Working in Yoga

Hosted by Rebecca Sebastian

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182

Latest episode

Aug 2026

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About the show

Join yoga studio owner, yoga teacher, yoga therapist, and yoga non-profit founder Rebecca Sebastian for a water cooler discussion of what it is to work in the yoga world. We will talk about our experiences, good & bad, connect with each other, share tips freely, and tell our stories. Many years ago a yoga-teacher friend of mine said to me “the one things I don’t like about being a yoga teacher is there’s no water cooler”. And he was right. (thanks James). So let’s use this podcast as our water cooler. This past year, especially, has been so hard for us. Let’s talk about it. Share our stories, our unique jobs, and a sense of community that we all need. Want in? Take a listen.

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60 recent

August 17, 2026Episode 1808 min

The Cheshire Cat, A.K.A. The Online Gap — The Grin That’s Left Behind

For one strange year, online was the whole game. Then studios reopened, and most yoga professionals quietly walked back — leaving behind a channel that still exists, a profile that’s still live, content that’s technically still there. This episode is about presence without substance — what happens to the online version of a teaching relationship when the relationship part leaves but the page doesn’t get taken down. It’s not about deleting anything. It’s about noticing what’s actually still working, and what’s just… still there. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe.

August 13, 2026Episode 1791 hr 2 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe. Kellie Adkins’ Website

August 10, 2026Episode 17810 min

The Caterpillar, A.K.A. The Extraction Economy

A therapist tells a client in crisis to “notice the present moment.” The client destabilizes — and the therapist has no idea why, because they read about mindfulness. They never built a practice, and nobody who has is in the room to say: that’s not how this works. This episode is about the difference between fields that hire yoga professionals (integration) and fields that borrow yoga’s tools without yoga professionals (extraction) — and why that distinction isn’t territorial, it’s a safety standard. The One Thing: a simple way to start the referral conversation with allied health professionals in your own network. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe.

August 6, 2026Episode 1771 hr 4 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Leave me a message on Speakpipe. American Yoga Council Website

July 30, 2026Episode 17552 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Connect with Felicia on LinkedIn

July 27, 2026Episode 17410 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Tick, Tock The Trend Report

July 23, 2026Episode 1731 hr 3 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Amara’s Website

July 20, 2026Episode 17211 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine

July 16, 2026Episode 17153 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine Good Ground Yoga

July 13, 2026Episode 1709 min

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. RESOURCES Working In Yoga Website Working In Yoga Newsletter The Back Room Inside Yoga Magazine