Teaching yoga, and maybe especially teaching private clients is, to be candid, an unstable way to make a living. But I have done it successfully for twenty years, so it can be done!

I’m in a season in my life where I have limited spots available to teach, but financially I need every single one of those spots filled every week. I have about ten standing private clients and then I have at least five spots every week that need to be filled.

So in today’s episode, I am giving you all the details about what I am doing to keep my private teaching calendar full. It is working really well!

In this episode, you’ll hear:

why I recommend having at least one virtual private yoga client
how having a list of people who I see infrequently has helped
how I talk about my work with confidence and seriousness
why I STILL offer free private lessons, and recommend you do too
how I manage my calendar booking software so I don’t miss out on filling a spot
advice I have changed my mind on, and why I invite students to have their friends join their private lesson

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178: The Systems You Need to Make Yoga Teaching Sustainable

Teaching yoga involves far more than the hours we spend with our yoga students. Behind every yoga class we teach there is a significant amount of planning, relationship-building, scheduling, administration, marketing, and financial management. In this episode, I share the practical systems that have helped me build a sustainable yoga teaching career over the last two decades.

Following up on our recent conversation about the hidden labor of yoga teaching, this episode focuses on solutions. While we absolutely need collective action and systemic change to better support yoga teachers (and other freelance workers), there are also concrete systems we can put in place right now to make our work feel more manageable, organized, and sustainable.

177: The Hidden Emotional and Physical Labor of Yoga Teaching

As yoga teachers, we spend a lot of time talking about teaching techniques, sequencing, cueing, and professional growth. But there’s another side of this work that often goes unnamed: the hidden labor of teaching yoga.

In this episode, I explore the physical, emotional, mental, and administrative work that happens behind the scenes of a yoga teaching career. From building a business one class at a time to managing finances, marketing, commuting, continuing education, and emotional boundaries, much of the work that sustains a teaching career is invisible to students—and often unacknowledged within the industry itself.

176: Yoga Is Sold As Healing and Taught As Performance: What we need to move away from this paradigm

Have you ever been in a yoga class where the yoga teacher gives a long dharma talk about ahimsa, and then when the movement practice begins the teaching style feels very aggressive? Or maybe you have been that teacher yourself. I know I have!

I think there are really subtle and beautiful ways to teach the movement part of yoga in a way that has the deeper philosophical teachings embedded within it, but most of us were not taught to do that, and it is more challenging to do than you might think!

149: What I’m Doing to Keep My Private Teaching Calendar Full

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149: What I’m Doing to Keep My Private Teaching Calendar Full

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150: Daily, Weekly + Monthly Routines That Make Me The Teacher I Want To Be

148: My Advice For New Yoga Teachers

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For Yoga Students

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