Oh Right, You Think I Just Teach Stretching.

So I’ve gotta tell you about this business course I just took.

Not only was it excellent, but it reminded me of something I sometimes forget.  Everyone thinks I just teach stretching.

I am going to admit something that you probably already guessed.  I mostly hang out with yoga people, and it has been that way for something like 20 years.  Firstly, I am going to justify my decision to know mostly yoga people by telling you that I am just really into yoga.  I like it.  I like how it impacted my life, how it makes my brain focus more easily, how it helps me see the beauty in life and people, and my dedicated practice allows me to build the skills that make the rest of my life better.   Not always easier (see my previous blog on Costco–sometimes yoga makes you only able to choose things that align with who you really are), but always better.

As a result of my many tens of thousands of hours of experience and skill in teaching yoga, with double that many hours in practice, as well as seeing clients as a yoga therapist for at least 1000 hours, I have a very strict “I do not work for free” policy.

But I did a few weeks ago.  I worked for 60 seconds during the portion of my business course where everyone enrolled in the course was pitching their growth strategies for their businesses–something we had been working towards for 13ish weeks.  

Our pitches were only three minutes long, and as a lot of us in the yoga space know, three minutes is not a lot of time to get anything accomplished in public speaking, and some 25ish people were pitching.  My small group of five was the last group to present, and I quickly spotted ten people in that folks’ nervous systems were going to need a serious reset if their brains were going to listen attentively to the cool shit our group was presenting.  

[Think things like a focus on being a media group for non-profits, starting new restaurants, expanding a cool campground, launching a line of women’s wellness supplements that are backed by science, and for me, I pitched you all–more later on that.] 

I really wanted everyone to be able to listen to our pitches, and the good news is that I have spent 20+ years teaching people how to reset their nervous systems.  “Give me one minute”, I said to the facilitators.  “I will reset the whole room”.  

Here is where the story gets interesting.

Because I don’t often hang out with people who aren’t in the yoga space, I sometimes forget that everyone thinks we just teach stretching.  

I could see it in the eyes of the folks I was talking to–just a flicker of a moment where they thought “is she going to give us a stretch break?”. 

Of course not, with 60 seconds we only have enough time for a skillful breath or three, but I got the opportunity to see the whole room co-regulate together, soften their bodies a bit, and reset their brains so that my very rowdy group could present our business pitches.  

That moment, though, the moment of asking before I got to take the proverbial stage and do what I have been trained to do for decades has stuck with me.

Everyone thinks we just teach stretching.  

And it is totally our own fault.

Now this is a large topic–the one of how we made yoga popular, especially in the teens of this century, when yoga was experiencing a meteoric rise due to the popularity of stars like Madonna engaging in the practice. Simultaneously, the mainstreaming of our very comfortable, moveable, and popular yoga pants in public consciousness meant people kind of understood what we do..

But in those years, we started selling yoga as primarily a movement practice.  We all know it, and if you were there, you are as accountable as I and anyone else for it.  

I have said in the past that I don’t blame our industry powers that be for this turn of events, I don’t think that anyone who was participating in yoga in the 90s had any idea what would happen for us in the 2010s.  No other movement practice rocketed into popularity like us, with the exception of maybe something like Jazzercise or, for a hot second, TaiBo.  

I know you hate that I compared us to Jazzercise.  But face it, most of the public sees us as a “chilled out” or “bendier” version of it.  And we let them.

Do you remember in the late 2010s when there were campaigns on social media to show the other, more internal aspects of yoga online?  The intention was to showcase to the world that we aren’t just stretching. It didn’t really work.  In 2020, COVID hit, we burned as an industry, and now most of us just want to get back to the “good ol’ days” of the 2010s, where it was easy to make money and yoga was the popular thing to do. 

Right now, in 2025, what yoga desperately needs is a marketing manager.  If only there were major organizations that took dues that could help us with that project.  Because this kind of experience I had shouldn’t be our reality anymore.  

While it is true, I don’t have to really explain what yoga is, which is something I did have to do when I first started teaching in the early 2000s–nobody looks at us as anything but skilled stretching.  

Now, everyone knows what yoga is, but not what yoga actually is.  And for some reason, we are too proud to correct them.

There could be a couple of reasons for this.  I had a friend and colleague on the podcast a while back, Tawnia Converse, who stated so beautifully that folks who teach “fitness yoga” often plant seeds that those of us who teach the more internal aspects of yoga get to harvest.  It is absolutely true that I have had several dozen students over the years come to see me after spending time with more athletic teachers, only to say, “I know I love yoga, but I want to know ‘more’”.  In fact, one could argue–I could argue- that this is the most effective marketing funnel our teacher trainings have.  The ethics of this are up for discussion on a later blog, but suffice it to say those of us who teach philosophy, pranayama, and contemplative practices often benefit from the ‘top of funnel’ marketing services that those fit-fluencers provide.

But also, I think a lot of us don’t know how to talk about the rest of the yoga pool without sounding either smug or high.  I will definitely include myself in this category, mid 2010s Rebecca was a right asshole about being a person who taught “real” yoga, while everyone else taught calisthenics.  And as per my typical self, I wasn’t quiet about it.  I do think that attitude of self-righteousness that I had definitely led to two very different outcomes–one good, one bad.  

A good outcome was that when I opened my studio, a lot of the bullshit yoga teachers didn’t want to have anything to do with me.  But also, as I look back, I think I could also have built a softer place for yoga pros in my area to land.  I could have been kinder to folks who weren’t even taught the language to understand why yoga made them feel good.  To this day, it breaks my heart to hear that the vast majority of people who graduate yoga teacher training programs neither know how yoga actually works nor have ever taught even one singular one-hour class.  That shit is wild to me.  And directly contributes to why nobody knows what we do.

But this, my dear readers, is a solvable problem.  

{Should I start talking to y’all like we are in Bridgerton?  Yes, obviously.]

As I have said countless times online, on air, and in writing, nobody is coming to help us.  Our organizations cannot, at this point, even pretend like they care about the outcomes of the professionals.  

[I know, your friend _____ is a part of ____ organization, and they assure you they are working on making it better.  Let me hold your hands when I say this.  They aren’t.  There is nothing in our current system that would reward those folks who run our orgs to change.  They are winning.  We are in poverty.  Someone should care, but it isn’t gonna be them.  Love you.  Your hands are soft.  What moisturizer do you use?]

But we can start being public about what we do.  In clear and easy terms.  We can slide in front of a room of 25 people who need a nervous system reset and do a 1-minute breathwork exercise with them that changes the energy of everyone.  

We can talk about it online.

We can actually try to be popular and gain attention from the general public.  Not for any other reason than we are going to need a lot of eyes on us in order to shift the conscious awareness of said public.  

Because remember, they all think we just teach stretching.  And we know we offer so much more.

Need a professional development reset this summer?  Snag my free challenge course here.  And email me at rebecca@workinginyoga.com to tell me whatcha think.  xx, R