Working in Yoga

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.

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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.

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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

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