I am resisting the need to explain away my desire to be a lucrative yoga teacher by explaining that it is stoked simply by the need to afford a good preschool; to allow my partner more time at home with our daughter; to live in modern society in 2010.
But this would be cowering to the pressure that I should not intend to make money teaching yoga, like any other person intends from their job. That teaching yoga is a vocation, and that I should commit to my ministry at any cost.
In the previous post, I mentioned the Sadie Nardini backlash on Yoga Dork’s Blog.
Ms. Nardini carefully responds, “I would like to pay my bills, yes, but I don’t give a damn about recognition, or becoming rich. This is our dharma…and our careers. To think negatively of this is to widely miss the point.”
What if she did want to become rich while manifesting her dharma?
My 500-hour Yoga Alliance Experienced Yoga Teacher application did not, to my recollection, include vows of poverty, abstinence and cloister. As a teacher, I do my best to commit to the simple humanitarian vows of the yamas and niyamas. I know my dharma viscerally, but I want to manifest it without compromising to my family’s fiscal well being.
Even ministers get that. In 2000, ministers in the United States made, on average, anywhere between $22,000 and $85,000, depending on the size of their congregation.
Turns out ministers are paid commensurate with their ability to fill seats, too.
A minister on Desperate Preacher writes, “The salary the pastor receives *frees* her or him to do ministry. Instead of a part-time pastor who must earn a salary on the side, a full-time pastor is freed from monetary concerns to *do* ministry for and with the church. Thinking along these lines, the church needs to pay the pastor enough to not have to worry -- about food on the table, about a medical crisis, about planning for retirement -- so that we can be in ministry.”
I hear you brother/sister.
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