Online Yoga, Accessibility & Building Without Burning Out — With Becky Aten

We talk a lot about what gets lost when yoga moves online. We don't talk nearly enough about what becomes possible. Becky Aten — back on the podcast after her earlier conversation about yoga and neurodiverse populations — joins Rebecca for week 4 of the online teaching series to make that case clearly. Online yoga is often wildly more accessible than in-person, and the yoga world needs to stop treating that as a footnote. For neurodivergent practitioners especially, the ability to go at their own pace, adapt to their own capacity, and participate without the sensory and social demands of a studio environment is not a consolation prize — it's the whole point. Becky and Rebecca also get into the sustainability side: sliding scale pricing and what it quietly does to both teachers and students, the cooperative culture fantasy vs. the reality of doing things yourself, and why building something slow and loving online might be the antidote to the hustle culture that the online space tends to produce. There is no one right way to build online. This conversation is proof.

Rebecca SebastianOctober 15, 2026Comment

What Now? Part 1: Find Each Other

"Okay, but what now?" It's the question Rebecca hears more than any other. After months of looking at what went wrong in this industry, from Yoga Alliance's leadership to the organizations that stepped back to the career path nobody built, it's time to talk about what comes next. In this first episode of a five-part series, Rebecca starts with an honest admission: she doesn't have all the answers, and she doesn't think any one person should. Instead, she makes the case for the move underneath every other move: finding each other. You'll hear why organizing almost always starts local, what ten teachers comparing notes can change, the objections that keep us isolated, and exactly how to start a network with one message this week.

Building an Online Membership & Preserving Your Body of Work — With Keri Marino

A lot of yoga teachers still have real questions about how an online membership works in practice — and Keri Marino has the answers. In week 3 of the online teaching series, she and Rebecca get into the mechanics and mindset of building a membership that actually holds people over time: email touchpoints that keep students engaged between sessions, the case for adding a live component, how to film in a way that feels authentic and connected even when nobody's on the other end of the camera yet, and why giving yourself full permission to enjoy the practice while you're recording changes everything about how the content lands. They also get into something Rebecca thinks about a lot — how legacy teachers can use online platforms to preserve and transmit their bodies of work, and what gets lost when that work stays locked behind high-ticket offerings that most students can't access. Plus a conversation about AI, agency, orientation emails, and why membership models take longer than people expect — and are worth it anyway.

Inside Yoga Magazine Issue 2 — The Accountability Issue

Accountability is one of the most overused and underdelivered words in the yoga industry. A soft-focus apology post is not accountability. A teacher quietly pulled from the schedule with no explanation is not accountability. Issue 2 of Inside Yoga Magazine — The Accountability Issue — is built around one argument: that accountability in yoga is performed rather than practiced, and the public has noticed. In this solo episode, Rebecca walks through what's inside. Magnolia Zuniga's unflinching piece on yoga's predator problem and the deflection tactics the community reaches for every time. Nana Amoako-Anin bringing a Truth and Reconciliation framework to the question of what repair actually requires. The Real Hours Project data sitting alongside parallel research from Singapore, converging on the same structural problem from opposite sides of the world. The grievance processes at Yoga Alliance and IAYT examined honestly for what they produce. And Rebecca's own most personal writing yet — four myths yoga professionals carry, and what each one costs. The issue closes with a story about lying to a man in a grocery store in 2013, and what it took to figure out why. This is what the magazine is for.

Evergreen Courses, Learning Outcomes & Building an Online Yoga Business — With Summer Huntington

Most online yoga studios are built like a sandbox — open-ended, come-when-you-can, no clear progression. Summer Huntington thinks there's a better way. In week 2 of the online teaching series, she joins Rebecca to talk about learning outcomes — identifying what students are actually working toward and building material that feeds directly into that — and why that framework changes everything about how you design an online offering. They also get into the case for having one clear offer instead of many, why small email lists consistently outperform large ones, the underrated market for private and individualized online experiences, and what it actually means to build a body of work rather than just a content library. Plus: what-to-expect emails, office hours, and why getting comfortable on camera is a skill worth developing even if the tech still intimidates you.

The Mock Turtle, A.K.A. Institutional Abandonment — The Tears

The Mock Turtle cries through the whole story. The tears are real — the Tortoise taught them that. Nothing changes.

This episode closes out the series with the hardest piece: organizations that perform concern about misconduct and student safety, without the accountability mechanisms that would make that concern mean anything. It’s not an angry episode — it’s closer to an autopsy. And it’s the hinge into where this work goes next.

The One Thing: this episode doesn’t end with a task. It ends with where the series is headed next — and an invitation to be part of building what the organizations won’t.

Rebecca SebastianSeptember 28, 2026Comment

Teaching Yoga Online With Intention & Community — With Nyk Danu

Rebecca doesn't say this lightly: this is one of those conversations where she found herself thinking she was talking to someone who is genuinely a better teacher than her. Nyk Danu has developed such a nuanced, intentional approach to teaching yoga online that this episode is practically a masterclass. She and Rebecca kick off a five-episode series on online yoga teaching by getting into what most people get wrong — the assumption that the relational depth of in-person teaching can't be replicated online. Nyk has built a warm, community-driven online teaching practice that works precisely because none of it is accidental. They cover how she creates a sense of home on Zoom, the cameras-on vs. cameras-off debate, why semesters make sense as a teaching model, hybrid class structures, niching as a differentiator in a crowded online space, and some genuinely practical advice for anyone who has ever recorded for another studio's platform. If you teach online or want to, start here.

The Mock Turtle, A.K.A. Institutional Abandonment — The Education

The Mock Turtle’s school taught Reeling and Writhing, and Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision — taught by the Tortoise, because he taught them. It’s absurd. It’s also, this episode argues, an almost exact map of how yoga credentialing works.

This episode looks honestly at what credentials actually prepare working teachers for, who’s selling them, and what it means that the organizations selling the credentials have signaled — in their own language — that building jobs isn’t their job.

Studio Ownership, Heartbreak & the Right to Evolve — With Jessica Patterson (Part 2)

This is the conversation Rebecca wishes she could have had when she owned her studio. In Part 2 of this conversation with Jessica Patterson, they move from theory into the deeply personal territory of what it actually costs to own a yoga studio — and why the industry has made studio owners into villains when many of them started this work trying to build a sanctuary. Jessica and Rebecca talk about the shift in power dynamics that comes with ownership and the isolation it creates, the heartbreak of telling a community you've evolved when they've frozen you in a particular moment in time, and the difference between self-agency and self-determination in an economic climate that nobody chose. They also get into the latent shame that comes with business difficulty, why blaming individual owners for systemic problems is both unfair and counterproductive, and the simple but radical truth that you don't have to keep doing the things you're good at. One of Rebecca's favorite conversations on the podcast. It earns that.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee, A.K.A. The Menopause Pivot

Tweedledum and Tweedledee look identical from a distance — but they’re not the same, and the real stakes are happening just out of frame while everyone argues about the rattle.

Menopause and perimenopause content is a real, legitimate growth area for yoga professionals — the demand is genuine and the science backs it up. But this episode is about the difference between a teacher arriving at this work because it’s where their career has been heading, versus a teacher pivoting because the topic is trending. From the outside, the content can look the same. From the inside — for the women being served — it’s everything.

Rebecca SebastianSeptember 14, 2026Comment

Purity Culture, Authentic Yoga & Which Bodies Come to Matter — With Jessica Patterson (Part 1)

Jessica Patterson is doing something rare — she's working through a PhD in religious studies focused on yoga and yoga bodies while remaining fully embedded in the yoga professional world as a teacher, studio owner, and trainer. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, she and Rebecca get into the ideas that don't get enough airtime in the industry: which bodies come to matter in yoga spaces, how proximity to authenticity functions as a marketing strategy, and the purity culture that quietly shapes how yoga professionals judge each other and themselves. They talk about Orientalism — the idea that the East is pure and the West corrupt — and why that framing isn't just intellectually lazy, it's actively harmful to the profession. They get into the difference between training yoga teachers and training yoga performers, the franchising of bodies and teaching styles, and the mob mentality that can emerge when cultural appropriation anxiety meets social media. This one is dense, honest, and worth every minute.

The Mad Hatter, A.K.A. The End of the Portable Career, Part 2

If Part 1 was about the stale tea party, Part 2 is about what’s actually on the other side of it: not another niche, not another container — depth. Philosophy, breathwork, meditation, movement, put back together rather than stripped for parts.

This episode is about the small but real number of teachers building something rooted, and what that looks like in practice — including the uncomfortable homework of treating your career like it just started, because in the market that now exists, in a lot of ways, it did.

The One Thing: an honest audit question — was your career built for expansion, or for depth? And what would depth look like on a specific Tuesday?

Yoga Therapy Clients, Referrals & the Studio Owner Experience — With Maile Wicklander

There's a real and underexplored difference between the people who walk into a general yoga class and the people who seek out a certified yoga therapist — and if you're trying to fill your yoga therapy practice, that distinction matters enormously. Maile Wicklander, longtime yoga studio owner and recent yoga therapy graduate, joins Rebecca to work through what that difference actually looks like in practice. They get into referral strategy, including Maile's straightforward approach to getting the right clients through the door, the particular challenge of psychotherapist referrals, and why handouts and connections to adjacent fields are still some of the most underrated tools in a yoga therapist's toolkit. They also talk about what's missing in the yoga professional community space, why boundaries inside collective networking groups make them more useful rather than less, and what studio owners need that nobody's really providing. A practical, grounded conversation for yoga therapists building or expanding a practice.

The Mad Hatter, A.K.A. The End of the Portable Career, Part 1

The Mad Hatter quarreled with Time, and now it’s always six o’clock — a permanent tea party, moving from seat to seat around the same stale table. That’s the soloist career model: niche something, workshop it, build a following, move to the next container. Repeat.

This episode names how that model came to dominate yoga careers in the 2010s — not by accident, but by design, modeled and reinforced by the most visible voices of that era. And it names, gently but clearly, that the market that made that model work doesn’t exist anymore — even for the teachers who are still running it.

How to Build a Local Yoga Professional Network

Most yoga teachers can name two or three colleagues they'd actually call if something went sideways. Not people they follow, not someone from a training years ago — people they could actually call. In a profession that runs on referral and reputation, that's not a personality problem. It's a structural one. In this solo episode, Rebecca walks through five stages of building a real local yoga professional network — getting honest about what you're actually building, finding your first five people, planning a low-stakes first gathering, setting ground rules that will hold when it gets real, and keeping the thing alive past the fourth meeting, which is where these groups almost always fall apart. This episode comes with a free companion checklist in the show notes. No email wall. Just the thing you need to actually start.

The Cheshire Cat, A.K.A. The Online Gap — Any Road Will Get You There

“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” For yoga professionals who left online teaching without a plan, that’s exactly what happened — they ended up somewhere, just not somewhere they chose.

Meanwhile, a small number of platforms kept building online and now dominate the space. This episode reframes the question most teachers get stuck on — “how do I compete with a channel that has a million subscribers?” — into the one that actually matters: what can a working teacher offer in an online space that a content platform structurally cannot?

The One Thing: a single reframing question to sit with this week about your own relationship to online teaching.

Scripts, Responsive Teaching & Self-Paced Courses — With Deb Flashenberg

This is the kind of conversation Rebecca wants to do more of — two people parsing out the nuance of how we actually do this work, in real time. Deb Flashenberg is back, and this time she and Rebecca get nerdy about scripts, responsive teaching, and what it really means to be present with the people in the room. They talk about why giving teachers a framework serves them better than handing them a script, what gets lost when AI writes your sequences, and the particular challenge of self-paced courses that have no relational feedback loop built in. They also get into the reps — the honest reality that there is no shortcut to learning to teach, and that teacher training exists precisely to give people a safe place to mess up and figure it out. If you've ever wondered whether scripts are a crutch or a tool, or how to develop the skill of actually seeing your students, this one is for you.

The Cheshire Cat, A.K.A. The Online Gap — The Grin That’s Left Behind

For one strange year, online was the whole game. Then studios reopened, and most yoga professionals quietly walked back — leaving behind a channel that still exists, a profile that’s still live, content that’s technically still there.

This episode is about presence without substance — what happens to the online version of a teaching relationship when the relationship part leaves but the page doesn’t get taken down. It’s not about deleting anything. It’s about noticing what’s actually still working, and what’s just… still there.

IAYT's 990s, AI Tools & Rethinking How Clients Find Us — With Kellie Adkins

Kellie Adkins did her homework — including a close look at the IAYT's 990s — and she brings the receipts. In this conversation with Rebecca, they get into the financial reality behind the C-IAYT credential: what yoga therapists are actually earning (around $10K a year, against the cost of a yoga therapy degree), why significant numbers of credentialed yoga therapists are choosing not to renew, and what the IAYT's own financial losses over recent years say about the organization's trajectory. They also talk about the structural problem at the root of all of it — an industry that trained far more people than it ever built jobs for, and the obligation legacy professionals have to charge enough that entry-level yoga therapy can actually be a livable wage. Kellie also brings something genuinely useful to the conversation: a working accountability model built around DEIA, lineage, and codes of conduct with real removal processes — and hire.yoga, her platform designed to connect yoga therapists with actual employment opportunities. Plus a conversation about AI tools and how yoga professionals can use them well.

The Caterpillar, A.K.A. The Extraction Economy

A therapist tells a client in crisis to “notice the present moment.” The client destabilizes — and the therapist has no idea why, because they read about mindfulness. They never built a practice, and nobody who has is in the room to say: that’s not how this works.

This episode is about the difference between fields that hire yoga professionals (integration) and fields that borrow yoga’s tools without yoga professionals (extraction) — and why that distinction isn’t territorial, it’s a safety standard.

The One Thing: a simple way to start the referral conversation with allied health professionals in your own network.