Are you a yoga teacher struggling to make ends meet? You’re not alone. In this episode of Cozy Yoga Life, we’re diving deep into one of the biggest challenges in the yoga industry—financial insecurity.
Many yoga teachers face unstable income, lack of benefits, and pressure to teach for free. But it doesn’t have to be this way! In this episode, we cover:
- Why financial instability is so common in the yoga world
- The mindset shifts needed to overcome money blocks
- Practical strategies to build a sustainable, thriving yoga career
- Ways to diversify income and create financial stability
Whether you’re a new teacher or a seasoned instructor, this episode will give you real-world solutions to help you feel more confident about your financial future.
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Real Life Struggles: Financial Insecurity Transcript
Welcome back to another episode where in this season I’m covering the real life struggles of yoga teachers.
For this episode, I wish I didn’t have to talk about this particular one. However, it’s all too common for yoga teachers whether you teach full-time, part-time, or you have this just as a side gig.
And that is the struggle many teachers face with financial insecurity.
What's in this podcast episode
In today’s episode, I want to cover the top reasons why yoga teachers face financial insecurity. I’m going to talk about mindset shifts that need to happen across the yoga industry. And of course, I want to provide some practical strategies to help yoga teachers bridge those gaps.
Like most of the topics that I’ve shared in this season on the real life struggles, I am no stranger to financial insecurity as a yoga teacher.
how i got started teaching yoga
When I first started teaching, I worked a full-time job, traveling around the country. I provided training and development to different corporations, and yoga was something that I did on the side for myself to help manage my stress and anxiety.
I fell in love with yoga and decided that I wanted to start teaching. I had no desire to give up my full-time job, so it was something that I did on the side, maybe teaching once or twice a month.
It was a way to get my membership for free. It was a way to feel like I was giving back, and it was a way to experience my passion in a different way. I never thought about the money that I was getting paid for it because it wasn’t something that was necessary for me.
Fast forward a couple of years when I get laid off from my full-time training and development job. My spouse at the time recommended making yoga a full time career. Since I was disillusioned with working full-time in the corporate world, and I loved yoga, it seemed like the perfect solution.
I’ll share more of my story later in the episode.
top reason for financial insecurity
Let’s talk about some of those top reasons why yoga teachers struggle with financial insecurity. At a yoga studio, you’re dependent on the studio and whatever they decide to pay their teachers.
In the North Texas area, if you, as a yoga teacher, are averaging $50 a class, that’s considered pretty good. However, $50 a class does not make a livable wage. When you break it down based on how many hours that $50 has to cover, it’s not such a great wage after all.
At $50 a class, you’re going to have to teach an awful lot of yoga classes. And I can tell you from experience, that is the fastest way to burnout and significantly impacting your mental health.
Additionally, if you’re working for a yoga studio, you’re [probably] working as a contractor. Therefore, you’re not getting any benefits or overtime. Some studios pay a flat per class rate. Some studios pay based on how many people are on the floor.
When you take that model into consideration, and all of the ups and downs and fluctuations that we have throughout the year. Holidays are always a slump in yoga classes. Summers tend to slump as well because people want to be outside rather than inside a studio.
So not only are they low paid with no benefits, they have to deal with the seasonal ups and downs.
Teaching Yoga for Free (not!)
Another reason why financial insecurity is a common problem is because there seems to be this idea that if you’re teaching yoga, you should do it for free, or you should do it for a deep discount.
And if you’re an individual who’s dealing with imposter syndrome, like we talked about in the previous episode, you then you might actually consider teaching for free or teaching for a discount because you want to get your name out there. You want to start building your own following.
All valid. All legitimate.
However, when you start teaching for free, and you start teaching for discounted rates, that tends to build the expectation that you will continue to teach for free and teach at a deep discount.
While I have been fortunate to not experience this myself, I know that there are unscrupulous studios and yoga studio owners out there who are taking advantage of yoga teachers. Because we love it so much. We just wanna teach. We just wanna be on the floor. And unfortunately, yoga studio owners can take advantage of that.
If you interview with a yoga studio who just doesn’t seem to be able to keep yoga teachers, or they’re constantly looking for new ones, that’s probably a red flag that they churn and burn their yoga teachers.
Mindset Shifts around money
Let’s talk about mindset shifts when it comes to teaching yoga. When I talk about mindset shifts, I’m actually not talking about a yoga teacher putting something on her vision board, or practicing affirmations so that she can manifest more teaching jobs.
When I talk about mindset shifts, I mean as an industry.
Our mindset needs to shift away from this idea of a yoga teacher being a starving artist. That because it’s yoga, a yoga teacher shouldn’t be expected to earn a livable wage.
If you take into consideration the amount of money that most yoga teachers invest in themselves to be a quality yoga teacher, if they’re just teaching yoga classes alone, they will have to work for years to make back what they have spent in their education.
Another mindset shift that needs to happen is around the idea that that money is bad. Or if you’re a yoga teacher and you do want to earn money, that that makes you less yogic than another teacher who is doing it for the love of it.
No shade against any yoga teacher who’s teaching voluntarily and they don’t need to earn money from it. There are just as many yoga teachers out there who would love for this to be their full-time job, but it can only be a full-time job if they earn the money to support them.
Yoga Hobby or Yoga Career
That segues perfectly into talking about practical strategies for overcoming financial insecurity.
In yoga teacher training, the majority of the time was spent teaching the skills that they would need to teach yoga as well as giving them an environment in which they could grow comfortable, and expand their confidence.
But the last part of teacher training, I always spent talking to them about “what do you want to do with yoga when you are finished with yoga teacher training?”
There was always someone in class who wanted to do it as a hobby. They were working full-time or they were a stay at home mom. Their opportunity to go out and teach yoga was for them and adult time. They weren’t really too concerned about how much money they would make teaching yoga on the side.
The majority of the yoga teachers, they were like, I would really love to figure out a way to make money at this. Because maybe they were not happy in their job. Maybe they’re not happy in their marriage and they’re making their escape plan.
Overcoming Financial Insecurity
The number one piece of advice I always give my yoga teachers is: if you want to make money as a yoga teacher you will need to focus on something besides teaching at a yoga studio.
You want to look into private lessons. Look at offering workshops, retreats, online classes, or working in a corporate environment. They’re all going to offer better pay and allow you to have more control over what you make.
You can also look at passive [income] options. Maybe you start a YouTube channel or a membership where all of your classes are online and people pay a monthly fee in order to access all of those classes.
Now, talking about each one of those options would be an episode of their own, but those are just some top ones to think about. Go out and research if you haven’t already looked into those options.
The other piece of advice that I give yoga teachers for being able to create financial stability is to not only look at different ways in which you can control the amount that you’re making, but to diversify. Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.
Maybe you offer a couple of workshops a month, and then once a quarter or every six months, you offer a retreat. While at the same time, you’ve got your YouTube channel that is generating a monthly membership for you.
From Yoga Classes to Teacher Training
Earlier, I was talking about how I got started teaching yoga—at a studio while I had a full-time job. Then I got laid off and looked into turning my passion into a career.
So I started teaching classes at a local community center. I got to control how much I charged and I got to control how many people came. Over time I built up that following until I had enough people to justify opening up a yoga studio.
That came with its own fair share of financial struggles.
I found that I was still teaching a ton of classes and I was still burning myself out. That’s when I started to look at offering workshops. I realized that for the effort and the time and my return on investment that workshops made more money than teaching the yoga classes did.
Because I was teaching so many classes, I realized I needed more teachers and that was how my yoga teacher training program was born.
When I offered that first yoga teacher training session, I didn’t know what to expect. But I was pleasantly surprised when five people signed up. That was really, for me, what turned the tide. I went from feeling like I was struggling all the time, to finally making ends meet.
Not only was I making more money, but I was enjoying my time more. I really found what married all my passions together. Yoga teacher training was the natural progression for me, and I was able to do that for many, many years. I did other things as well.
Pivot, Pivot, Pivot
By the way, I forgot to mention, I had sold my yoga studio. I realized that that was just not for me. It was not something that I loved doing. When I sold my yoga studio, it allowed me to focus more on the yoga teacher training, which is what I absolutely loved doing.
Now 20 years later, ironically, I’ve come full circle. I have gone back to working full-time and now yoga is something that I do on the side. I [focus] more at those passive avenues of generating income like books, planners, and sequences. I still offer yoga teacher training, but it’s now all online.
I found that in this stage of my life, this is what is working for me. This is what decreases my stress and anxiety, and eases up my mental load. That’s really important to keep in mind when we talk about financial insecurity for yoga teachers.
It’s okay if you start teaching yoga and realize the things that you need to do to make money are not what you want to do. (I don’t mean that in a negative way or you’re having to manipulate or anything.)
You are allowed to try something, and if it doesn’t work, or you don’t like it, you’re allowed to change your mind. If you started teaching yoga, and you’re like, I really want to do this, but you’ve been teaching for just a little bit and you decide, you know, maybe this really isn’t what I wanna do. I want yoga to stay just a passion project for me. You are allowed to do that.
Wrap Up for Financial Insecurity
Life changes, life evolves, and you need to be aware enough, brave enough, and strong enough to know when you need to pivot and do something different. Because when you can take care of your financial health, that’s going to help you take care of your mental health.
For me, that’s always the number one [goal] that I want to make sure you’re doing is that you’re taking care of your mental health so that you can help others take care of theirs.
Whether you’re just starting, not making a lot of money, or you are cranking it out, living your best life, teaching yoga, traveling the world, make sure to check out all the resources I have available to you from free all the way to paid.
