Yoga is a hard product to sell, because you do not really see the value in it immediately. It is only after quite some time of being consistent, that your yoga practice starts turning into magic.
Also, by yoga everybody understands the asana practice, meaning the movements and poses you do with your body. This is why we have this on-going discussion online where yogis keep asking to remove Yoga from the fitness culture. The truth is that, this asana practice that is commonly known as yoga, is indeed a physical activity that raises your heart rate, makes you move your body and use your muscles. Will you continue practicing and start getting the benefits of yoga, beyond the physical activity? – Yes? Great! – No? Well, you had a good movement session and that is also good!
Medicine and health industries have done a great job promoting yoga (again, meaning asana practice). Saying it reduces cortisol (stress), helps you with your cardio-vascular health (lowers blood pressure), and promotes strength, flexibility, and balance. This has made yoga a more popular term and practice, which has also helped more people getting in touch with this philosophy. But once you dive into the yoga culture, you realise that the physical part of yoga is only 1 of 8 parts philosophy of life.
Yoga is famous for a reason, and has remained relevant for millennia. Yoga holds a transformative power of making you lower the intensity of the external world and go inwards to your internal world. Makes you get in touch with yourself and be aware of your own thoughts, movements, breathing, and eventually your emotional wounds, fears, and attachments. Yoga is wonderful and has helped so many people across time and space. That is why anyone should do yoga. Anyone will benefit from it.
I am not going to give you a speech into what the Yoga philosophy is. You can find it in many other places. But let’s just say that yoga, like any other life philosophy, is adopted, and adapted, by the imperfect humans that we are. Just like you hear of Catholic priests sometimes do not-so-priesty things. Sadly, people who represent yoga in this material world, incur in activities and attitudes that, often, are not so yogi-like. So you should be cautious and selective of who you follow for your yoga guidance.
Yoga is a business after all. If you believe in yoga. If practicing yoga and this life-style has changed your life for the better. If you want to become a yoga ambassador, wether is a teacher, studio owner, spokesperson, or whatever; you need to find a way to monetise it, because you also need to eat and pay bills. So what happens with all idealistic environments, people are people, and will bring all their light into it, but also all their darkness. Believe me on this one, I joined Academia because I wanted to create knowledge for a better world, and left when I saw it was yet another game of power.
When you decide to become a yoga teacher, be sure that is not because you foresee yourself getting rich from it. You do it because you believe in it, it makes you feel good about yourself, want to make others feel good too. But it pays you peanuts. In the beginning you just spend money on classes, workshops, and certifications, and then you start working for free or danation-based classes. When you finally break through, to teach at studios, you most likely start only taking substitutions, which not only means you need to have complete availability, and bend your schedule around last minute requests. It also means hurt-feelings sometimes, as many people tend to get attached to their teacher, and when a new teacher shows up to sub a class, people are disappointed, they cancel their booking, and in extreme occasions leave when they see your face and the class is about to start.
When you finally get a fixed class with your name on it, you feel good! Your wallet not so much. If you are wondering, at least in my experience from teaching in 7 different studios in Prague, the average is around 500-600CZK. Many studios have a fixed rate for a class, Some other studios have a pay-by-student system, and the amount varies depending on how the student paid for the class, being the lowest with Multisports, and the highest if they paid with a subscription or drop-in. To make something above 1000CZK, you have to have around 17-22 students in your class, which is not so common for new teachers. Like everything in life, it takes time to consolidate a good class with students who are recurrent, and follow you. In the beginning you can make as low as 200CZK for a class if you have only 2 students. And you invested around 2 hours of your time including commuting, plus the preparation for the class and the flow. So you get the picture.
The first years as a yoga teacher are a red-numbers scenario, as the first certification of 200 hrs, in a good program, costs somewhere around 50,000CZK. So this is why is hard to make a full living out of being a yoga teacher. You either have to have very popular and consolidated classes, or teach around 4 classes a day, which is insanely draining, not to mention the commuting time between studios.
But the studio owners are the brave ones. It takes a lot of courage to set up a business and take all the risk. The yoga teacher may not make much money, but the studios many times lose money as they have fixed expenses. Without the studios, us teachers would not have a place to teach, and you students would not have a place to go for your practice.
Yoga studios are another interesting piece of the yoga business. Most yoga studios are owned by yogis. People who started practicing yoga, taught yoga, and decided to have their own place to teach. However, one thing I have observed is that, many times these people have very little experience in the business and corporate world. And wether you want to see it or not, a studio is a business and it needs structure. Most studios start empirically. I mean, I got a nice place, bought the mats and props, pay a teacher and that’s it, right? – Sadly no, you need a receptionist (many places make their teachers do the reception, which adds time and stress), you need manuals about how the system works, the speaker, the lights. You need cleaning, marketing, social media. You are managing sometime above 50 eventual teachers! That alone, surely needs an HR go-to person. You are managing people, and where there are people, there tend to be conflicts. Studios often have their favourite teachers who bring in more people (because it is a business), so classes are not distributed equally, and that can be sometimes a hard space to navigate for a new yoga teacher who is trying their best, and only making peanuts for his/her time and effort.
All the reasons above are why many teachers start expanding to organise retreats, workshops, courses and their own online platforms. Many find the balance to get a bit more income, without losing hope in humanity in the process. Teaching so many classes a day/week, tends to strip out the joy of practicing yoga. Teachers can start focusing more on making ends meet, than really enjoying the process of dispensing a bit of a healing treasure to others. Which is what brought them to teach in the first place.
So next time yo go to a class, and you connect with the teacher’s style or vibe… Tell them! We are also human and we also need some recognition from time to time. If you have a Multisports memberships that allows you to come to all their classes, consider maybe supporting them when they host a session that is longer than 60 minutes and is not included with Multisports. Spread the word about their classes, share with them a testimonial they can post, share on your social media a picture about their class and tag them. Believe me, we need the visibility to get to easier waters to navigate.
Lastly, I want to talk about Gurus and Certifications. Honestly I am quite torn about the whole Guru thing, as I see some people having a lot of awareness and knowledge that are very important to bring to others, who are willing to enhance their spiritual awakening. But when you are in search for answers, existential answers, people can take advantage of your need to belong, and wrap you over in situations that can get to be a bit sketchy, or scams that only want to get money from you. I got into a certification here in CZ that was somehow phishy (won’t say names but if you are curious or concerned, drop me a private message). This is just to say, PLEASE, be careful. Do not compromise your safety (physical/emotional/mental/financial).
I grew up in this spiritual-awakening worlds because my mom was really into it. I am including some pictures of me as a kid with Tibetan Monks for evidence haha. My brother and I used to be the only kids in those ashrams meditating with other adults. I even got to bend metal cutlery with the power of my mind after meditation (spoiler: I have tried as an adult and have not been able anymore haha), but the thing here is that we got away from all that world, when my mom started discovering that many of the gurus and people who came to “enlighten” and “guide” others, were complete scammers who only wanted to make money out of people looking for answers. So please, be critical.
And now that you have a bit of a bigger picture of what the money-related yoga world looks like… just KEEP FOCUSED ON THE GOOD! Yoga is great tool, and it can transform your life. Just do it under your own terms, in an ethical way honouring yourself, and others. Support the yoga teachers who inspire you! And keep showing up!
Remember, good things take time, but wonderful things happen all at once. Be patient and you will start blooming soon ♥
Hope to see you in my classes soon in case you haven’t tried them!
And if you like this blog post or any of the previous ones, PLEASE share it with your friends or whomever you think will enjoy it too! See you next week.
Vero ♥
