Can You Earn a Living Teaching Yoga?

Beaten up by the economy, more people are looking for solace on a yoga mat. And they’re not just angling for a good spot on the floor. Many want to stand at the front of the room, as an instructor. The unemployment line has led straight into yoga studios, where the recession has brought an uptick in teacher training enrollment.

Here at DoubleX, we wondered about the return on that investment [2], sometimes in the range of $4,000 for a 200-hour course. Do you have to be a celebri-yogi or the head of a chain of studios to see a payoff? Who actually makes a living from the $6 billion yoga industry?

A lot of the teachers you see when you take classes aren’t actually making a living at yoga, we gathered from the responses we got from readers. For them, it’s a form of self-employment and independent contracting that allows for flexible hours and often a sense of belonging and spirituality. But if you want yoga to pay your bills, you've got to leave the deep breathing and asanas at the door and do the capitalist hustle.

Starting out, yoga can look a little like indentured servitude. Like a lot of teachers, Paula Lynch got her start as a devoted student. She took classes for years—as many as six sessions a week—before getting certified as a teacher in 2005. She set up a payment plan to cover the $1,600 price tag for her 10-week training course. And she held onto her full-time job managing a New York restaurant, figuring she could work teaching into her schedule.

Watch our video on the dirty little secrets of yoga instructors.

She did, sort of. At the restaurant, “Last call was at 2 a.m. I’d get home at 4 a.m., take a nap, and then teach a class at 10:30 a.m.” And she was doing it for free. Because she was a beginner, Lynch didn’t earn anything at first. Within a year, though, she built up a stable of classes and private clients, mostly through referrals from her own yoga teachers. She quit her restaurant job (and lost its health benefits) and committed to teaching yoga full-time. It was rough. “I had to borrow money from friends and family members just to make rent,” she says. “It was always a choice of do I pay my bills this month, or do I fill my fridge?”

Things got easier when Lynch landed a part-time administrative job at YogaWorks, the chain that operates 23 studios in California and New York. Now she supports herself solely with teaching. It comes with a lot of paperwork. She saves receipts, tracks different revenue streams, and buys her own health insurance. A chunk of her earnings come from the $65 per class she makes teaching at YogaWorks. The chain is doing just fine—it has quickly grown by by buying up small studios [3] and has opened new locations throughout the downturn.

The corporate profits aren’t much trickling down to the front of the studio, however. To make a decent income, teachers have to supplement the money they make teaching group classes by attracting private clients. “When I teach privately, that’s the most bang for the buck,” Lynch says. She charges $125 an hour and plans to raise her rates soon.

These days, Lynch teaches about 30 hours a week, with 16 steady classes and around 10 private lessons. She’s financially stable but not affluent. “Every month, I have enough to pay rent and bills first. What’s left over then feeds me, buys my metro card, and coffee or something else. But my savings are very small,” she says.

That actually makes her one of the lucky ones. Other teachers are finding that in the recession, private clients can be fickle. In Knoxville, David Morgan lost about 90 percent of his students when the economy deflated last fall. “It was a serious drop in income,” he says, “and it was fast.”

Morgan moved to the church-basement circuit, a model of teaching yoga that has its plusses. You get the whole take because you have cheap space. But when you're moving around, you have to make sure your customers know where to find you. And if no one shows, no payday.

Over the winter, Morgan built up a schedule of dozens of classes in different churches. He asked for donations rather than setting a fee. "I was making a living—barely," he says. Then springtime came, and his clients stopped exercising indoors. Morgan moved to the next level of yoga entrepreneurship: setting up his own studio [4]. He rented space and offered dirt-cheap introductory rates. He was turning a small profit by July. But he’s not earning enough to support himself yet, despite his 100-hour workweeks. Most of that time, he’s not doing yoga. “I teach 20 classes and private lessons a week,” he says. “Then there's the administrative duties, custodial duties, customer service, marketing and advertising, keeping the website up to date, creating events on Facebook.”

April Woody also has her own studio [5] in Charleston, W.Va. She started it to get out of the house as a young mom. After a year-and-a-half in business, she’s meeting overhead and even making a little more than that. But it’s her husband’s salary that covers the bills for their home and two boys. “It would be a burden if there was more pressure to contribute financially, because I don't do that very much,” she says.

April’s a believer in what she calls “spiritual economics.” “We just leave our cash box sitting out.” That’s in keeping with the yoga spirit, she says. But if you want to move up the food chain, Brooklyn-based instructor Sadie Nardini says, you have to be more hard-nosed. Nardini has parlayed her teaching into magazine columns, international workshop appearances, and a Soho studio called The Fierce Club. [6] She has an agent from a new yoga management company [7]. She estimates that these days only about 10 percent of her income comes from teaching classes. The rest is from DVD sales, teacher training courses, and workshop retreats. And Sardini is unabashed about treating yoga as a cash cow. "There’s a myth that you can't be spiritual and rich at the same time," she says. "But it's not spiritual to be broke and stressed out about your rent.”

Nardini also says that “It’s totally more than possible to make six figures a year teaching yoga.” She has to believe that, since her latest venture is an ebook that offers financial advice for yogis (available for sale on her website of course). With a business plan, she says, comes better yoga. Maybe. But for a lot of teachers, yoga in the recession feels like manual labor in cuter clothes.