The White Rabbit, A.K.A. We’re Already Late

This episode opens a new series — one that’s a little different from the others. Less “here’s a number nobody told you” and more “here’s the shape of the thing we’re all standing inside.”

The premise: the yoga industry isn’t approaching a turning point. It already turned. Most of what this series will describe over the coming weeks has already happened — it’s just not been named out loud, in order, in one place.

This episode sets the frame and names the urgency without pretending to have all the answers yet. If you’ve had the feeling that something shifted and nobody sent the memo, this is that memo.

Read More
Updated Conversation — Yoga's Changing Landscape, Aging Teachers & the Case for Regulation With Amara Miller

Amara Miller is back, and this updated conversation goes to some places the original didn't. The yoga industry is contracting — fewer participants, a flooded market, and more companies chasing a shrinking pool of practitioners. Amara and Rebecca talk honestly about what that means for the profession, including the regulatory conversation the industry has been reluctant to have and why the libertarian anti-regulation instincts of the 2010s may be genuinely outdated in the current landscape. They also get into something Rebecca hadn't fully considered before this conversation: the yoga teachers and lineage holders who carry the deepest knowledge of this tradition are aging, and the professional associations haven't built any meaningful infrastructure to preserve that wisdom before it walks out the door. It's a conversation about what the industry is at risk of losing — and whether we're organized enough to do anything about it before it's too late.

Read More
The Math Nobody Does: The Retirement Math

Most yoga professionals have no employer contributing to their retirement. No pension. No automatic savings. Whatever gets built for the future is built entirely through individual planning, out of an already stretched income, in a profession that culturally treats financial planning as spiritually suspect. In this episode we do the retirement math — what you actually need to save monthly at different ages to retire at sixty-five, what that number looks like against average yoga professional income, and why starting now matters more than starting right.

Read More
Updated Conversation — Teacher Training, Online Yoga & Studio Owner Skills With Leslie Pearlman

Leslie Pearlman is back, and this update to their 2024 conversation covers even more ground than the original. Rebecca and Leslie dig into online and hybrid teaching not as a lesser alternative to in-person but as a genuinely distinct skillset that requires its own curriculum — one most YTTs still aren't providing. They get into the internal regulation work required to teach well in any format, and the largely unexamined tendency to moralize the absence of in-room co-regulation as an automatic loss. They also tackle one of Rebecca's long-running preoccupations: the difference between professional training and personal development, and why the yoga industry needs to get honest about which one it's actually offering. And they go somewhere most conversations don't — into the urgent need for yoga teacher trainer training and studio owner training, including the relational dimension of what it means to be for a community without being of it. Rich, honest, and covers a lot of ground in fifty minutes.

Read More
The Math Nobody Does: The Online Business Math

The online yoga business is sold as the answer to everything — unlimited reach, passive income, freedom from the studio model. The reality has a specific math that most of the people selling online business courses are not showing you. In this episode we build the honest financial picture of what it costs to build an online yoga offering — in time, money, and the long runway before it generates meaningful income — so you can make decisions about digital offerings based on what is actually true.

Read More
Confidence, Pricing & Visual Representation in Yoga — With Nana Amoako-Anin (Part 2)

Part 2 of this conversation with Nana Amoako-Anin goes somewhere a little more personal — and just as essential. Rebecca and Nana talk about the confidence it takes to charge what your work is actually worth, and why pricing remains such a persistent struggle for yoga professionals. They get into consumer choice — the fact that the industry has never given students a real way to evaluate or choose a good teacher — and the visual culture problem baked into yoga marketing, where the internet still defaults to one narrow, unrepresentative image of who practices. They also touch on AI's growing role in marketing and what it means to stay genuinely uncomfortable while your teaching and business evolve. This one feels like listening in on two people becoming real friends, which, honestly, it is.

Read More
The Math Nobody Does: The Retreat Math

Running a retreat looks like a financial opportunity. Fill twelve spots at $1,500 each and you have $18,000 in revenue for a long weekend. The math seems obvious. Until you look at the actual costs. In this episode we build the real financial picture of a yoga retreat — venue deposits, per-person minimums, marketing costs, payment processing, and the thin margins that result. This episode is for every yoga professional who has run a retreat and wondered where the money went, or who is considering their first retreat and wants to go in with accurate expectations.

Read More
Capital, Trauma-Informed Practice & a Cautionary Tale — With Nana Amoako-Anin (Part 1)

Nana Amoako-Anin has lived a genuinely international life — including a stint as a prosecuting attorney in Manhattan — before finding her way into yoga and opening her own studio in Ghana. In Part 1 of this conversation, she and Rebecca get into something the yoga industry rarely names directly: access to capital, and what it means for the future of this work. They also unpack the term "trauma-informed," questioning whether academic language is actually serving the people it's meant to help, and look honestly at how the US wellness industry burned hot and fast in the 2010s, organized itself around deep individualism, and ultimately failed to build infrastructure for its own workers. It's a candid look at what other parts of the world might do differently — and why.

Read More
The Math Nobody Does: The Studio Job Math

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 More
Yoga Philosophy, Virtue Ethics & Why Dissatisfaction Is the Beginning — A Revisited Conversation With Dr. Shyam Ranganathan

Some 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 More
The Math Nobody Does: The Continuing Education Math

Yoga 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 More
Perfectionism, Activism & White Supremacy Culture in Yoga — A Revisited Conversation With Colice Sanders

This 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 More
The Math Nobody Does: The Yoga Therapy Credential Math

The 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 More
How We Built the Yoga Organizations We Have — A Revisited Conversation With Amara Miller

If 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 More
The Math Nobody Does: The Going Independent Math

Going 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.

 

Read More
A Conversation Worth Revisiting — Yoga Teacher Training Best Practices With Leslie Pearlman

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 More
The Math Nobody Does: The Studio Owner Math

Yoga 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 More
What We Got Right — And What's Coming Next: The 2026 Yoga Industry Forecast

Six 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 More
The Math Nobody Does: The 200-Hour Training Math

Everyone 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 More
Building Something That Has Never Been Built Before: Introducing Inside Yoga Magazine, Issue 1

Issue 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 More