I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger, she got needs –

I ain’t sayin’ she a gold digger, she got needs –

In 2006, I averaged 14 students and $73 per class on four yoga classes.

I set aside Light on Yoga and set out to become a yoga-preneur. I devoured Good to Great, Break from the Pack and The Starbucks Experience. All books address why some businesses fail, some succeed and some set the bar in a market.

I was seeking the magic bean that would set me apart in the suffocating commoditization of my previously unique offering of Power Yoga. My students were leaving by the handfuls for teacher trainings and I would never see them again on the mat. I encountered their adho mukhas on home made posters with slightly bastardized, eerily familiar slogans, selling Power Yoga everywhere from church basements to health clubs.

There are few palatable ways to measure one’s ability to teach yoga, or to evaluate improvement. Undeniably, the popularity of a class is correlated with success and the ability to fill the mats inextricably connected to pay. I opened an Excel spreadsheet and began tracking and plotting my class attendance.

In 2009, I averaged 28 students and $130 per class on the same four yoga classes.

If you ain’t no punk, holler we want –

I want to make a decent living teaching yoga without teaching to “burn out” or needing to hold down a second career. I seem to be on the right path but I lack certainty because I am at a loss to diagnose what it is exactly that has carried me this far. And because everyone is certain it can’t be done.

Recently, The New York Times featured a yoga teacher on food stamps as the poster child of the struggling under employed.

According to the yoga blogosphere, not only is financial prosperity unlikely, neither teachers nor students find it an acceptable intention for yoga teachers, according to posts on XXFactor, YogaDork, and Scenic Root.

And the animosity toward those that are making it big or want to make it big as yoga teachers is fierce. Certainly, some bring this upon themselves (the object of stretching is pulling… huh?) Others are helpless targets. Take the recent Sadie Nardini backlash from the haters commenting on Yoga Dork’s Blog.

The esteemed Yoga Journal’s Teacher Tells All blog recently posed, “Can Yoga Teachers Teach Full Time and Pay the Bills?” And the answers came passionately, and conclusively, maybe.

Personally, I need more than a maybe. Once and for all I need to know, can yoga bring the bling?

In this blog I publicly embark, for all our edification, on a year of not simply teaching yoga, but of Being a Yoga Teacher. Follow as I explore, by trial and error, what is teaching enough and what’s too much? How do you stay true to your authentic mission as a teacher and survive in a consumer society? How much attention needs to be paid to the business of yoga without turning yoga into just a business?

The audacious yoga teacher declares, “I will make a living teaching yoga.”

Get down girl, go ‘head get down (dog).