Working in Yoga

By Rebecca SebastianSociety & Culture Business Alternative Health Health & Fitness Personal Journals Careers

Working in Yoga episodes

July 13 The Math Nobody Does: The Online Business Math
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
10 min
July 09 Confidence, Pricing & Visual Representation in Yoga — With Nana Amoako-Anin (Part 2)
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
40 min
July 06 The Math Nobody Does: The Retreat Math
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
12 min
July 02 Capital, Trauma-Informed Practice & a Cautionary Tale — With Nana Amoako-Anin (Part 1)
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
42 min
June 29 The Math Nobody Does: The Studio Job Math
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
11 min
June 25 Yoga Philosophy, Virtue Ethics & Why Dissatisfaction Is the Beginning — A Revisited Conversation With Dr. Shyam Ranganathan
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
55 min
June 22 The Math Nobody Does: The Continuing Education Math
Yoga professionals are required to complete continuing education to maintain their credentials. Nobody has ever done the math on what that requirement actually costs over a career, or what it actually returns in earning potential. In this episode we put both numbers on the table — the real cumulative cost of continuing education across a yoga career, and the honest answer to whether those requirements serve the professional or the organizations that set them.
RESOURCES
Working In Yoga Website
Working In Yoga Newsletter
The Back Room
Inside Yoga Magazine
10 min
June 18 Perfectionism, Activism & White Supremacy Culture in Yoga — A Revisited Conversation With Colice Sanders
This is one of those conversations Rebecca keeps sending people back to — and for good reason. First recorded in March 2024, this discussion with Colice Sanders on perfectionism and activism in the yoga space holds up in every way that matters, and has only gotten more relevant since. Colice brings serious precision to the conversation — defining terms, naming the ways white supremacy culture shows up in yoga and social justice spaces, and making a clear-eyed case for why awareness without focused action is where we keep missing the mark. They also get into how perfectionism gets weaponized to police each other in yoga and activist communities, the difference between critique worth sitting with and shame designed to silence, and how moral superiority quietly infiltrates even the most well-intentioned spaces. An updated conversation with Colice is coming in July — things have shifted enough since 2024 that it was time. Start here first.
RESOURCES:
Working In Yoga Website
Working In Yoga Newsletter
The Back Room
Inside Yoga Magazine

Colice’s Website
White Supremacy Culture website
1 hr 12 min
June 15 The Math Nobody Does: The Yoga Therapy Credential Math
The C-IAYT credential represents a significant investment — in time, money, and professional identity. In this episode we put the full cost of becoming a certified yoga therapist on the table alongside the realistic income outcomes, and calculate what the credential actually needs to return to justify the investment. The math is not designed to discourage you from yoga therapy. It is designed to give you the complete financial picture so you can build a career strategy that works in the real landscape.

RESOURCES
Working In Yoga Website
Working In Yoga Newsletter
The Back Room
Inside Yoga Magazine
10 min
June 11 How We Built the Yoga Organizations We Have — A Revisited Conversation With Amara Miller
If you've ever wondered how we ended up with the yoga organizations we have, this is the conversation. First recorded in 2024, Rebecca's discussion with Amara Miller remains the clearest, most honest account she knows of how the yoga industry organized itself — and why it looks the way it does today.
They trace Yoga Alliance back to its 1999 origins as a genuine attempt at student safety and teacher standards, through the flood of money that hit the industry in the late 2000s and early 2010s that nobody was prepared to navigate, to the cultural counterculture identity that shaped how yoga professionals thought about structure and institutions.
They also get into the hours-vs-curriculum debate that defined early standards-setting, the approval of fully virtual YTTs, and what it might mean to start thinking seriously about unions and community-led professional organizing. An updated conversation with Amara is coming in July — but start here. This one is foundational.
RESOURCES
Working In Yoga Website
Working In Yoga Newsletter
The Back Room
Inside Yoga Magazine
Amara’s Website
1 hr 4 min

About Working in Yoga

From the publisher's feed

Join yoga studio owner, yoga teacher, yoga therapist, and yoga non-profit founder Rebecca Sebastian for a water cooler discussion of what it is to work in the yoga world.