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, 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 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.”

Tags: sadie nardini, yoga, yogaworks

Anna Sale is a freelance writer and radio producer based in Brooklyn.

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