Swimming in 31 years of notebooks from my studies of yoga. (And there are a handful missing in this picture!) 📙📘📖📕📗📓📒
In this age of social media, sweaty yoga workouts, and quick rises to fame in the yoga world, people forget that studying yoga is physical, yes, but it's also academic and it takes TIME.
There is an infinite body of knowledge to tap - so much to learn, and so much to know. No one person could ever imbibe it all!
Studying yoga was never meant to be easy. It takes perseverance, dedication, and devotion. There is no such thing as overnight success yet the benefits are worth your efforts tenfold!
In 1999 Molly Fox, a prominent fitness and yoga teacher invited me to co-lead my very first yoga teacher training in Brooklyn, NY. I was a new teacher, but Molly somehow had faith in me and took me on to help lead her group.
In the years that followed I met a dear student, Anne Libby, who took part in one of my trainings. She was well versed in business and we often mused about the sometimes flakey and unprofessional reputation of yoga teachers, and other yoga world issues.
We were trying to figure out why Anne and her fellow graduates were having such a hard time finding time slots to teach yoga. I shared that shortly after I started teaching, I had to turn down offers – so, we wondered, why was it that in only 3 years time it had become so challenging for new teachers?
Anne astutely pointed out that this new problem was because of a dearth of yoga teachers in the city caused by the increased popularity of yoga teacher trainings.
It never occurred to me that I and countless other trainers were contributing to the overall ecology of New York yoga by effectively “birthing” new teachers into the community through our trainings.
Instinctively, I had already stopped offering large teacher trainings in favor of Immersions, and eventually began offering teacher training in much smaller groups. And yet, in that moment sitting with Anne, I knew that I needed to write a book that would help yoga teachers thrive in a crowded market and help them to take the yoga profession more seriously.
Part of writing this book was guilt, since I seemed to be in the right place at the right time, and as a result, never had a tough time finding work. But my heart broke for my students when they graduated and couldn’t make ends meet!
And even though I do not have kids of my own, the teachers I’ve trained have always been my hatch, so to speak, and therefore, like a mother, I felt responsible and protective. So I went about studying business and marketing as diligently as I had studied yoga philosophy and applied it to my own career, until one day I felt ready to share what I’d integrated with others.
With the expertise and help of my partner, Taro Smith, PhD, I shared this body of knowledge as an online course in 2010, called 90 Minutes to Change the World, which is still available today.
The course became a game changer for yoga teachers as it turned out! Our graduates have gone on to grow their classes by 42%, publish books, teach at major events, and increase their earnings dramatically.
It was the course that became the fodder for the book, and the rest is history!
If you teach yoga or are thinking about teaching yoga, we hope this book helps nourish your career, and makes it possible for you to serve and give back wholeheartedly to others through yoga.
