The Mentor Sessions

Teaching yoga, and maybe especially teaching private clients is, to be candid, an unstable way to make a living. But I have done it successfully for twenty years, so it can be done! 

I’m in a season in my life where I have limited spots available to teach, but financially I need every single one of those spots filled every week. I have about ten standing private clients and then I have at least five spots ...

Anytime I connect with a new-ish yoga teacher I end up giving a lot of the same advice, so I collected all of it in one place, right here in today’s podcast episode! Whether you are a new teacher or an experienced one in a phase of rebuilding (haven’t we all been rebuilding lately??) this episode has all my best pearls of wisdom, hard won over the last twenty years of full-time yoga teaching!

In this episo...

You all know that I am only minimally interested in business-- I’d much rather talk about the actual craft of teaching yoga. But we do need to make money, and if we have chosen yoga teaching as our job, we need to be SMART about business because it is not the easiest way to make a living!

Having some smart foundational systems in place can make a huge difference in your yoga teaching career path, and today...

More than ever our work as yoga teachers is challenging and important.

We don’t want to be like this lady, right? Trying to sell people something they don’t need while their house burns down? People need yoga, but they need the kind of yoga that supports awareness, connection and care (which could mean lots of different things for different students and teachers!). People do not need the kind of yoga that ...

You don’t me to tell you that the world as we know it is burning to the ground. This makes teaching yoga hard, important and strange. A few episodes back I answered the question, “Should we talk about current events in our yoga classes?” By essentially saying, “maybe… but most likely YES.” In that episode I talked about how important it was to have an understanding and point of view about what the yoga teachings would ...

Solo or with guests,  I explore the craft of teaching yoga, as its own practice. I’m seeking answers to the questions about why we teach something the way we do, how we could be more expansive and inclusive in our teaching, and how we can continue to grow and evolve in our teaching practice.

I would like to release episodes more frequently and your feedback will determine the kinds of episodes I record. I’...

Even if you first learned yoga from your parents and your grandparents, the path to truly embodying the philosophical yogic teachings can be long and winding. Today we have a beautiful conversation with Reema Datta to share with you that explores:

• the path from a physical focus in teaching to a philosophical practice

You don’t need me to tell you what a wild and scary time we are living through. We know that the tools of yoga can be incredibly supportive in difficult times and also have things to say about the difficult times we are living in.

So are you talking about this in your classes? Should you?

I am, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about it! So today’s episode is going to dive deep into thi...

As I sit down to write these show notes, RFK Jr is currently in his senate confirmation hearing. By the time you read these words it is my assumption that he will be the new head of Health and Human Services for the United States, a job with incredible power. Anything is possible, so there could be a different outcome, but it seems unlikely. 

You might ask, “what does that have to do with teaching yoga?” 

Building a career as a yoga teacher is challenging because unlike many other kinds of jobs, you have to build out a career in one hour blocks, working to get and then manage each gig separately.

While the explosion of online offerings and social media as a marketing tool has changed much about the landscape, there is one thing it hasn’t changed. In my view, the best way to build a career as a yoga teacher ...

Octavia Raheem first wrote a book called Gather where she talked about gathering ancestors, gathering courage and gathering rest. Then she wrote a book, Pause Rest Be, about how rest has served as a tool for courage and resilience for her and the people she’s worked with. 

And lucky for us, Octavia has written a new book called Rest Is Sacred, that takes these ideas and weaves them together,...

I have been an active participant in the yoga industry since the early 2000s, and I have never really understood how brick and mortar yoga studios, especially locally owned ones without corporate backing, made it work. 

I’ve been curious about it, and I have seen a few studios run incredibly well and last a long time, but we all know those are the outliers. These spaces are so important for us as teachers ...

If you are a yoga teacher trying to make anything close to a full time income with your work, then you are an entrepreneur. Many of us resist that truth, or we at least resist some of the work that is associated with being a small business owner.

That is why today I’m so excited to introduce you to Jackie Murphy. She is here to give us all a business strategy pep talk!

Jackie Murphy (she/her) ...

The learning journey I’ve been on regarding hypermobility is incredibly personal. I was plagued with nearly constant minor and serious injuries most of my life. As a dancer that seemed normal, but it was very difficult and I was often injured more than anyone else I knew. I worked so hard to “build more stability” and “get out of my patterns of gripping” and some things did help quite a bit, most notably Feldenkrais.

Holding grounded space as a teacher is one of the most important and most hard to teach skills for new yoga teachers. How can you be confident doing something you are new at? Do you need to actually be confident? What do we do when challenging situations knock us off our center?

To answer these questions and more, I’m so honored to have my teacher and friend Ethan Nichtern with us today. Ethan Nichtern (he...

I had a profound conversation with yoga teacher and writer Karin Lynn Carlson (she/her) and I can’t wait for you to listen.  Karin is a thoughtful teacher and a beautiful writer and has so much to share on the intersection of ethics and yoga teaching. This episode is packed with both valuable insights and practical advice.

We talked about implementing a code of ethics akin to those in social work and discu...

How to teach yoga in a trauma sensitive way is a conversation that floods mainstream yoga spaces these days. And with good reason; almost everyperson in the world has had some experience of trauma, so our yoga classes are filled with people who have had exposure to trauma.

It is very easy for yoga and asana to be taught in ways that are not trauma sensitive. Being aware of teacher-student power dynamics an...

This episode is one of the most important interviews I’ve ever recorded. Our guest, Katie Blecker (she/her) is here to talk about two of my favorite things, accessible yoga and teaching yoga. And even better, we are going to talk about the intersection of those two things in a conversation that is LONG overdue on this podcast: Making the vocation of teaching yoga accessible to all yoga teachers.

Katie Blec...

The yoga world has changed so much in the last 5 years, and more and more yoga teachers are finding they need to build and create their own opportunities to teach. Even before the pandemic it was nearly impossible to build a full time career teaching group classes at studios. The pay is too low, the opportunities too rare and the workload is way too high to exclusively teach at a yoga studio. 

But paving y...