Dear Friends,
I have decided at this time to stop teaching yoga, at least for a little while. My plan is to create a new life for myself using different types of movement and healing modalities as well as spending more time doing creative things like making macrame projects, writing, playing music, doing environmental activism and more. I love yoga and will continue to practice, more gently than I have treated my body in the past. It's really not the end, it’s just the beginning. I’d like to share some of my thoughts about my experience teaching yoga with you.
I have been a student of yoga since I was 20 years old, so for 16 years, and what I’ve noticed is that the more for me, that I do yoga, the more my body has become hyper-mobile meaning I dislocate incredibly easy doing things that really “shouldn’t” be harming me. This could be because of my body type, but this may also very well be from practicing yoga so much, incorrectly/not in supportive ways for MY body. I have teachers who I’ve trained with that actually apologize to me for issues I have in my body, as they feel responsible for it, as they realize now a lot more about the practice than they knew before, and teach differently after learning more.
In regards to the industry, it has mostly been so much fun and rewarding to teach and help people find their bodies and breath, but to be honest In my opinion the industry needs a make over. A lot of yoga teachers are very under paid and receive inadequate compensation and benefits for the work they do. Yoga works offered me for example, $25 to teach a class after doing a training with them, and if I went well, I could work up to $40. Mission cliffs also offered me $45 a class, both opportunities I turned down, only to see other teachers happily accept these offers. In my opinion, yoga has been monopolized by large corporations and desperation from the many new teachers popping out of the industry at all times (the reason some studios stay open at all), and honestly I don’t know what the answer is, but it seems to me that popping out teachers all year long to further saturate an oversaturated and poorly compensated industry is not the answer.
Some folks have been successful in sustaining their own businesses and for that I am truly happy for those people, and they deserve it. What I’ve personally seen, is a very cut throat industry with teachers being so competitive that they don’t truly support each other, they don’t take each others classes, and they don’t try and create community for each other, just themselves. I’ve also seen studio owners that have grown accustomed to taking advantage of teachers in so many ways such as in my own experience holding auditions and arriving to an owner in a teacher training not even looking at me while auditioning, only her phone for about 90 seconds until I was dismissed. To me , teaching new teacher trainees that this is appropriate behavior, is super disappointing and lacks integrity and more.
I have also witnessed a studio manager bad mouthing students as they walked in and then eventually firing me for sticking up for myself when they would same day decide that they’re feeling up to teaching the class for me, and instead of calling me or emailing me, they let me find out day of, by logging in to mind body and changing my name to theirs, something they thought was acceptable and something other teachers also experienced, I came to find out, but they were too afraid to complain about. Rightfully so as they would have been fired! This studio owner even brought a fellow teacher to the last class she had me teach and this teacher stood by her side and never defended me, only to find out later that she too quit for similar reasons/the owner poorly treating the teachers.
It is not my wish to tell you these things to bad mouth yoga in the bay, but rather to plead with you. Please, do not be complacent and silent when you see injustice with your fellow teachers. Please stand up for yourselves. This includes not working for minuscule pay rates as you then set the standard rate for the whole industry by allowing someone to under value you. Please do not stand by idly while your colleagues are mistreated. This is the bay, be an activist for what’s right! That is yoga. It’s time that we all valued ourselves more, and stood up for each other and supported each other. Please remember why you decided to teach in the first place.
I’m moving to Colorado. Good luck to each and every one of you.
With love,
Jessica