Support Your Local Yoga Teacher – An Interview with Diana Bonyhadi

Posted on May 15, 2010 by Nikki Chau

I met up with Diana Bonyhadi, a fellow graduate of Pacific Yoga Teacher Training, at Grimaldi’s, a great local coffee shop in Issaquah, Washington. Her husband showed up for a short minute to give her a kiss and shared a cookie with us, and was off to work, leave me to chat with her.

What made you want to be a yoga teacher?
I’ve been practicing for 15 years. I grew up in Berkeley in the 60s, yoga was part of my life, but I didn’t actively practice until 1990. I had a lot of people asking me to be a yoga teacher, and I couldn’t ignore it.

What’s the hardest thing about being a yoga teacher?
When I have a student that comes to class regularly and the correction is always the same, and it makes me wonder if maybe this isn’t the class for them? Should I have to ask them to leave? You have to let people walk their own walk and ask, “What is it that has to happen when they refuse to take the adjustment?” Also, helping students to do that om.

What comes naturally for you in your teaching?
Sequencing really comes naturally. When I talk to the students and see what they need, it becomes so clear what the sequencing should be.

What has changed the most in your teaching?
The reliance on notes. I would write up the whole class and study them beforehand. Not to say that I don’t have a teaching plan, but now it comes more naturally and intuitively.

How would you describe your signature teaching style
It’s a Vinyasa style class with therapeutics element and alignment-based. I would start with a seated meditation, then opening up the arms and working through the shoulders, the rib cage and the hips, all are sequenced with breath. You will always get pranayama in my class. There’s always good music.

How do you tend to your own practice?
I do it every day, and it always has a meditation component.

What have you learned about teaching?
You can’t model the full pose, when you look up you’re out of alignment. Also, different people come with different energy and different bodies and i really enjoy that. No matter where you are, you don’t need a yoga room. You can gain deep wisdom from your students no matter where you teach.

What would you tell an aspiring a yoga teacher?
Go study, go get your certification. Learn alignment.

Diana teaches at Samena Club in Bellevue and Urban Oasis in Issaquah. You can learn more about Diana at Kharma Bella Yoga and follow her blog Living Yoga Beyond the Mat.

Issaquah yoga teacher Diana Bonyhadi

Here’s a tip from Diana on getting started on chanting Om.

Let the Music Play

Posted on May 9, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Sophomore year. 19 years old. I was studying in France. Traveling alone half the time. I had taken a night train to Milan to meet a boy (don’t ask). We were going to spend two weeks in Rome together. After breakfast, he put on some music and laid there on the couch. “What are you doing?” I asked, puzzled. “Listening to music,” said he, equally puzzled that I had to ask about something so obvious.

“You, you… you would just lay there listening to music?” I really did not understand this phenomenon. “Don’t you?” He asked, like I had been missing out something great.

And I had.

I had never, never ever, just listen to a song while doing nothing. The whole entire song. To me, what this means is I’m unable to focus on just one thing, not even for less than five minutes. This is a serious bug. In the software world it’d be something classified at, like, Sev. 1 Pri. 1 (Severity 1, Priority 1).

I don’t know how I got to be this way. I don’t know what this is a product of. I’ve got no one to blame. Oh, sure, I have a few suspects. I might bash the easy scapegoats. But in the end, I’m responsible. It’s my own fight, my own battle. It’s starting to look oh-so-Bhagavad-Gita-ish, isn’t it? “Oh Arjuna, resolve to fight!”

As you can see, like a lot of things, it goes back to yoga.

A Walk To Remember

This afternoon, I took a walk along the shores of Richmond Beach with my mom, a beach not too far from my house north of Seattle. I had introduced her to Iyengar yoga a year and a half earlier, and she has gone twice a week religiously since then. During our walk, she said to me, “My body is finally starting to do what my mind asks it to do.” She was so excited! We stopped on the beach and she showed me how she now knows what to do when the instructor asks her to bend at the hips. “Normally I’d bend here,” she said showing me her spine. Then she said something fantastic, “I’m starting to see my mind and body uniting.”

Hallelujah!!!!!

Let me tell you a little about my mom. She’s an Expert Worrier. My mom worries. She worries a lot. If you’re not worried about anything, that’s because my mom is worrying about it for you. She has the greatest imagination in the world, and it’s often used to worry about things with the most remote possibility of happening.

This is a woman who knows nothing about the latest yoga trends. I doubt my mom even remembers that yoga means union. She doesn’t study the Sutras, the Gita, or Tantra. She’s not out there rocking to yoga music for ecstatic bliss. She just dedicates herself twice a week to going to class. At night, if I am home, she often lets me put her in a Restorative pose. That’s all.

To hear her say that was so awesome that I screeched and jumped up and hugged her, startling other peaceful beach walkers, but if they had know what was happening, they’d be ecstatic too.

You’ve Got The Music In You

In one session during my 500-hr teacher training, we discussed the appropriate use of music for each type of asana (standing, twists, backbends, etc.). I brought in La Soledad by Pink Martini as music for the standing poses. “I don’t know if I can practice to this, I’d have to lay down and just relax because it’s so beautiful,” my teacher said. “I know,” said I, “my pace is really slow.”

This slow pace hasn’t always been my favorite or forte. But, it’s my Chinese bitter medicine. Breathing slowly, practicing Asana slowly, walking slowly, it is the hardest thing in the world for me. Just as my mom’s practice is showing her she can gain mastery over her body, starting with intellectual knowledge, my practice is starting to let me gain mastery over my mind with the physical work of not rushing from pose to pose. I’m learning how to Keep Quiet and let the music play.

This is a favorite poem I read daily lately.

Keeping Quiet – Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their brothers
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.

-from Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon
Translated by Stephen Mitchell

On the beach with my mom for Mother's Day 2010.

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits

Posted on April 3, 2010 by Nikki Chau

One of my favorite movies of all time is Before Sunrise, which I have seen so many times the disc is completely scratched up. One of the memorable scenes that seems to be permanently stuck in my mind is when Ethan Hawke’s character recites the poem As I Walked out One Evening by W.H. Auden.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

These last days, as the calendar says it’s time for Spring, though the weather in Seattle today violent disagrees (heavy rain and 30mph wind), these lines remind me: ‘O let not Time deceive you. You cannot conquer Time.

Time goes fast, we keep hearing that. We keep hearing these clichéd phrases until they become tired like that proverbial broken record, but there are moments when they hit home so close that you finally get what they are all about, then they become true on a cellular, experiential level.

This month marks exactly one year since I finished my 200-hour training from Pacific Yoga, a 9-month program that sent me deep into the woods of yogic studies. It left me bewildered, confused, amazed, and humbled. Next month this time, I’ll be graduating from the 500-hour teacher training, a program that I started a year ago.

This morning when I was gathering my training attendance records, I went over the schedule of each session with mixed emotions. I was proud that I had been exposed to so much material, and I was a bit nervous because I don’t think I remember every single thing I’ve learned. But that anxiety did not last very long. I was immediately reminded of how I’m still going over the material that I learned in the 200-hour training, how everything I learned continues to emerge for me to grasp, understand, and learn them again.

I’m comforted by Yoga Sutra I.14, which is something of a personal mantra as of late. I learned this sutra in my 200-hour training, and it’s taken over a year for me to get it.

Satu dirgha kala nairantarya satkara asevitah dridha bhumih – YS 1.14

This sutra roughly says that there are three things that make a practice is firmly rooted and becomes stable:

dirgha kala: a long time
nairantarya: without interruption
satkara: devotion

I’m comforted by knowing that when May rolls around and Graduation day comes, and it will be here soon enough, I won’t really have to be “done”. I’ll still have some time to continue to do whatever work is left to do, which is endless, really. “Your certificate is a certificate to begin your studies,” Judith Hanson Lasater said once.

Having said that, I also know that I don’t really have *that* much time. Recently, a family friend passed away completely unexpectedly, and her untimely death shocked all of us to the core. My mom celebrated her 60th birthday yesterday. We were sitting at the kitchen table talking about it last week when she looked at me tenderly and said, “You’re 28, you turn around, and you’re 60. Time goes so much faster than you think.” I nodded and looked at my mom, I mean really looked at her, trying to capture what she looked like, because I’ll want to remember that exact moment when I turn 60.

In one of her talks, Pema Chodron cited Suzuki Roshi: “Knowing life is short, enjoy it day after day, moment after moment.” Sure, it’s easy for *them* to say that, but what about me? Me who’s got enough Vata to bottle energy drinks for an army? Me who’s constantly distracted and checking my iPhone and the latest tweet and blog and facebook status and what’s hot, what’s new, what’s latest, everything but what’s here and what’s now?

I’m practically a lost cause, running after anything that’s shiny, promising instant gratification and an escape from this mundane moment. My saving grace is yoga. Over these past two years of immersing myself in the teacher trainings, attending workshops, and committing to a daily meditation practice, I have occasionally caught glimpses of what it might be all about, that, “enjoy it moment after moment” thing. You cannot conquer time, but you can learn to be its companion.

To me, that’s what the practice is about, and it’ll take a long time, being consistent, and lots of dedication. I will not let Time deceive me, and I will not deceive it. I’m humbled by Time, and I will let it run its course. In the meanwhile, all I can do is continue to practice with what I’ve got, one day at a time.

To all you guys reading this, kudos to you for committing yourself to this practice, or any practice for that matter. Kudos to you for showing up, and committing your mind, and body, and time, to whatever it is that floats your boat: climbing, painting, singing, writing, dancing, etc. All I can say is, if that’s your thing, and it’s doing you good, as long as it feeds you, it doesn’t matter where you are in the process, just keep going.

When I’m 60, or 70, or 80, if I will have learned to sit or lie down in Savasana and not think of a million and one things having nothing to do with that current moment, I will probably tell W.H. Auden, “Ha! See? I *can* conquer time.” At which point I’ll remember the movie Before Sunrise and think of all my favorite scenes, and poof, there will go my mind again.

Color-coordinated mother and daughter. With my beautiful mom on her 60th birthday.

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

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.

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?

Santosha, and Resistance and Acceptance

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Nikki Chau

Talk about weird cosmic timing. I made a short video about Santosha a couple days ago, and today in my inbox, I received the latest blog post from Arnold Ilgner, the author of The Rock Warrior’s Way: Mental Training for Climbers about Resistance and Acceptance.

I absolutely enjoyed reading what Arnold had to say. He said what I wanted to convey in the idea of Santosha, but much more concise. I want to share it with you guys here. I also took the liberty to bold some texts.

We all tend to resist stress. To begin overcoming this tendency, admit that stress is a normal and desirable part of climbing. Accept this not just philosophically but in practice. When you encounter a stressful situation, accept the stress and explore its details. Accepting stress will help you see a situation as it is and avoid the distracting tricks your mind plays to satisfy its desire for comfort.

Acceptance does not equal resignation. It means simply that you avoid wishful thinking and illusions, and focus on gathering useful information about the challenge before you. Saying, “I wish these holds were bigger,” is an expression of resistance. It will not make the holds grow or help you use them. Saying, “I hope there’s a hold up there,” will not create a hold or help you respond if there isn’t one. Saying, “If only I wasn’t so pumped,” will not re-energize your forearms or help you find the least strenuous path through the crux.

Juliet is not a good spotter at all.

Feel All Emotions

Posted on February 28, 2010 by Nikki Chau

I have been reading A Year of Living Your Yoga: Daily Practices to Shape Your Life by Judith Lasater since December 2007 (thank you, Amazon Orders History). Every time I read the daily entry, I get a new perspective and insight.

Today, February 27, the entry reads:

If you want to embrace the light, you must also embrace the darkness.

LIVING YOUR YOGA: We all long for love, peace, and ease. But in order to fully experience them, we must also be willing to embrace our hatred, anger, and agitation. Today when you feel any strong negative emotions, really feel them. Cutting off negative feelings cuts off our ability to feel all emotions.

I especially enjoy this, because reading it feels like a long relieved exhalation. It’s given me permission to acknowledge emotions that I once thought were “off-limit”.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

One thing about the yoga and meditation world that I think “hooks” people in is the promise of bliss, and not just any kind of bliss, eternal bliss, ecstatic bliss, (uh, not to mention, yoga bliss hips). If you’re not happy, practice it. If you’re currently happy, you could be happier, all the time. My god, even the mat wash oughta be happy.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for happy, love, bliss, and more happy. Nope, nothing against that at all.

What I’ve learned though, that when we talk about abstract concepts like love, compassion, happy, spiritual, bliss, without setting any context, without any preconditions, we can run into all sorts of troubles when we’re not experiencing any of those emotions.

For example, let’s say something has gone very wrong, everything has hit the fan. My uncensored reaction might go something like this, “I’m so pissed! No, I’m fucking pissed! I HATE HATE HATE.” Or, perhaps something milder happened. Maybe I’m slightly offended by something. I might run off, get on my high horse and judge, roll my eyes and get all worked up. You know the drill.

Uh oh, but, I’m a yoga teacher! I’m not supposed to get upset! I’m not supposed to get livid! Quelle horreur! Seeing this, I might tell myself, “Oh, it’s okay. I’m fine. I’m supposed to be happy, and loving. Yes, I love everyone. And we’re all one. Ommm.”

If this is my approach to every crummy moment in life, I’ll end up with a lot of repression, won’t I?

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

I’m learning that in the context of yoga, things like love and happiness aren’t what we think they are. They’re not the–”I’m so happy it’s sunny out”, or, “I love this present you gave me”–kind of emotions.

Once, when my boyfriend was waiting to hear back from a prospective employer and getting worried and anxious, I told him to be happy and just enjoy the moment. He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Be happy? How could I be happy when I may not get the job?”. “Is everybody who has a job happy? And all the unemployed people are swimming in giant seas of unhappiness?” I asked him. “Well, yeah. How could you be happy if you don’t make any money?”

I knew then that we weren’t talking about the same kind of happiness. My teacher Shinzen Young often talks about a kind of happiness that’s independent of any conditions. That’s probably the happiness and bliss that yoga teachers and magazines often talk about. But I’m not convinced that it’s clearly explained enough, especially in mainstream yoga. Or, perhaps the ambiguity is intentional. After all, my guess is “Practice Feeling Completely Rotten” doesn’t sell as many magazine copies.

All Fall Down

I’m finding out that taking the role of the Witness, the Observer (or Ishvara) means that I’ve got to call an Ace an Ace. Whatever emotion that’s passing by, no matter how dark, should be recognized. Oh look, there’s anxiety. There’s jealousy. There’s selfishness. There’s self-righteousness.

And the trick is to do so with a kind of tenderness, a kind of… well, love; love for my humanness. How human of me to be scared, to be hurt, to project. Practicing this way, for me, creates a kind of happiness that’s really sweet, and so hard to describe. “I’m happy that I can see how awful this experience is.” I know, it doesn’t make any friggin’ sense, does it?

Well, I can say more, but Pema Chodron has eloquently and concisely put it in one sentence as she talked about Maitri, the practice of loving-kindness.

“Maitri is not about feeling good, it’s about feeling whatever you feel with a compassionate attitude and with extreme honesty” – Pema Chodron, Awakening Compassion Lectures.

Have you ever felt like you were “supposed” to feel anything different than what you’re currently feeling? How do you work with that?

Perhaps you need a copy of Yoga Journal, kitteh?

Yoga with Nikki Chau

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

Category Archives: Yoga Tips