Working in Yoga

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

Working in Yoga episodes

May 18 Nobody Told You Working Until You Die Isn't Devotion, It's A Missing Retirement Account
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
11 min
May 14 Mapping the Real Landscape of Yoga Teaching Today — With Alexia Walker
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
54 min
May 11 Nobody Told You It's Okay To Feel Taken Advantage Of
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
10 min
May 07 The Economics of Yoga — Curiosity, Community Spaces & Staying in the Work With Reika Shucart
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
58 min
May 04 Nobody Told You Almost Everyone Came Here To Regulate Trauma
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
10 min
April 30 Data, Transparency & Building the Yoga Industry We Actually Deserve — With Dr. Stevie Inghram (Part 2)
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
39 min
April 27 Nobody Told You The Organizations Believe In Yoga, Not In You
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
10 min
April 23 Debt, Standards, and Who's Really Looking Out for You — With Dr. Stevie Inghram (Part 1)
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
38 min
April 20 Nobody Told You Yoga Therapy Jobs Don't Exist
You finished your training. You passed your boards. You have the credential. And now you're discovering that the jobs you were promised aren't there. In this episode we name what the yoga therapy credentialing world has never said clearly: the job market doesn't exist the way you were told it did. That is not your failure. That is a promise that was never backed up with infrastructure — and it's time someone said it out loud.
RESOURCES
Working In Yoga Website
Working In Yoga Newsletter
The Back Room
Inside Yoga Magazine
10 min
April 16 How to Build the Doors Yourself — Yoga Therapy in Clinical Settings With Jenna Csont & Whitney Pasch (Part 2)
If Part 1 made you believe a clinical yoga therapy job was possible, Part 2 is going to show you how to start going after one.
Jenna Csont and Whitney Pasch get into the practical side — networking in spaces where yoga professionals are still a new concept, the education that makes these opportunities available, reaching out to therapy centers, and why knowing how to clearly explain what yoga therapy is may be the most underrated professional skill you can develop.
Rebecca also reflects on what Jenna's path represents: solo, ground-up, door-building work that most of us weren't warned we'd need to do. If you're a yoga therapist who wants to work in clinical or medical settings, this episode is required listening.
RESOURCES
Working In Yoga Website
Working In Yoga Newsletter
The Back Room
Inside Yoga Magazine
42 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.