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.
Read MoreSome 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.
Read MoreYoga 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.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreGoing independent sounds like the answer to everything — no studio politics, set your own rates, build your own thing. And it can be. But the math of going independent has a specific shape that most people don't see clearly before they make the leap. In this episode we build the real financial picture of independent yoga work — what you need in place before it makes sense, how long the runway actually is, and what it costs to make the transition sustainably rather than desperately.
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Some conversations age well. This one with Leslie Pearlman — first recorded in 2024 — is one Rebecca keeps coming back to, because everything Leslie was talking about then is still not standard practice now. Leslie was among the first to build a hybrid yoga teacher training model, and it's still wild that teaching online isn't a baseline requirement in most YTTs. In this revisited conversation, they get into what actually makes a great teacher trainer (spoiler: it's a different skill set than being a great teacher), why mentorship and ascension models need to be part of this industry's future, the problem with "listen to your body" as instruction without the tools to back it up, and what it means to be truly intentional about who you are as a teacher and space holder. Stay tuned — an updated conversation with Leslie is coming in July.
Read MoreYoga teachers and studio owners are often frustrated with each other over money. Teachers feel underpaid. Owners feel squeezed. In this episode we put the studio owner's actual numbers on the table — rent, payroll, insurance, utilities, platform fees, marketing, and the razor-thin margins that result. This is not an episode that excuses poor pay. It is an episode that gives yoga professionals a complete picture of the economics on both sides so they can stop directing their frustration at each other and start directing it at the actual problem.
Read MoreSix months ago, Rebecca published the first Yoga Professionals Trend Forecast — a snapshot of what was actually happening in the yoga industry, without the soft focus. In this episode, she comes back to it. Not to congratulate herself, but to update it: what held, what sharpened, and where things have moved.
She also previews the Summer 2026 forecast. A few trends get named. One — the end of the portable career model — gets the full treatment. If you've been building your career on the solopreneur model and something has started to feel off, this episode is probably for you.
Read MoreEveryone 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 most 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.
Read MoreIssue 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreThere'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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreIf 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.
Read MoreThere 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.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreNobody 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.
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