Inside Yoga Magazine Issue 2 — The Accountability Issue

Accountability is one of the most overused and underdelivered words in the yoga industry. A soft-focus apology post is not accountability. A teacher quietly pulled from the schedule with no explanation is not accountability. Issue 2 of Inside Yoga Magazine — The Accountability Issue — is built around one argument: that accountability in yoga is performed rather than practiced, and the public has noticed. In this solo episode, Rebecca walks through what's inside. Magnolia Zuniga's unflinching piece on yoga's predator problem and the deflection tactics the community reaches for every time. Nana Amoako-Anin bringing a Truth and Reconciliation framework to the question of what repair actually requires. The Real Hours Project data sitting alongside parallel research from Singapore, converging on the same structural problem from opposite sides of the world. The grievance processes at Yoga Alliance and IAYT examined honestly for what they produce. And Rebecca's own most personal writing yet — four myths yoga professionals carry, and what each one costs. The issue closes with a story about lying to a man in a grocery store in 2013, and what it took to figure out why. This is what the magazine is for.

Evergreen Courses, Learning Outcomes & Building an Online Yoga Business — With Summer Huntington

Most online yoga studios are built like a sandbox — open-ended, come-when-you-can, no clear progression. Summer Huntington thinks there's a better way. In week 2 of the online teaching series, she joins Rebecca to talk about learning outcomes — identifying what students are actually working toward and building material that feeds directly into that — and why that framework changes everything about how you design an online offering. They also get into the case for having one clear offer instead of many, why small email lists consistently outperform large ones, the underrated market for private and individualized online experiences, and what it actually means to build a body of work rather than just a content library. Plus: what-to-expect emails, office hours, and why getting comfortable on camera is a skill worth developing even if the tech still intimidates you.

Teaching Yoga Online With Intention & Community — With Nyk Danu

Rebecca doesn't say this lightly: this is one of those conversations where she found herself thinking she was talking to someone who is genuinely a better teacher than her. Nyk Danu has developed such a nuanced, intentional approach to teaching yoga online that this episode is practically a masterclass. She and Rebecca kick off a five-episode series on online yoga teaching by getting into what most people get wrong — the assumption that the relational depth of in-person teaching can't be replicated online. Nyk has built a warm, community-driven online teaching practice that works precisely because none of it is accidental. They cover how she creates a sense of home on Zoom, the cameras-on vs. cameras-off debate, why semesters make sense as a teaching model, hybrid class structures, niching as a differentiator in a crowded online space, and some genuinely practical advice for anyone who has ever recorded for another studio's platform. If you teach online or want to, start here.

Studio Ownership, Heartbreak & the Right to Evolve — With Jessica Patterson (Part 2)

This is the conversation Rebecca wishes she could have had when she owned her studio. In Part 2 of this conversation with Jessica Patterson, they move from theory into the deeply personal territory of what it actually costs to own a yoga studio — and why the industry has made studio owners into villains when many of them started this work trying to build a sanctuary. Jessica and Rebecca talk about the shift in power dynamics that comes with ownership and the isolation it creates, the heartbreak of telling a community you've evolved when they've frozen you in a particular moment in time, and the difference between self-agency and self-determination in an economic climate that nobody chose. They also get into the latent shame that comes with business difficulty, why blaming individual owners for systemic problems is both unfair and counterproductive, and the simple but radical truth that you don't have to keep doing the things you're good at. One of Rebecca's favorite conversations on the podcast. It earns that.

Purity Culture, Authentic Yoga & Which Bodies Come to Matter — With Jessica Patterson (Part 1)

Jessica Patterson is doing something rare — she's working through a PhD in religious studies focused on yoga and yoga bodies while remaining fully embedded in the yoga professional world as a teacher, studio owner, and trainer. In Part 1 of this two-part conversation, she and Rebecca get into the ideas that don't get enough airtime in the industry: which bodies come to matter in yoga spaces, how proximity to authenticity functions as a marketing strategy, and the purity culture that quietly shapes how yoga professionals judge each other and themselves. They talk about Orientalism — the idea that the East is pure and the West corrupt — and why that framing isn't just intellectually lazy, it's actively harmful to the profession. They get into the difference between training yoga teachers and training yoga performers, the franchising of bodies and teaching styles, and the mob mentality that can emerge when cultural appropriation anxiety meets social media. This one is dense, honest, and worth every minute.

Yoga Therapy Clients, Referrals & the Studio Owner Experience — With Maile Wicklander

There's a real and underexplored difference between the people who walk into a general yoga class and the people who seek out a certified yoga therapist — and if you're trying to fill your yoga therapy practice, that distinction matters enormously. Maile Wicklander, longtime yoga studio owner and recent yoga therapy graduate, joins Rebecca to work through what that difference actually looks like in practice. They get into referral strategy, including Maile's straightforward approach to getting the right clients through the door, the particular challenge of psychotherapist referrals, and why handouts and connections to adjacent fields are still some of the most underrated tools in a yoga therapist's toolkit. They also talk about what's missing in the yoga professional community space, why boundaries inside collective networking groups make them more useful rather than less, and what studio owners need that nobody's really providing. A practical, grounded conversation for yoga therapists building or expanding a practice.

How to Build a Local Yoga Professional Network

Most yoga teachers can name two or three colleagues they'd actually call if something went sideways. Not people they follow, not someone from a training years ago — people they could actually call. In a profession that runs on referral and reputation, that's not a personality problem. It's a structural one. In this solo episode, Rebecca walks through five stages of building a real local yoga professional network — getting honest about what you're actually building, finding your first five people, planning a low-stakes first gathering, setting ground rules that will hold when it gets real, and keeping the thing alive past the fourth meeting, which is where these groups almost always fall apart. This episode comes with a free companion checklist in the show notes. No email wall. Just the thing you need to actually start.

Scripts, Responsive Teaching & Self-Paced Courses — With Deb Flashenberg

This is the kind of conversation Rebecca wants to do more of — two people parsing out the nuance of how we actually do this work, in real time. Deb Flashenberg is back, and this time she and Rebecca get nerdy about scripts, responsive teaching, and what it really means to be present with the people in the room. They talk about why giving teachers a framework serves them better than handing them a script, what gets lost when AI writes your sequences, and the particular challenge of self-paced courses that have no relational feedback loop built in. They also get into the reps — the honest reality that there is no shortcut to learning to teach, and that teacher training exists precisely to give people a safe place to mess up and figure it out. If you've ever wondered whether scripts are a crutch or a tool, or how to develop the skill of actually seeing your students, this one is for you.

IAYT's 990s, AI Tools & Rethinking How Clients Find Us — With Kellie Adkins

Kellie Adkins did her homework — including a close look at the IAYT's 990s — and she brings the receipts. In this conversation with Rebecca, they get into the financial reality behind the C-IAYT credential: what yoga therapists are actually earning (around $10K a year, against the cost of a yoga therapy degree), why significant numbers of credentialed yoga therapists are choosing not to renew, and what the IAYT's own financial losses over recent years say about the organization's trajectory. They also talk about the structural problem at the root of all of it — an industry that trained far more people than it ever built jobs for, and the obligation legacy professionals have to charge enough that entry-level yoga therapy can actually be a livable wage. Kellie also brings something genuinely useful to the conversation: a working accountability model built around DEIA, lineage, and codes of conduct with real removal processes — and hire.yoga, her platform designed to connect yoga therapists with actual employment opportunities. Plus a conversation about AI tools and how yoga professionals can use them well.

What Is the American Yoga Council & What Does It Do? — With Andrew Tanner

A lot of you have had questions about the American Yoga Council — what it is, what it does, and whether it's worth your attention. So Rebecca went straight to the source. AYC founder and CEO Andrew Tanner joins the podcast for a straightforward conversation about what the organization is building and why: certification vs. registry, accountability reporting, access to data, retirement funds, and what it means to advocate for yoga professionals at an institutional level. Rebecca isn't doing gotcha journalism here — the goal is to give you the information you need to make your own call. She also gets into something she's been developing for the magazine: a theory about why yoga professionals are so cynical about organizations in the first place, rooted in counter-culture identity, 2010s individualism, and the specific kind of betrayal that comes from entering an industry you believed would be different. This is a conversation about whether institutions can actually serve us — and what it would take to find out.

Insurance, Retirement & Protecting Your Future — With Felicia Laab

Rebecca has a name for this kind of content: boring. And she means it as a compliment. The boring stuff — insurance, disability coverage, retirement planning, banking relationships — is exactly what protects you when something very non-boring happens. Financial planner Felicia Laab joins the podcast to talk about what yoga professionals are consistently leaving on the table when it comes to protecting themselves and their futures. They get into disability insurance specifically, which most yoga teachers never think about until their body has a bad year and suddenly it's all they're thinking about. They talk retirement — how to stop working before you die, as Rebecca puts it — and what it looks like to start building real financial infrastructure when your income has never been predictable. This is also the conversation that connects directly to what major trade organizations like Yoga Alliance could be doing for their members and aren't. Worth every minute.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mapping the Real Landscape of Yoga Teaching Today — With Alexia Walker

There's a real and growing gap between yoga teachers who built their careers in the 2010s and those trying to build one now — and we're not talking about it enough.

Alexia Walker, a yoga teacher working in Michigan, joins Rebecca for an unfiltered conversation about what the current landscape actually looks like.

They get into the devaluing effect of free offerings, why the people who find you through free content rarely become paying students, how the yoga world built a training system that rewards wealth and travel over actual teaching skill, and what it means to build a truly bespoke career when no two paths look the same. They also touch on transferable skills, community care as a framework for service, and the harm that gets quietly replicated when we don't pay attention to the patterns we're inheriting. This is the conversation about where yoga is right now — not where it was ten years ago.