When One Door Closes

Posted on March 26, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Last week I told you guys that a climbing gym where I had been teaching Yoga for Climbers decided to discontinue the program. As someone who enjoys synthesizing the two together big time, I was bummed for not having a place to share that with my fellow climbers and yoga practitioners.

Two days later, an awesome email arrived in my inbox, and I had to laugh out loud while reading it. You know that U2 song, She Moves in Mysterious Ways? I immediately thought of it, and shook my head smiling, thinking, “Okay, the Universe, you’ve got me. I surrender.” All those cheesy self-help feel-good things that you hear started flashing through my mind. Sure, people say when one door closes, another opens. But there is sometimes a long hallway in between, and wow, this one opened almost immediately right after the other one closed.

What happened that got me so jazzed? Check out the email I received and you’ll see:

My name is Danielle, I have very recently opened a yoga studio and outdoor excursion company in Ballard: Backside Bow. Most of our yoga classes are based around outdoor, “action sports” or “surf, snow, and dirt” (climbing, biking, surfing, snow). The Bow’s purpose is to create a community around healthy living, the outdoors, and yoga. Bringing all outdoor creatures to yoga, and yoga to them. Also, there’s the hope that this will bring the different outdoor communities together!

I have heard great things about you and your teaching. I would be very interested in sitting down with you to talk about the classes you have been teaching, ideas, and your availability or interest in teaching more yoga for climbers classes. Please, let me know if this is something you’d be interested in talking about further.

Would I be interested? Hell yeah! And talking about it further I did. This morning I met Danielle Harvey, an inspiring young woman who grabbed the bull by the horns, followed her passion, and opened Backside Bow, a yoga studio for anyone who likes to play outside with snow, water, and dirt.

We spent almost two hours talking about everything from being an entrepreneur, to marketing, to Danielle’s vision for the outdoors and yoga worlds to collide, and everything in between. (When two women with crazy love and ambition for yoga meet, long conversations are sure to ensue.) So, you’ll be hearing more about Backside Bow from me in the future. For a sneak peek, I’ll be teaching there twice a week:

R&R Yoga on Sunday nights, 7-8:30 p.m. starting April 4, 2010.
8-week Intro series of Yoga for Climbers, Wednesday nights, 7:45 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. starting May 5, 2010.

In the meantime, here’s a short video of Danielle talking about her vision at Backside Bow. And if I can tell you something a guy named Tom once said, it’s that life is really, truly a box of chocolates, and if something tugs at you, just run like the wind blows.

Backside Bow Yoga Studio in Ballard, Seattle.

Press:

KOMO: Backside Bow ties yoga to outdoor sports
Ballard News Tribune: 23-year-old creates her dream job

Adapting Your Yoga Asana Practice and Diet for Spring

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Recently, I was contacted with an article submission for my blog. The author is none other than Melina Meza, an accomplished Seattle yoga teacher with 16+ years of experience under her belt.

From the bio on her website:

Melina has been teaching yoga full time at 8 Limbs Yoga Centers (Seattle, Washington) since 1997 and is the Co-Director of the 8 Limbs Teachers’ Training Program. In addition to leading group classes, workshops, and private sessions, Melina facilitates year-round yoga retreats in extraordinary sanctuaries around the world. Her continual growth as a teacher and practitioner has been influenced by studying with numerous instructors, including Dr. Robert Svoboda, Scott Blossom, Sarah Powers, Jin Sung, Gary Kraftsow, and Kathleen Hunt.

Melina holds a bachelor’s degree in Nutrition from Bastyr University, where she deepened her interest in the world of whole foods nutrition. While attending Bastyr, she found what her body, mind, and spirit had been waiting for—yoga.

Though I’ve never met her, I’m going out on a limb (insert collective groan here) and guess that she knows a thing or two about yoga and nutrition. So, without further ado, here’s Melina’s article: Tips and ideas how to adapt your yoga asana practice and diet to accommodate the beauty unfolding in spring.

A few excerpts:

Travel Light

It makes sense that many of us are drawn to the idea of cleansing and purging this time of year—it’s time to lighten our load. Here are a few diet adaptations that will help prepare your body and mind for spring:

Decrease heavy, oily, cold, fatty foods.

Increase spicy, bitter, and astringent foods (arugula, mustard greens, kale, strawberries, blueberries, and sprouts).

Increase your vitamin, nutrient and chlorophyll intake with early dark green vegetables and sprouts.

In general, eat light and eat local.

Spring Cleaning Doesn’t Have to Be a Pain in the Asana

(I took a creative license to put that heading in. Cheap joke points?)

Now that winter has passed, it’s time to start sending some TLC to the liver and gallbladder, which may have been working overtime during the winter with diets heavy in fat, protein, caffeine, alcohol or sugar.

In regards to asana, the inner legs and outer leg lines correlate to the meridian lines that feed into the liver (inner legs) and gallbladder (outer legs). Spring is a great time to deepen your relationship to poses such as Eka Pada Rajakapotasana (pigeon), Garudasana (eagle), Prasaritta Padottanasana (wide leg forward bends and Gomukasana (cow face), as these poses help you connect to and activate the liver and gallbladder meridians.

Following are two asana sequences specifically geared for spring.

Yin/restorative class sequence for spring:
Lying on your back:

Supta Baddha Konasana, Happy Baby Pose, Wide Leg Splits (while supported by the floor)
Easy Twist with bent legs, “Thread the Needle”

On the knees or seated:
Wide Leg Child’s Pose, Sphinx, Pigeon, Ardha Matysendrasana, Gomukasana, Upavista Konasana, Padmasana

Seasonal Vinyasa Yoga Spring class sequence:
Supta Baddha Konasana, Happy Baby Pose, Wide Leg Split, Supta Padangusthasana (standard and twist), Abdominal work with Twists, Abdominal work with legs in Garudasana, Lion’s Breath, Fire Hydrant, Spinal Rolls, Uddiyana Bandha, Agni Sara
Sun Salutes with Salabhasana, Squats, Surya Namaskar B, Garudasana, Prasaritta Padottanasana Series, Sirsasana, Bakasana, Eka Pada Rajakapotasana (pigeon), Gomukasana, Double Pigeon, Pursvottanasana, Mayurasana (peacock), Bharadvajasana, Maha Mudra, Janu Sirsasana, Setu Bandha, Halasana with Padmasana…finishing poses.

Wait, does this mean butter with a side of bread is out? I think I’ll have to prolong my winter for a little while longer. For those of you who are ready for spring, check out Melina’s full article here: Seasonal Vinyasa Yoga – Spring [PDF].

Yoga Teacher Melina Meza

Seattle Yoga News – Taj Yoga 5th Anniversary Celebration

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Taj Yoga turned 5 last month, and it’s time for some celebratin’! This Friday evening, March 26, 2010, you’ll have a better excuse than ever to nibble on cupcakes and raise a toast of champagne. (New Year’s resolutions don’t count when it comes to celebration and birthday parties anyway.)

The doors will open at 7:00 p.m. The stage will be all set and ready for original yoga dance choreographs and performances from 7:30 p.m. – 8 p.m.

It’s been five amazing years of asana, Gumby, and Pokey. We’ll pop the cork at 7 p.m. and make merry with Champagne and cupcakes. Please arrive early so you can get a seat (these events have filled in the past).

For directions, check out my Studio Profile – Taj Yoga post.

Gimme Five! Happy Birthday Taj Yoga!

A Sample of Yoga with Nikki Chau

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Do you ever look at a yoga class schedule with unfamiliar teachers’ names and wonder what he or she is like, and wonder if you would enjoy taking a yoga class from them? It’s odd, if you think about it, whomever we choose to do yoga with will be in charge of our physical well-being, telling us where to put our arms and legs for at least an hour, but sometimes we spend waaay more time checking out the specs of a new phone.

It’s hard to know what a teacher is like without having taken a class with him or her. And even then, if you’ve only taken one class, it may not necessarily give you a full and accurate picture. Unless there’s something jarringly obvious, good or bad, like they gave you a Kundalini awakening, or threw out your back, it’s not always clear what working with them is like.

I understand this, and on this blog, one of my intentions is to give you a better idea of who I am, as a person, and as a teacher, so that should you ever decide to check out my classes, you can have some idea of my teaching approach and personality.

So, to start, here is a sample of what I send to my Intro to Yoga class. As my teaching evolves, I have started to send out these notes as a “bonus”, or “extra credit”. I don’t expect all of my students to do anything in particular with them. There are no quizzes or anything like that. It’s all in the spirit of “take what you need and leave what you don’t.”

Having said that, I believe that yoga really becomes *your* practice when you do it on your own, and when it stays with you even after you leave class. So, when I heard that one of my students had started a folder with all of the notes I sent out, and another taped some of my stick figure drawings to her desk at work, I was stoked.

Please click on the image for the full size.

If you do yoga with Nikki, you'd get class notes like this

10 Days of Silence: Is a Vipassana Boot-camp For You?

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Last year, I went on a 10-day Vipassana mediation retreat. The word “retreat” may conjure up images of sandy beaches, blue ocean water, luxurious bed linens, and faraway lands. This was not one of those. I woke up every morning at 4:30 a.m. and sat for 12 hours a day on a cushion on a cold stone floor, trying desperately to focus on my breath, or something, *anything*.

My friend Aron Schoppert recently finished the same course, and he was awesome enough to do a long write up about it and agreed to let me publish it here. It’s a long piece, so I will put out some quotes and summary, and put the full article in PDF document for your reading pleasure.

Aron’s Story

I recently became a first-time participant to a 12-day Vipassana meditation retreat near Onalaska, Washington at the Northwest Vipassana Center, as taught by S.N. Goenka in the tradition of Sayagyi U Ba Khin. I first became aware of Vipassana and the center back in 1997, but found the schedule and set of restrictions daunting with the potential for 100+ hours of seated meditation over the course of the 10 days of silence. It is the only one of its kind in the northwest region.

Why He Did It

I was not seeking to fix anything, but knew that I could stand to benefit on some level.

Did it “Work”?

I feel very fortunate that Goenka started this movement and provides the teachings free of charge. While this may turn out to be a short-sighted claim, I feel I will be forever changed for the better good because of it. This is not to say that I don’t realize how easy it is to get caught back up with my old patterns and lose the bulk of said benefit. There is more work to be done, and I plan to stay on task. The benefit is too great.

… With Some Caveat

Despite the amazing amount of progress I made in the course of 10 days, I am not a complete advocate of Goenka’s retreat or teaching style. There are a number of shortcomings and dangers in its application that I believe limit its potential or its goals in helping others… There are public, well-written critiques of Goenka teachings that I recommend reading before taking the plunge.

And Now for the Vipassana Elevator Pitch

Vipassana is one of India’s most ancient meditation techniques. Vipassana is a word in Pali which translates literally to insight or seeing within. It is described in the center’s brochure as the process of mental purification through self observation and introspection.

And Who’s This Goenka Dude?

S.N. Goenka is widely known as one of the foremost non-sectarian teachers, and it is important to note his 10 day course focuses on what many in the meditation world consider a highly selective form of Vipassana. Vipassana is also known as “mindfulness meditation” where one looks within, utilizing all the senses.

Just Scratching the Surface

Goenka’s version focuses specifically on awareness of body sensations and his technique is arguably for simplicity, but this is not explained in the course. Upon further research I found that his teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin, was documented in 1961 as saying that once awareness of body sensations is practiced, one may move on to the other senses.

Goenka, Here, There, and Everywhere

At the retreat, assistant teachers are present to help answer questions at the end of each day after they “push play” on Goenka’s pre-recorded video and audio instructions. The version in rotation was created in 1991, and heard and watched at over 200 centers worldwide which Goenka insists upon to maintain consistency of the teaching.

Vipassana Psychology

Vipassana psychology (in simplified terms) breaks the mind into 4 parts, which I found helpful to understanding the breakdown of the technique. Cognition or acknowledgement of the sense objects, Recognition or discrimination of the type of sense, Sensation or the experience thereof, and the mind’s Response (sangkara), which is the sub or unconscious response to the actual sensation.

The crux of what Buddha learned was that the mind does not crave the actual sense objects, but the resulting sensations. The technique allows one to retrain the associations of these sensations. In order to be successful, one must practice equal parts awareness and equanimity as you experience the sangkara.

Okay, Seriously, You just Sit Around All Day?

You could say that. Here’s the daily schedule.

4:00 a.m.                             Morning wake-up bell
4:30 – 6:30 a.m.               Meditate in the hall or in your room
6:30 – 8:00 a.m.               Breakfast break
8:00 – 9:00 a.m. Group meditation in the hall
9:00 – 11:00 a.m.               Meditate in the hall or in your room
11:00 – 12 noon Lunch break
12:00 – 1:00 p.m.               Rest, and interviews with the teacher
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Meditate in the hall or in your room
2:30 – 3:30 p.m. Group meditation in the hall
3:30 – 5:00 p.m. Meditate in the hall or in your room
5:00 – 6:00 p.m. Tea break
6:00 – 7:00 p.m. Group meditation in the hall
7:00 – 8:15 p.m. Teacher’s discourse in the hall
8:15 – 9:00 p.m. Group meditation in the hall
9:00 – 9:30 p.m. Question time in the hall
9:30 p.m. Retire to your room; lights out

Critique of Goenka and the Retreat

While there were strong claims of non-sectarianism, and how scientific the technique is, most of the discourse is based around Buddhist tradition, mixed with jokes and anecdotes tinted with the lens of traditional beliefs. In particular, expect to hear mentions of sentient beings in other planes, and information pertaining to how we can’t escape the poor decisions of our past lives.

I also was uncomfortable at times with Goenka’s frequent jabs at certain religion’s rites and rituals, which was completely unnecessary. I would say at least 30% of the discourse material had little to no relevance to the technique and should have been edited out.

So, Is it For You?

I would not recommend this program if you have any kind of emotional instability and would seriously question attending unless you were comfortable re-living past disturbances and facing them on your own. The environment felt very safe and supportive in a hands-off kind of way.

However, there is no trained staff, and I would go into this as if you were working in isolation. I did find personal reports online of people being hospitalized, reliving forgotten child abuses and an example of someone bi-polar disorder spiraling out of control on the 10th day.

That is the power of this technique, and the fact that there is no real support system present made me question some of the dangers associated, even for myself.

Here’s Aron’s full write up: Aron Schoppert’s 10 Day Vipassana Write-up

My one advice? Be sure to have backup while you're gone without the internets for 10 days.

Yoga as a Service – A Case Study

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Nikki Chau

This is a case study in how a yoga program works, or doesn’t work, in a non traditional yoga setting.

A couple things first:

+ I realize that teaching is a service, any kind of teaching. I called this Yoga as a Service because in the tech world, there’s SaaS, or Software as a Service, where the benefits are touted as superior. (I won’t go into details here, or we’d be here all day.)

+ As I write this, it reminds me of a New York Times article, Rolling out the Yoga Mat, describing the current trend where yoga is becoming part of a service package, especially in hotels and resorts. “Yoga is becoming a must-have amenity,” on the order of Internet access, said Chekitan S. Dev, a professor of marketing at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.

Background: The Story

I’ve been climbing for about 8 years, and the more that I do it, the more that I realize there’s a whole art and science to it, just like yoga. There’s the physical aspect, and then there’s the mental aspect, and there’s the dedication, the perseverance, and the patience with time. (Sounds like sutra 1.14, doesn’t it?)

Ever since I got my teaching certification, I have wanted to combine the similar aspects of yoga and climbing, and teach yoga specifically for climbers. I approached the manager at Gym A, a climbing gym in Seattle, last April, and was first told thanks but no thanks. Some time passed, and I was approached about six months later about teaching there. I don’t really know what happened, but my guess is that another gym in town, Gym B, started to offer free yoga, and that had something to do with it. In any case, I was ecstatic!

We decided to start in January of 2010, and at first it was offered for free for the gym members. Gym A has a work out room separate from the climbing area, and I decided it would be best to use that space since it would provide a firm surface. The space would hold 8 people, max, and we started a registration list. Soon the list grew so big that they had to be wait-listed, and we decided to have two classes. In exchange for my teaching, I would get a membership at the gym for free.

With the popularity of the yoga program, Gym A management decided to charge a fee for the class the following month. That’s where the number retracted considerably, understandably so, because, well, free is a great price. Gym A made it a requirement to be a member to take the class, and charged for a series of monthly 4 classes. Later, a drop-in fee of $12 would be added. As the classes are not free, I would be paid to teach them.

After two months of offering paid yoga, the popularity, or lack thereof, indicated that it wasn’t a profitable endeavor, and Gym A asked if I would go back to teaching for free in exchange for a membership. I thought things over, and proposed that I would, on the condition that I would teach twice a month instead of four times a month. Gym A then decided to scrap the program altogether, citing that the classes would only make sense if there were dedicated space.

I am bummed upon hearing this, because I greatly enjoy the marriage of yoga and climbing, and enjoyed teaching the classes and getting to know more fellow climbers. In retrospect, I think there are some things that I’ve learned from this, and I’m writing this post as a case study, so that perhaps you too, can learn something from my experience, and can perhaps offer your insight into this too.

Post-Mortem: What Didn’t Work

+ Space. The space availability was a factor in deciding how to structure the various ways we would run the yoga program. The constraint made it hard to account for drop-ins, which could vary widely, so a preregistration was enforced. Because of this, we first asked for a 4-week commitment, which probably turned some people away.

+ Time. The only time that I could teach was in the morning, from 7-8:30 a.m. Because the workout room sees more traffic in the evenings, Gym A management didn’t want to cut in that time to dedicate to yoga. This makes it hard for people who work early or have to commute a long distance to go to work to do yoga before work.

+ Location. This, I believe, is one of the shortcomings of my yoga class. The location of Gym A is in a part of town that’s not on the way to anything. It is a destination, and it takes dedicated time to go there. If you have to go to work, it would add a minimum of an hour just in transit.

+ Membership Constraint. I had a student who is currently not in class this month at Gym A, but instead going to my other yoga classes at another studio. This is because you had to be a member of the gym to take yoga, and she didn’t renew her monthly pass. I think if this was available to anyone who was willing to pay a drop-in fee, there would have been a larger group of people to appeal to.

+ Marketing & Communication. One morning as I walked through the gym with my skeleton, Bob, someone who was there climbing asked what that’s for. “For Yoga,” I said. “There’s yoga here?” she asked, astonished. I was equally astonished. You would have thought that with the poster up for two months in various places in the gym, that *everyone* would know about it. I think that’s where we made the mistake, of assuming that the flyers on the wall would do an adequate job of creating awareness.

Come and think about it, the gym does not send out newsletter, does not tweet, does not do any sort of mass communication. Unless I physically show up and read the announcements taped to the wall, I as a member would have no idea that there was a new workout room put in, or that there’s a competition coming up and certain parts of the gym will be closed, or that there’s yoga offered in the morning.

+ The Teacher (Me). There is also the possibility that people just did not enjoy my classes and style of teaching as well, and so they did not come back. If so, why did they come back during the month when the classes were free? Maybe free yoga is free yoga, even if you don’t like the teacher?

You might ask, “Well, how come the classes were busting at the seams before?” I don’t really know. Maybe it was January and there was more resolve for an early morning yoga practice. My guess is that the inconvenience of time and location may have been made up by the fact that the classes were free. If you’d be willing to drive out of your way to a gas station in another part of town to save a few pennies per gallon, you’d be more willing to rearrange your schedule for free yoga.

Where To Next?

As for me, I’m still convinced yoga and climbing go great together, and I’ll continue to explore ways to teach yoga for climbers. I also think that yoga is a great service that a climbing gym can offer, and it could even sway someone to become a member of one gym vs. another. Then again, I don’t run a climbing gym, so that’s just a speculation.

I wonder how the hotels and resorts are packaging, pricing, and advertising their yoga offerings? Do you know? What are your thoughts or insights about yoga as an added service?

A Moment of Living in the Moment

Posted on March 18, 2010 by Nikki Chau

I am writing this post with fast and furious fingers and sweaty palms, quite possibly from my morning coffee or the bright spring sunshine walloping all of Seattle right now. I am also experiencing a ginormous sense of overwhelm. Not overwhelm in the common sense of being eaten alive by to-do lists, but overwhelm in the sense of the feeling you get while standing in front of a vast blue ocean or a tall green mountain, and witnessing something very big and powerful.

Those of you that know me know that I am into this “sitting thing”. I usually say that “I sit”, and not “I meditate”, because sitting is a more accurate description of what really happens. I sit. And then I think about a hundred and one things that I should be doing, or the things I did and all the things I will do or want to do. It’s elusive, that quiet meditative mind.

And yet. And yet. Something interesting happened to me this morning. Shinzen Young talks about this phenomenon in his lectures The Science of Enlightenment. You do this thing called meditation. You *try* desperately to meditate. You pay good money to go on meditation retreats. When you come back and tell your friends what happen, they wonder if you’ve lost your mind for paying good money to go somewhere to “sit around all day”.

You might start to wonder the same thing. You might blow off sitting once, or twice, or altogether. Or you put it off, thinking, “I’ll do it tomorrow”.

But, by hooks or by crooks, by some miracle, or by some clever tricks, as Shinzen said, “if you can’t be disciplined, be clever.”, you sit, and you sit regularly, day after day, month after month. You start to see glimpses of what it means to live in the moment. You look at the world like a goldfish with that proverbial 3-second memory, or the proverbial curious cat that acts like it’s seeing everything for the first time, sniffing it, exploring it.

And boy, is it grand when it happens. It happens very fast, and it does not last.

But, no matter how fleeting, no matter how swift that moment comes and goes, it blows you away. All of the sudden, you start to understand that big word impermanence. You start to see the joys and the sorrows. I’m not even talking theory and hypotheses here. Those things happen right in front of your eyes, as if on cue. It’s very creepy.

(No, the irony does not escape me to reminisce the moment of “living in the moment”, but it must be captured and recorded somehow )

What am I trying to say? If you are engaged in this practice, this yoga thing, this meditation thing, this, dare I say it, getting in touch with your spirit thing. Trust the process. Really. Trust it even when you are weary and full of doubt. And get clever. Trick yourself into practicing when you least feel like it, on the cushion, on the mat, in the grocery line, or in traffic jam.

It will not give you a mountain of gold, it will not instantly make all your troubles go away. It will not automatically rid you of your destructive habits and general life shenanigans. It will not make you taller and turn you into a baller and give you a girl that you could call her.

I honestly can’t even tell you exactly what it will bring to you, because it would be arrogant of me to claim to know what *you* personally experience. What I can arrogantly claim, however, is that life is always coming together and falling apart at the same time. There will be so much joy, and so much sorrow. And there are no words to describe what it’s like, when you are in what they call the Witness state. Something this morning put me in an incredibly clear mind to see both, like a jolt of lighting or a flash of shooting star. To put it plainly, it scared me, it overwhelmed and amazed me, and it humbles me like nothing ever before.

I will say this, admittedly with a lot of caution and hesitation. I am beginning to see what Vyaas Houston talks about in The Certainty of Freedom.

In the meantime, I hope you dance.

Finders, Minders, and Grinders – More on Being a Yoga Teacher and Entrepreneur

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Nikki Chau

This morning in my Technorati twitter feed came this post: Three Personality Types that Help Drive Business.

I’m not a big fan of the terms the author used. (Last I checked no one enjoyed “the daily grind.” Who wants to be considered a “grinder”?) But the post is so pertinent to what I wrote last night about being a yoga teacher and entrepreneur that I will write a bit more about it here.

The author, “with over 15 years of intensive marketing, public relations, business development and management experience”, identified three types of people for professional service business “when looking at how to operate and grow effectively.” (And make no mistake, as a yoga teacher, you are a professional, and you are providing a professional service.)

The three types are:

1) Finders: the people who lead the business development. They bring in new business, create new relationships and continue to sell to existing customer.

2) Minders: the ship captains. They make all operations run smoothly, manage stuff, ensuring things get done.

3) Grinders: the ones who get the job done. In our case, this means teaching, and continue to learn how to learn, learn how to teach, learn how to communicate. This is the part everyone sees.

I’ve paraphrased the types a bit, because I find some of the language a little distressing, (“These people are the cogs of a business” is just so cringe-inducing to me.)

Each role is absolutely critical to the success of a company and they all think that they are the most important. Without finders you would have no new business coming in the door, and no new projects for your team to work on. Without minders you would miss your deadlines and fail to monitor and achieve your profitability and success. And without grinders, nothing real would ever get delivered to your clients.

There is one rare type of professional to look out for in a services business however. They are they type that can carry all three roles and flip between them as required, with ease. If you find one of these, be sure value it for the quality jewel that it is.

This is the part where, if you never thought of yourself as one, now’s the time to consider yourself a quality jewel if you are about to start a business teaching yoga. Things will change down the road. You might find that you don’t particularly enjoy doing one type of work and get someone else to do it, for example. When you first start out, however, you’ve got to be aware of what you’re in for and what you’ll be called to do.

I would say that the author missed out several other really Important Roles: an Incubator, someone who sees far and thinks big, and an Advisor, or Mentor, someone who can guide you through the growing pain. Okay, another post is called for, eh?

Sunny spot, we all need one.

Being a Yoga Teacher, Being an Entrepreneur

Posted on March 16, 2010 by Nikki Chau

This is another post in the series I call New Yoga Teacher to New Yoga Teacher. It’s written specifically for… well, new yoga teachers, but I think it applies equally to anyone new to owning and operating their yoga business.

I came to this realization a couple months into being a brand new yoga teacher, and every day, I’m reminded of how true this is. Today, my friend Lyndi Thompson tweeted about Young Entrepreneur Advice: 100 Things You Must Know!, and I thought it’d be a perfect time to write this blog post. Here it goes: If you want to be a successful yoga teacher, you must learn to be an entrepreneur.

Now, the topic of being an entrepreneur can fill multiple libraries, and so is the topic of being a yoga teacher. So, I will set some parameters around this post as followed.

Assumptions

1) You are an independent yoga teacher, that is, you teach primarily at places where you must do the heavy lifting of marketing yourself and your classes. This might rule out places like health clubs and “mega” yoga studios, where there’s already a steady group of students.

2) You do not teach “pre-packaged” yoga. What I mean by this is the style of yoga that you teach does not have built-in “brand recognition” in the community that you teach. This is *not* to say that if you do, you are any less of an entrepreneur, but I am putting down some assumptions to reign in the scope of this blog post. I could also easily argue that if you teach a “brand name” yoga, you have to work just as hard to differentiate yourself from other teachers. What I’m talking about here, however, is about marketing, educating, and generating recognition where none existed before.

3) Your success directly depends on your ability, as they say in the biz world, to “attract and retain”. That is, you are paid by how many students come to class and continue to come to class, not a flat rate. Again, I am in no way saying that if this is how you get paid *now*, that you’re not an entrepreneur. I’m just setting the assumption that if you are a teacher who’s renting a space and keeping the profit, and if you are paid according to the number of returning students, you might be more motivated to go out and promote yourself, streamline your processes, and so on.

Okay, with that out of the way, here are some things I think a new yoga teacher ought to know, and do. While there are many, many little things to do, here are three big ones that have stood out for me as how you must act like an entrepreneur. Along the way, I’ll insert some quotes from the Young Entrepreneur Advice article, and of course, a yoga sutra.

Truth One: “This is the United States of James Carter. I’m the president, I’m the emperor, I’m the king.”

As a yoga teacher, you’re the CEO, the CIO, CTO, COO, you’re all the C level executives there can be. You’re also the janitor. You *are* the Marketing Department. You *are* Operations and Admin. You *are* Finance, and Budgeting, and Accounting, and Legal, and Sales. *You* are the Chief Networking Officer, and Information Officer, and Knowledge Officer, and Creative, and Customer Service, and Business Development, and Social Media, etc. The list goes on.

The first thing to realize is that as an independent yoga teacher, you are now a walking, talking, *real* business. You may rent out your own space and fully own your business, or you may work at a studio as a contractor, in both cases you are responsible for getting your name out there, establishing your reputation, gain and retain students, create ways to generate revenue and profit, both on and off the mat, perhaps hire and fire staff, and continue to grow. That, my friends, is an entrepreneurial undertaking.

As an entrepreneur, you will do everything, and you’ve got to figure out how to do everything better and more efficiently every day.

21. I did not realize the level of sacrifice that would be required to become not only an entrepreneur, but a successful entrepreneur. Don’t get me wrong, it is worth every single second, but I had no idea that friends and family would not be able to relate. – Amber Schaub http://www.rufflebutts.com/

Truth Two: “Early to bed, early to rise. Work like hell, and advertise.”

I don’t know about early to bed, but the work like hell and advertise bit was true when Ted Turner said that, and it will be true when you decide to be an independent yoga teacher. You’ve got to figure out a way to do marketing and promote yourself like crazy, and do it in a way that’s not sleazy and cheesy.

When you are virtually unknown, one yoga teacher among hundreds and thousands of others, you’ve got to start a marketing campaign, or several. If you don’t teach a kind of yoga that the general public has been exposed to, you will need to start from scratch to generate awareness for your business and educate people on what it is exactly that you offer. This is, as they say in the corporate world, business development.

This goes into a rabbit hole of figuring out your niche, (athletes, cubicle dwellers, gardeners, weekend warriors, etc.), figuring out your main clientele (do you teach children, senior, teens, or athletes?), and telling a compelling and concise story, (something like, “I focus on teaching for stress relief so I do a lot of calming stuff”). Pay a consultant an enormous amount, and they’ll tell you gotta build the pipeline.

Then you need to figure out where are you going to advertise, and where are you going to offer your service? Will you make flyers? Where will you post them? How will you know if one location is more effective than another? Aside from your “home base”, where else will you teach as a marketing tool? Perhaps in a park? At a retail store? In some circles, they like to talk about all those delivery channels.

Okay, you get the idea. Marketing matters. And if you don’t have a marketing department behind you, you’re it.

78. Relationship Marketing – I wish I had understood the importance of staying connected with past clients and nurturing relationships with current clients. Your personal life, your spiritual life and your professional life is all about the relationship. – Sandie Glass http://www.sandstormideas.com/

Truth Three: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”

No stranger to strategies, that Winston Churchill, eh? “Strategy? Don’t you just… show up and teach yoga?” Au contraire, ma cherie. Strategy is the foundation of a successful yoga business (and perhaps all other businesses). This involves thinking about questions such as,

Where are you going to teach?
What day and time of day?
What else is offered in the area, by whom?
Who will you align yourself with for potential partnership?
What communication tool(s) will you use?
How much money will you invest in a particular thing, like building a website or renting space?
Will you incorporate your business?
What other products and services can you offer?
Will you be working another full time job while launching your yoga business?
Do you want to travel and teach workshops or teach on-going classes in one location?

Answering questions like these will help you sort out the pros and cons of each. No matter what you do, there are always advantages and disadvantages. You won’t be able to avoid the disadvantages, but knowing what they are, evaluating them, and taking them with calculation will help you deal with setbacks.

100. I now know that businesses are extremely organic & have a way of taking on a life of their own – now I know that though things don’t always work out as planned, there is always another opportunity around the corner…understanding this from the beginning would’ve saved me a lot of stress! – Rina Jakubowicz http://www.rinayoga.com

Yoga teachers have somehow gotten the unfortunate perception that we are “flighty” and ethereal and that our head is somewhere out there over the rainbow. It’s really too bad, because having your head screwed on right over your shoulders, with the left brain and the right brain working, you know, in union, is really what yoga should be about.

I haven’t talked about bookkeeping, accounting, budgeting, operations, and administrations. It’s also extremely important to have mentors and an Advisory Council. Perhaps they’ll be the topic of another post, but they are an integral part of being an entrepreneur as well, for obvious reasons.

Are you an entrepreneur? Are you a yoga teacher? Perhaps both? What are your thoughts? What have your experiences been like?

Sutra 1.14. This practice becomes well-grounded when continued with devotion, without interruption, and over a long period of time / sah tu dirgha kala nairantaira satkara asevitah dridha bhumih

Did I mention a mentor is super important too?

Blind Items Yoga

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Nikki Chau

In self reflection, I realized that I have developed a few traits over the years, like a certain sense of skepticism and snarkiness, all wrapped in a tongue in cheek live and let live perspective. I’d like to think that I can blame this on the years and years of reading websites like Gawker and Pajiba, but perhaps they’re just catalysts and convenient scapegoats.

One fun Gawker column is Blind Items, or #blinditems, where the author entices you with questions about lives of people you’d really like to care less about, such as, Which Famous Couple Is Splitting and Getting New Boyfriends? Resistance is often futile.

I think the lure of the Blind Items column is that it invokes our inner Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, Clue, etc. It gives us a rush of excitement to try to figure out Who Dun It. Oh, and of course, it gives us gossip. So, in the spirit of Blind Items, I introduce to you Blind Items Yoga, an occasional reporting on things that the wind from the rumor mills brings me.

To start with, here’s one for all you in the Seattle area.

Which yoga studio is packing people in wall-to-wall, and telling earnest students that they should come an hour early to get their spot, and refusing to refund passes if the yoga student just isn’t *that* earnest?

Oh, and if the wind from the rumor mills ever asked you for direction, you’re more than welcome to whisper in its ears: “Blind Items Yoga”.

Is it elementary, Watson?

Yoga with Nikki Chau

If you want to be happy, be. ~Leo Tolstoy

Monthly Archives: March 2010