The Business of Yoga: When the Practice and the Industry Collide

I’ve spent more than two decades teaching yoga, and lately I’ve been thinking about the rather uncomfortable relationship between the practice I’ve devoted my life to and the industry that has grown around it.

It’s a strange thing to make a living teaching people about nonattachment while simultaneously trying to keep a business alive.

Yoga studios are closing. Teachers are struggling to earn a sustainable living, and communities that have spent years practicing together are losing the spaces that brought them together. I find this genuinely heartbreaking, particularly because I now understand the financial realities of owning one of those spaces.

There’s an enormous difference between loving yoga and being able to afford to keep teaching it.

Yoga has always had an interesting relationship with commerce. Teachers deserve compensation for their knowledge, and maintaining a physical space costs money. But modern business models demand growth. More members, more classes, more revenue, and preferably a steady stream of something new to keep people interested.

Meanwhile, the philosophy we’re teaching asks us to examine our relationship with wanting more in the first place.

You have to appreciate the irony.

We’ve created an entire economy around the pursuit of wellbeing. We sell experiences designed to help people disconnect from a culture of consumption, often using the very marketing strategies that perpetuate it.

And I’m not suggesting that everyone selling yoga is doing something wrong. I’m part of that economy myself. I’ve spent years organizing teacher trainings, leading international retreats, and developing programs that introduce people to the practice. I understand the work involved in creating these opportunities, and I believe that work deserves to be compensated.

But I also think we should be willing to question what happens when the business model begins influencing the practice rather than the practice informing the business.

At what point does making yoga accessible become making yoga marketable? And are those necessarily the same thing?

One of the more difficult things I’ve learned as a studio owner is that experience doesn’t necessarily translate into commercial success.

You can spend decades studying and teaching yoga, develop meaningful relationships with your students, and offer something you genuinely believe has value. None of that guarantees you’ll fill a room.

And when you’re responsible for paying the bills, it’s surprisingly easy to begin measuring the value of your work by the number of people who show up.

That’s a particularly uncomfortable realization for someone who has spent much of her career encouraging students to examine their attachment to outcomes.

I can intellectually understand that the value of a practice isn’t determined by attendance. I can teach that principle with complete conviction. But understanding something philosophically and living it when your livelihood is involved are two very different experiences.

Perhaps that’s where the practice becomes most interesting.

Lately, I’ve also been asking myself whether the traditional studio model is necessarily the best way to continue sharing yoga.

Not because I believe studios have lost their value. Quite the opposite. I’ve witnessed what happens when people find a place where they feel known and connected. I’ve watched friendships develop between people who might otherwise never have met. I’ve seen students return week after week, not because they’re chasing a physical achievement, but because something about being in that room matters to them.

Those relationships are real, and I don’t think we should underestimate their importance.

But perhaps preserving those relationships doesn’t always require preserving the exact business structure that brought everyone together.

That’s a difficult distinction to make when you’ve invested so much of yourself in creating that space.

There’s also something worth examining about the expectations we place on yoga teachers.

We encourage them to teach from a place of authenticity, to remain connected to the philosophical foundations of the practice, and to approach their work with integrity. Yet we also expect them to become marketers, content creators, salespeople, and entrepreneurs capable of competing in an increasingly crowded wellness industry.

Being an exceptional teacher and being an exceptional businessperson are not the same skill set.

And while there’s certainly nothing wrong with developing both, I wonder how much valuable teaching gets lost because the people doing it simply aren’t interested in becoming brands.

I don’t believe yoga needs to reject commerce to maintain its integrity. Nor do I believe teachers should be expected to sacrifice their financial wellbeing in the name of spirituality. That expectation has its own problems, and romanticizing financial struggle does nothing to support the people dedicating their lives to this work.

But I do believe we need to become more thoughtful about what we’re building around the practice, and whether those structures are actually serving the people who participate in it.

Because at some point, the question becomes whether we’re adapting yoga to sustain the business or adapting the business to sustain yoga.

And I think that’s a question worth asking, especially now.

I’ve watched the yoga industry change enormously throughout my teaching career. I’ve seen trends emerge, become wildly popular, and eventually give way to something else. Some of those changes have made the practice more accessible, and I welcome that. Others have left me wondering whether we’ve become so preoccupied with selling the experience of yoga that we’re losing sight of what the practice is actually asking of us.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion to offer.

After more than twenty years, I’m still learning what it means to practice what I teach, particularly when the circumstances of my own life make those teachings considerably less theoretical.

Maybe that’s part of the lesson I’m being asked to confront right now. Not how to make the practice fit the life I’ve built around it, but how to let the practice inform what I choose to build next.

What I do know is that my relationship with yoga has never depended on a building, a business name, or the number of people in a room.

The way I share it may continue to change.

The reason I teach it hasn’t.

xo,

🧘🏻‍♀️🧪
Lindsey