiterate: a 501c3 organization in the United States exists to serve a public function, and a 501c6 org is a business or trade organization that exists to serve its members.  The IAYT is currently the former, not the latter.  

*Medicalizing yoga and yoga therapy comes with a whole host of complications.  And this series on the podcast will cover some of those complications as we go forward into talking about licensure, the medicalization of yoga, and more.

*Yoga is relationships.  This is a quote from this episode of the podcast that I have already used a dozen times since Leslie and I recorded this podcast together a few weeks ago.  Because it is so true.  We are in relationship with ourselves, our students, our colleagues, and our organizations.  It is important that we chose to build the best versions of those relationships that we can so we can all thrive, and also so that yoga and the yoga industry can thrive in this modern world.  

*If you missed it, if there is an offer to write a rebuttal of someone wishes to write a position paper about moving towards licensure in the yoga therapy space.  Please someone take Leslie up on this so I can read both your paper and his response.  I love this kind of stuff.

*Yoga has long taken place within the outskirts of culture.  I have said this a lot, but we came of age in the counter-culture movement of the 90s, and a lot of us really liked it that way.  I include myself in this group.  I don’t know if the 19 year old version of myself that started yoga would have found her way into today’s modern yoga spaces.  I think about that a lot actually, especially in the context of all those gifts that a consistent yoga practice has given me over the last 27 years.  Leslie refers to this with his assertion that yoga has existed very often between the cracks of general culture.  

Comforting or not, that is the reality of what we have been.  And I am interested to see if we keep that trend going forward into the future.

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Find Taylor Casey

Once upon a time we had organizations that worked for us, the professionals of the yoga industry.

Or did we?

On this new series we explore the recent work of one of our orgs, the International Association of Yoga Therapists as well as some other organizations in our space.

Sorry Yoga Alliance, you are sitting this one out.

Take a listen to the intro and then get ready for some serious industry legends and pros to tell you what they think about our recent organizational moves.

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Yoga Alliance Scope of Practice

International Association of Yoga Therapists Scope of Practice