My origin story. As a yoga therapist, owner, and eventually trainer.

So this week I asked people in my FB group what their origin story is for why they became yoga therapists, yoga studio owners, or yoga teacher trainers.

I think that we have this idea that our stories are supposed to be deeply yoga centered. You know, the “yoga changed my life, so I want to help change other people’s lives…” or some such story. And any other reason someone may have had to become a ‘yoga <anything>’ is somehow not “yogic” enough. [btw. “yogic” is a term I never use in sincerity. Talk about your weaponized terms…]

So here is my story. May it free you all to be whomever you want in this industry. I don’t care how you got here; I care that you are doing good work and honoring our traditions and communities.

I am an incredibly reluctant yoga teacher. I was a sincere and dedicated practitioner for years, and then two things happened almost at once. My then teacher came up to me and said, “You should do the teacher training” (hooooooow early 2000s), and a friend’s spouse asked me to teach a class at their business. And I said no to both. Like… immediately.

That same friend’s spouse was quite persistent and leveraged the relationship I had with their significant other and said, “It is only for 6 weeks!”, so I relented. There is a lot I will do for a friend if I like them well enough.

Six weeks later, that class asked me to continue, and I figured I should take the advice of that teacher and do a training.  So I was in class 3 of her first-in-our-area yoga teacher training.  And I had an advantage, I got to practice all the new skills I was learning with my students, who were along for the ride.  

After a few years of teaching as a hobby (like so many of us), I had a child, and my then-husband almost immediately left our relationship to pursue another.  This left me with a baby, the desire to keep the house we were living in, and the need to have a job that was flexible enough that I could do it whenever I had childcare, which was about 8 hours a week.  The only skills I had up to that point as an adult were as a professional fundraiser for a national non-profit, waiting tables, and…you guessed it…teaching yoga.  

So I hustled.  I built a class roster, taught as many as 18 classes a week at one point when my son hit school times, and built a business.

Why then, did I train to be a yoga therapist?  That, surely, was rooted in a deep dedication to yoga, right?

Nope, this isn’t that kind of take. The reason wasn’t some incredibly yoga-inspired deep calling.  In fact, if yoga is my calling (it probably is, let’s admit this at this point), I have never once willingly picked up the phone.  Yoga therapy was no exception.

I became a yoga therapist because I wanted to run books the way my massage therapist friends did, and that felt like a way I could build a sustainable career.  So I turned to the internet to search for my favorite yoga teacher in the industry at the time (2009), and that showed me she was on the training staff for two yoga therapy schools. That was interesting. I hadn’t heard of yoga therapy, but it seemed like a professional path forward. I bet on myself to build something for my family, and chose the yoga therapy program that I could go to while being a single mom, and became a yoga therapist.

Sorta.  

Cuz at the time, yoga therapy was barely a thing.  

Let’s be honest, yoga therapy is barely a thing now, but at that time, there was no organization claiming they held the keys to the kingdom of a professional yoga therapy practice.  We were all on our own, and we knew it.  

Almost a decade passed after that point before I opened my studio.  While I would love to say that I opened the studio because I felt called to provide a certain yoga experience to the community I lived in, the fact that I did that, that I built an accessible and restorative-forward yoga studio, was a happy accident.  

I needed a place to see yoga therapy clients, and I wanted to build a community of teachers who wanted to talk about yoga, especially yoga philosophy, as much as I did.  I wanted a place to work where I didn’t feel restricted to teach what was expected, but a place where I could explore the connections between our lives and our yoga more fully.  With a community of participants that didn’t care how weird it got. 

And also, let’s be fully transparent, I also believed that I could do it better than I had seen other people do it.  (What an ego statement, I know. I do know better now.)  

So in 2019, six months before COVID hit the planet, I opened my studio.  And while I had been a special guest star in so many YTTs up until that point, I had never run one myself.  In fact, running a 200-hour teacher training was something I always said I would not do.  I did run a 300-hour YTT during COVID, but had not really considered coming in at the entry level training area.

Enter a lovely and dedicated student to the studio who said to me, “I want to train, and I want it to be with you.  So you should do some deep soul-searching and see if that is what you want to do.”  Yes, he did say “deep soul-searching” while looking me dead-ass in the face.

And I agreed. 

Fast forward, one of those trainees bought my studio this year so she can build her own version of a yoga dream business, and I couldn’t be more thrilled.

And now I am here, behind a laptop, coming back to those days in 2015 and 2016 when I knew I felt lonely as a professional, wanted people to talk to, and knew deeply that yoga folks were just simply “my people”.  

We are messy as hell.  Nobody comes to yoga because life is going right.  

We are sometimes deeply problematic.  But our willingness to learn and shift is something I admire about us.  We can, and do, take a note.  

We run from discomfort, like literally all humans, and sometimes openly embrace our own suffering because of it.  However, we are so lucky to have the language to talk about that among ourselves, and use the tools yoga has offered us to shift and lean in to difficult discussions.  

So I am here.  Behind a laptop, building a thing for us.  

A podcast, a trade magazine, and another 2027 something or two.  

The reluctant yoga pro.  The dedicated co-worker.  The practitioner of a practice that didn’t come from where I am from, doesn’t belong to me, and changed (and saved) my life.  

What ever path you got here on is fine.  I am not gonna judge.  

What we need now is less “my way is best” and more “we all are in this together”.  

Cuz I am with you.  Always have been, always will be.

xx,

R