On Teaching, and the Ongoing Pursuit of Joy by Angie Never

When I announced my intention to shut down the Yoga Enlarged program at the end of July 2017, lots of people figured it was all about money.

"Too bad you were never able to make enough money off that one," they said.
"I just wish you had made more money," they said.
"Better luck next time," they said.

But I didn't get it.  My public announcement about the change didn't say anything about money.  I hadn't been skipping sundaes or complaining to my friends about how broke I was.  The more I thought about it I began to understand the underlying assumption that was creating this mistake.

Success in teaching equals making a lot of money.  Failure means not making enough. Success (a.k.a. pile of money) means a class can go on forever.  Failure (a.k.a. broke as a joke) means the class has to meet an untimely demise.  While this seemed to feel true to everyone else, it didn't feel true to me.  Why not?

Because my measurement of success is not now nor never has been about money.  If you must know, I made plenty of money.  I made about the same as I've made teaching other yoga classes, and it was enough.  I paid my bills and went on vacation.  I went out to eat and got some new tattoos.  I gave money to charity and bought some shit I didn't need, all signs that one has enough.

But what became apparent to me is that very little of that money was coming my way based on the quality of the class I was teaching.  The money, for a teacher making her own way in the yoga business, is all about the hustle.  The harder I hustled, the more money I made.

The word hustle can sound kind of sexy, like you're half yoga teacher / half hip hop superstar, but what we're really talking about here is marketing.  Which makes you half yoga teacher / half advertising executive, which sounds way less baller.

Hustling means thinking about what kind of photoshoot you can do to get people to come to your class, then bickering with the photographer because he thought he was going to shoot some circus shit that day.  Hustling means scanning through poems not because you love poems, but because you need an inspirational line to superimpose over your inspirational picture so you can get some likes and some shares.  Hustling means trying to think of ways to turn your friends into soldiers in your hustlers' army.  Hustling means looking at every personal interaction as an opportunity to turn a human into a customer.  

The hours I spent with my yoga books and on my mat didn't matter, but the hours I spent on Instagram did.

If you're a yoga teacher and you complain to other yoga teachers about the hustle, they start to relanguage it for you.  (Yoga teachers are nothing if not peerless relanguagers.)  "Don't think of it as marketing," they say.  "Think of it as sharing your gifts with the world."  I'm happy for teachers who can look at the world through that lens, but I'm not one of them.  I'm an anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist anarchist, and it breaks my heart to think of my "gifts" as a brand.  I can do it, but I don't want to.

When I made the decision years ago to live a simple, minimalist lifestyle, I did so because I wanted to be free.  I wanted to pursue a life that suited me exactly, and I didn't want anything to stand in my way.  I live in a cheap apartment and drive old cars and quit on the stability of office work and use stuff until it's totally worn out so that money doesn't have the opportunity to imprison me.

Teaching, creating a space for practice, helping people unlock the best parts of themselves - that suits me exactly.  Brainstorming clever yet ethical Facebook posts doesn't.  So I don't have to do it, no matter money I might be saying no to.  I'm lucky because when I get very clear, and begin to know my own mind, the universe shows up with a silver platter acting like, "Girl, I was just waiting for you to ask."  I know I'll be taken care of, and that liberates me to explore a lot of directions.  I know there are ways we can find each other and keep going without feeding the machine.

We all participate in this cycle, and we can all participate in creating a new model, if we want to.  If you're a studio owner, think about ways you can support the teachers who are important to your business so they can focus on creating great classes for your clientele.  If you don't have any ideas, ask - I am sure your best teachers are brimming with suggestions on how you can support their efforts to advertise.  If you're a student, understand that your teachers are not infinite resources - what can you do to prolong the health and stability of the teachers and classes you love?  For my fellow teachers, I just want to give you permission to say YES to the things you love about all this and NO to the things you don't.  You are allowed to ask for help.  You are allowed to opt out.  You are allowed to be a visionary, and teach us all more about how things can be done.    

Until next time, y'all.  And a big thanks to Melissa Lopez for affirming that what I wanted to say needed said.