Everyone assumes yoga teacher trainings are a cash grab. The actual math tells a very different story. In this episode, we build the real financial picture of running a 200-hour yoga teacher training from the trainer's perspective — the 500 hours of labor behind 200 hours of delivery, the costs that eat into gross revenue, and the hourly rate that results. For many trainers, that number lands around $20 per hour before taxes. This episode is for everyone who has ever assumed the trainer got rich off their tuition — and for every trainer who has never actually sat down and calculated what their work is worth.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Issue 1 of Inside Yoga Magazine is here — and in this episode, Rebecca walks you through what's inside, why she built it, and what she hopes it becomes for the yoga profession.

The Rebuild is the first issue of a trade publication designed to do something that doesn't exist yet: treat yoga professionals like the intelligent, serious people they are. That means original data, honest industry reporting, contributor voices from across the profession, and editorial writing that says the things that have needed saying for a long time.

In this episode you'll hear about the Real Hours Project and what the early data is showing about compensation and unpaid labor. You'll meet the contributors — Suzie Carmack, Jivana Heyman, and Stevie Inghram — and hear why their pieces belong together in the same issue. And you'll hear Rebecca talk about what it cost to write the pieces she wrote, and why she wrote them anyway.

This is the beginning of something. Come be part of it.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

The yoga industry tells a story about the devoted teacher who never stops — who teaches into their seventies, their eighties, who is on the mat until the very end. We tell it like it's a spiritual achievement. Nobody asks whether those teachers had a choice. In this episode we name the open secret the industry has been romanticizing for decades: for a lot of those teachers, it wasn't only devotion. It was the absence of a retirement account. And an industry that conflates financial precarity with spiritual purity has a serious problem that no amount of reframing can fix.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

There's a real and growing gap between yoga teachers who built their careers in the 2010s and those trying to build one now — and we're not talking about it enough.

Alexia Walker, a yoga teacher working in Michigan, joins Rebecca for an unfiltered conversation about what the current landscape actually looks like.

They get into the devaluing effect of free offerings, why the people who find you through free content rarely become paying students, how the yoga world built a training system that rewards wealth and travel over actual teaching skill, and what it means to build a truly bespoke career when no two paths look the same. They also touch on transferable skills, community care as a framework for service, and the harm that gets quietly replicated when we don't pay attention to the patterns we're inheriting. This is the conversation about where yoga is right now — not where it was ten years ago.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Alexia’s Website

The yoga world's commitment to non-judgment, positive intent, and non-attachment is genuinely beautiful in a practice.

In a profession, those same values have been used to silence legitimate grievances, protect institutions that should be held accountable, and make yoga professionals carry a collective harm privately that should have been named publicly.

In this episode, we say plainly what the industry has never said: you are allowed to feel taken advantage of. Because in many cases, you were. And naming that is not unspiritual. It is honest. And honesty is also a practice.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

If we keep training yoga teachers without honestly addressing how they're going to get paid, we're doing everyone a disservice — the teachers, the students, and the practice itself.

Reika Shucart, host of the Full Time Yoga Teacher podcast, joins Rebecca to talk about what it actually looks like to build a sustainable income as a yoga teacher right now.

They get into the shift away from studios toward community spaces like YMCAs, senior centers, and libraries; why online teaching needs to be a YTT requirement, not an afterthought; the quiet shrinking of the continuing education market; and the honest conversation nobody wants to have about yoga's cultural moment fading. There's also something genuinely hopeful in here — about curiosity, artistry, and the kind of passion-led teaching that keeps both teachers and students coming back. This one is practical, a little uncomfortable, and worth every minute.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Reika’s Website

There is something true about this profession that almost nobody says out loud.

Almost everyone who comes to yoga — and especially everyone who makes it their life's work — came here because they needed it.

Because something in them needed regulating. In this episode we name what the yoga industry has never said collectively: your history is not a liability.

It is your most important credential. And the fact that you came here to heal is not something to hide. It is the whole point.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

What would it mean if yoga professionals actually had access to employment data, debt-to-income numbers, and honest information about whether this career is financially viable?

In Part 2 of this conversation, Dr. Stevie Inghram and Rebecca get into why yoga's governing bodies keep that data close — and what it costs the profession when they do. They also talk about the difference between people who train for personal knowledge versus those building a career, why waiting for existing organizations to fix things is a losing strategy, and what a genuinely community-led approach to yoga professional advocacy could look like. And they share details on a free summer gathering for practitioners ready to stop waiting and start organizing.

This is a conversation about building the industry we all need and deserve — and it starts here.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Reflection Guide

Register for our community organizing event!

Stevie’s Instagram

The organizations governing the yoga profession care deeply about the practice. What they have never demonstrated a meaningful commitment to is the professional welfare of the people teaching it. In this episode we make a distinction nobody in this industry is making out loud — and explain why it changes everything about what you should expect from these institutions, what you're actually paying for, and what needs to be built.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Nobody talks about debt-to-income ratios in the yoga world.

Stevie Inghram does.

In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, Rebecca sits down with naturopathic doctor and yoga therapist Dr. Stevie Inghram to dig into some of the most under-discussed structural problems in the yoga and holistic health professions —

including whether it's even ethical to keep training people at current income levels,

how poor working conditions quietly erode professional standards,

and what it would take to build an organization that actually advocates for the people doing this work, not just the practice itself.

If you've ever felt like the system wasn't built for you, this conversation will help you understand why — and start you thinking about what comes next.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Reflection Guide

Register for our community organizing event!

Stevie’s Instagram