Working in Yoga

This episode opens a new series — one that’s a little different from the others. Less “here’s a number nobody told you” and more “here’s the shape of the thing we’re all standing inside.”

The premise: the yoga industry isn’t approaching a turning point. It already turned. Most of what this series will describe over the coming weeks has already happened — it’s just not been named out loud, in order, in one place.

This episode sets the frame and names the urgency without pretending to have all the answers yet. If you’ve had the feeling that something shifted and nobody sent the memo, this is that memo.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Tick, Tock The Trend Report

Amara Miller is back, and this updated conversation goes to some places the original didn't. The yoga industry is contracting — fewer participants, a flooded market, and more companies chasing a shrinking pool of practitioners. Amara and Rebecca talk honestly about what that means for the profession, including the regulatory conversation the industry has been reluctant to have and why the libertarian anti-regulation instincts of the 2010s may be genuinely outdated in the current landscape. They also get into something Rebecca hadn't fully considered before this conversation: the yoga teachers and lineage holders who carry the deepest knowledge of this tradition are aging, and the professional associations haven't built any meaningful infrastructure to preserve that wisdom before it walks out the door. It's a conversation about what the industry is at risk of losing — and whether we're organized enough to do anything about it before it's too late.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Amara’s Website

Most yoga professionals have no employer contributing to their retirement. No pension. No automatic savings. Whatever gets built for the future is built entirely through individual planning, out of an already stretched income, in a profession that culturally treats financial planning as spiritually suspect. In this episode we do the retirement math — what you actually need to save monthly at different ages to retire at sixty-five, what that number looks like against average yoga professional income, and why starting now matters more than starting right.

 RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Leslie Pearlman is back, and this update to their 2024 conversation covers even more ground than the original. Rebecca and Leslie dig into online and hybrid teaching not as a lesser alternative to in-person but as a genuinely distinct skillset that requires its own curriculum — one most YTTs still aren't providing. They get into the internal regulation work required to teach well in any format, and the largely unexamined tendency to moralize the absence of in-room co-regulation as an automatic loss. They also tackle one of Rebecca's long-running preoccupations: the difference between professional training and personal development, and why the yoga industry needs to get honest about which one it's actually offering. And they go somewhere most conversations don't — into the urgent need for yoga teacher trainer training and studio owner training, including the relational dimension of what it means to be for a community without being of it. Rich, honest, and covers a lot of ground in fifty minutes.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Good Ground Yoga

The online yoga business is sold as the answer to everything — unlimited reach, passive income, freedom from the studio model. The reality has a specific math that most of the people selling online business courses are not showing you. In this episode we build the honest financial picture of what it costs to build an online yoga offering — in time, money, and the long runway before it generates meaningful income — so you can make decisions about digital offerings based on what is actually true.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Part 2 of this conversation with Nana Amoako-Anin goes somewhere a little more personal — and just as essential. Rebecca and Nana talk about the confidence it takes to charge what your work is actually worth, and why pricing remains such a persistent struggle for yoga professionals. They get into consumer choice — the fact that the industry has never given students a real way to evaluate or choose a good teacher — and the visual culture problem baked into yoga marketing, where the internet still defaults to one narrow, unrepresentative image of who practices. They also touch on AI's growing role in marketing and what it means to stay genuinely uncomfortable while your teaching and business evolve. This one feels like listening in on two people becoming real friends, which, honestly, it is.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Tick Tock, The Trend Report and State of the Profession

Nana’s Website

Running a retreat looks like a financial opportunity. Fill twelve spots at $1,500 each and you have $18,000 in revenue for a long weekend. The math seems obvious. Until you look at the actual costs. In this episode we build the real financial picture of a yoga retreat — venue deposits, per-person minimums, marketing costs, payment processing, and the thin margins that result. This episode is for every yoga professional who has run a retreat and wondered where the money went, or who is considering their first retreat and wants to go in with accurate expectations.

 RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Nana Amoako-Anin has lived a genuinely international life — including a stint as a prosecuting attorney in Manhattan — before finding her way into yoga and opening her own studio in Ghana. In Part 1 of this conversation, she and Rebecca get into something the yoga industry rarely names directly: access to capital, and what it means for the future of this work. They also unpack the term "trauma-informed," questioning whether academic language is actually serving the people it's meant to help, and look honestly at how the US wellness industry burned hot and fast in the 2010s, organized itself around deep individualism, and ultimately failed to build infrastructure for its own workers. It's a candid look at what other parts of the world might do differently — and why.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Tick Tock, The Trend Report and State of the Profession

Nana’s Website

The per-class rate sounds reasonable until you do the actual math. In this episode we calculate what a studio teaching job really pays when you factor in unpaid prep time, travel, cancelled classes, and the absence of benefits. What looks like a professional income often works out to less than minimum wage when the full picture is on the table. This episode is for every yoga professional who has felt that something wasn't adding up — because something wasn't.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Some conversations leave you with a line you keep quoting for years. For Rebecca, this is one of them. Dr. Shyam Ranganathan, founder of YogaPhilosophy.com, joined the podcast during the 2024 perfectionism series, and the conversation has held up in every way that matters. They get into the difference between Western virtue ethics — which starts with finding the right person and doing what they say — and yoga's invitation to spend a lifetime practicing right doing as you understand it. They talk about why "the customer is always right" is a genuinely complicated idea when you're teaching something transformative, why yoga is inherently subversive and dissatisfaction is actually the doorway in, and what that means for how you market your work without compromising your ethics. And they get into leadership — the real kind, that requires vulnerability, healthy boundaries, and the willingness to be a serious student yourself. This is the final episode in the revisited conversations series, and it's a worthy close.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Dr. Ranganathan’s website