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Before I fell in love with yoga, I started my career at an incredible arts non-profit in Houston called Writers in the Schools. We sent creative writers into schools, hospitals, juvenile detention centers, really anywhere you can think of, to engage children in the pleasure and power of reading and writing. At the end of our sessions, we would have the kids repeat after us loudly and proudly, “My voice is powerful, and my voice can change the world.” If you didn’t know that I was a writer because I’ve done many different things in my career, I’ve been a writer since the fourth grade when I used the adjective cornsilk to describe the color of a character’s hair in a short story, and my teacher who had seen the light on my face when she read Roald Dahl’s The Witches to our class weekly, recognized my talent and nurtured it.  

Honestly, I prefer to write fiction or poetry or literally anything else than a nonfiction article on the yoga industry, but I was brought up in my profession outside of yoga by great arts administrators who believe in social justice, and I truly believe my voice is powerful, and my voice can change the world.

For anyone who needs to hear this clearly or loudly in the back, I know exactly who I am, and what I am saying. And I’ve never been prouder of who I am, or of my contribution to the yoga industry. I am speaking from more than a decade of full-time experience in the industry and about my experience at many different studios and trainings as a Director, manager, teacher, teacher of teachers, student, teacher in training, and teacher training assistant.  

I am proud to call myself one of the Houston yoga and worldwide yoga community and I am grateful for the studios in my city and the people who give their hearts to running and supporting them. I am alive because of the healing practice of yoga, and I believe in the sacredness of the spaces we practice in.

My intention is not to cause harm to any studio or any individual. I think every single studio is a life-line for hundreds of students and I am grateful for every single one, especially the studios I have had the privilege to work for and help build. 

For every painful story I have, I also have a breathtakingly beautiful one. But, I have recently come to realize that when teachers with as much experience, history, and leadership as me only share their joy for the industry, and not their pain inside of it, it is a disservice to other yoga teachers and to the industry as a whole.

Our industry has real issues in areas such as mentorship and training, ethical and clear contracts, fair and timely pay, gender inequity, accessibility, lack of clear professional and personal boundaries, physical and emotional abuse, cultural appropriation, and the list goes on.

There are so many things I’ve been through, and seen my friends and colleagues go through over the years that we survived, learned from and lived to do better ourselves, to train newer teachers and managers to do better, and yet, I see so much of the past repeat itself, and it is unbearable to me.  

I have a deep compassion and an intimate understanding of what it takes to run a yoga studio, and what it takes to have a long-term career as a yoga teacher. If you know me, you know me. But, if you don’t know me, what you need to know is 11 years ago, when I turned 29, I fell in love with a local yoga studio called BIG Yoga, and I took a pay cut from my barely covering the bills arts nonprofit job that I loved, to go work full time in the yoga industry. BIG was a part of a worldwide community of yoga studios through Baptiste Yoga, until 2020, when we de-affliated and separated from the Baptiste Institute completely.

A few of my fondest highlights from a decade long career: running our kids yoga program; being the Director of our Memorial studio; all of the amazing studio teams I’ve worked on and led; 2020 - teaching three classes a day from my one bedroom apartment and innovating online yoga with talented gamechangers; all of the wonderful humans I’ve interviewed, hired, trained, partnered with; teaching BIG SUP yoga, hugging dogs, meeting your babies, teaching holiday classes so full I didn’t know where to stand, and the most challenging and the most important, the last four years 2020-2024: re-opening the doors and doing whatever it took to keep the doors open. I have said it and I will say it for the rest of my life. Thank you. I came alive here and being at BIG with you (if you were here with me) was one of the most profound and meaningful experiences of my life. I am forever grateful to Nancy Perry, Laura Rust, the BIG team and community for 10+ years of purpose, passion, laughter, and making a difference together.   

I want you to know that these years were some of the best of my life, and I would do it all over again, even knowing the pain that I would go through and witness my friends and colleagues go through. I’ve asked myself in reflection on the other side: how can an industry that causes so much beauty, healing, and personal growth, also cause heart breaking harm, pain, and chaos? When beloved senior teachers or teachers of teachers leave the profession and have to take years to heal themselves through self-care practices and therapy, that is not right. We could do better for our own.

I am not okay with the things that happened to me in this industry.  

I am not okay with the time I took a vacation to visit one of my best friends and discovered that the manager of the studio where she taught was being sexually harassed daily physically and emotionally by a senior male teacher. You can bet I spent a day of my vacation starting the conversations that led to that teacher’s termination.   

I am not okay with the time a student slapped me on the ass with a yoga strap in front of my entire class before it started and when I cried out in pain and expressed that it hurt, he said, “no it didn’t.” My instinct was to make a joke, “don’t take me out before I teach your class,” and despite the fact that it brought up so many things in my life that I’ve been through as a woman, I had to walk up to the front of the room, put on a smile, and teach an amazing class for my students.   

I’m not okay with the number of times female yoga teachers would call me when I was a Director. Teachers who had more education, more training, and more experience than many of their male counterparts, and actively did the work to sequence and theme their classes intelligently to ask me why their classes weren’t as full, what they were doing wrong, and what they could do better.  

I’m not okay with the fact that we let our bosses, managers, teachers, and employees get away with things that they would never get away with in the corporate world because we deeply love them and have personal relationships with them. Honestly, there were a few more stories I had originally written about that I removed because of this, which does weigh on me.  It is the job of a journalist to tell the stories that need to be told, but I am also not a journalist so I have compassion for myself with where I am and what I can manage in this moment.

I’m not okay with the fact that for years I took emotional abuse from my male bosses who I loved and were my best friends because I oriented myself to believe that their feedback, belittling, and breaking down of my spirit were to make me a better and more empowering leader, and that I allowed that to happen to others through my friendship, partnership and belief in them. And, I’m not okay with the fact that even though I finally did realize what was happening and become an advocate for others, that I still spent years replaying and apologizing for all of the management conversations I had ever had with someone that were in the style of the way those managers trained me.

I’m not okay with the fact that I have a painful hip injury from the time I was in a teacher training with a cohort of teachers and we were forced to practice Warrior 2 for two hours with a PVC pipe to ensure our front thigh was parallel to the ground, and our front shin was parallel to our knee and ankle, and taunted the entire time.  

And most of all, I am not okay with the fact that my friends and colleagues around the world in the industry are telling me the same stories today that I was telling two years ago that my friends and colleagues were telling two years before that and the teachers who were my mentors when I began were telling ten years ago. The past is not dead, and it is up to us to change the future.  

And, then there are painful things I went through that are just the nature of yoga studios being a corporation just like any corporation with a profit and loss statement, and I accept these. I accept that I have had to be a part of three studio closures. I accept that I have had to hold my team members and my colleagues in my arms and let them cry as they lost their livelihood, but mostly because they were losing their yoga home.

Every hurricane or natural disaster over the last decade, I wasn’t with my family. I was taking care of a studio, a team, and a community. I was braving floods to teach pop up classes. I was teaching during tornados. I missed every one of my aunt’s Sunday brunches. But, I accept that after ten years of service to my studio, my job ended in a split second moment on a phone call when for the millionth time in my career, I was asked to choose how we were going to cut labor costs and if I was going to cut my team and work all their hours, or cut myself, and for the first time in my career, I chose to cut myself because I knew the gig was up, the doors were going to close, and I had already declined the offer to work for the owner's new high-end business in a demoted role at a 30% pay cut.

In 2020, the world was in uproar in pain, rage, and heartbreak from years of oppression, murder, and unspeakable loss, and I believe the people that were speaking out then were speaking out to protect others, to share their experiences, to cause massive and rapid change, and to move the world in the direction of love, fairness, and equality. A lot of my friends and colleagues left the industry that year, and I decided to stay. I stayed because I was in love with the practice, the team, and the community, and with making a difference for hundreds of students a day. 

And, I stayed because of my boss, friend, and studio owner, Nancy Perry. I was not going to use any names in anything I wrote, but I will use her name because I want people to know that I have the utmost respect for her because she took what happened on our team that year, and in the worldwide yoga community, and in the world, and she went and created change. She ended partnerships and terminated problematic and harmful leaders; she took a stand for the Black Lives Matters movement, and she partnered with leaders of color in our community to cause education, awareness, action and change; she hired a talented HR professional so our team had someone to speak to besides her; she brought in an expert on diversity and inclusion to train our team in understanding and recognizing our own biases so we could collaborate with each other and others in a more kind, compassionate, and regulated way. She used her privilege and her platform to champion so many people, and so many causes, and it brought a lot of hate and a lot of pain her way. And if anyone is still upset with her because she closed the doors of BIG completely in 2024, I will tell you, she and we did everything we could. 

In January 2024, the last year we were open, I went to the doctor with a sore throat, and ended up in the hospital because my blood pressure was so high. The ER doctors thought I was having a stroke or there was a bleed in my brain or there was a hole in my heart. I thought I might die that day, but in the end, after testing everything they could, they gave me Valium and my blood pressure came down. I went through months of testing after that, and my doctor concluded at the end of that time, that my job was killing me, and that I had a sleep disorder from years of shift work. I felt so much pressure that year to create revenue from our programming, I would wake up with no alarm at 4 AM, and work for 3 hours before going on my sunrise walk and heading to the studio to begin a full day of teaching, working, managing and training teachers.  

So here are my top constructive tips:

If you are a studio owner:

1. What you need to understand is that your product is not a can of soda; it is a human being. Your product is Gayatri Parikh, or (insert the name of your favorite yoga teacher here). Remember this first and foremost as you make decisions in business, marketing, social media, messaging, and hiring.
2. Since sexual harassment is the number one lawsuit in the yoga industry, it is essential that you vet your employees the way that any business would vet their employees: multiple round interviews, references, and a background check.  
3. If you’re opening a yoga studio and you are a legitimate LLC, get your teacher contracts, partnership contracts, pay structure, and payroll set up before you have teachers begin teaching, give their hearts to the studio, and begin promoting it.
4. You need a human resources professional. This is a human business, where emotions and passion run high because the humans involved care deeply for the practice, the space, and the people. Your employees need someone to talk to if it’s not working for them to talk to you.  
5. Studios are mostly great about inspiring students to become new teachers and to pouring energy and resources into teacher training, but not so great at retaining senior teachers. If you want to know why, this is mostly about money. Teacher training is the highest cost ticket item on a studio pricing menu. If you treat your senior teachers the same way you treat your first year teachers, you will eventually lose them. They don’t need you to offer yoga, but you do need them to have a quality product. In our industry, students follow teachers. Think about retention.  
6. I have a deep compassion for studio owners. I have never been one, or wanted to be one. But, I do want to say thank you. Thank you for having the vision and bravery. Thank you for taking on the expenses and the liability. Thank you for bearing the unwinnable burden of trying to meet people's expectations because people have unreasonable expectations of their spiritual leaders, who are just human beings doing their absolute best.  

If you are a yoga teacher:

1. You need to read your contract. Especially if you are a yoga teacher that does your own programming in addition to working at a studio, or you teach at multiple studios. I know you trust and love your studio owner, and it doesn’t matter. The contract was written by a lawyer who is doing their job well if it is written to protect the business. And, you are an equal, intelligent, and integral party that has 50% of the responsibility to create an agreement that has integrity with what you believe in and will support your long-term career in yoga. Even better, hire a lawyer.
2. Non-solicitation clauses and non-compete clauses cripple our ability to work for multiple studios effectively and successfully; to steward our students to the best teachers, styles, and studios that work for them in any given season; and to connect our colleagues to the best career opportunities for them.  
3. Even if your studio has yoga teacher insurance, you should get your own insurance. I could write a novel about injuries to teachers and students, failure of the studio to provide a safe physical space, and poor decisions on students' parts about the adequate hydration and nutrition required, and what a safe inversion practice looks like. You need your own insurance.
4. If you are a senior teacher with your own intellectual property you are using for workshops and classes, make sure your contract clarifies in a defined way what intellectual property you will own and what intellectual property the studio will own when you part ways, including on demand recorded videos of your classes.
5. If your studio does not have a process for obtaining student consent for receiving physical yoga assists, then you need to create your own clear process. This is to protect our students, who may have very likely experienced trauma or injuries or prefer not to be physically touched by you, and to protect you.

If you are a manager: 

1. I will tell you, it was a thrilling, beautiful and wild ride to work full time in the yoga industry. I would do it all over again, but I was always aware from day 1 that it was a risky move. And, especially in 2020, I knew I might go down with the ship, and I did, so if you choose to do it, go into it with open eyes. Keep building your skills in areas like management, marketing, social media, or literally anything you are interested in so that if you ever need to, like I did, you can go and make a pivot.
2. You will hire and fire and have disciplinary conversations with your friends a hundred times, and it will take a toll on you.
3. You need to have friends and family outside of the yoga industry. You need to have people you can go to dinner with and take a break from talking about what you deal with day in and day out.  
4. You will likely have no clear boundaries around your work hours and it will be up to you to create them. When do you start working? When do you finish working? (Most studios open in the 4 AMs, and close in the 10 PMs). Who handles what you handle on your days off?  
5. Burnout, frustration, sleep disorders from shift work are all real issues and I’ll throw my hand up in the air as being one of many managers who is still trying to heal from the way I’ve harmed my health. In an industry that’s about wellness, are yoga studio managers well?  

If you are a teacher of teachers:

1. Something you need to be aware of is that training yoga teachers creates an intimacy between human beings that is beautiful, but often only for a season.  
2. Teachers in training are in a sensitive time in their lives. It takes great courage and strength to get up at the front of the room when you are learning in public, and it is our responsibility to train new teachers with love, honesty, respect, support, and boundaries.
3. Thank you for using your experience and sharing it with newer teachers. You do not have to do that. You could just focus on your own career. It is an act of complete service, and if you trained us, we are so grateful.
4. You cannot treat your South Asian yoga teachers like all your other yoga teachers. We have an innate and from birth knowledge of yoga and meditation because it is from our culture, and our relatives and ancestors may practice it in a religious way. No matter how many trainings you do, how many mantras you memorize, or what you’ve changed your name to, have the humility to respect us and our knowledge the way that we respect you and your knowledge.
5. Please show your teachers in training how to avoid cultural appropriation by simply and authentically sharing the source of what they are teaching. It doesn’t have to be that complicated.

And if you’ve only seen me behind the front desk or at the front of the room at BIG - easy, breezy, with a smile on my face, full of joy, laughter filling the room - and you don’t know this side of me…If you’ve never heard my precise language, direct delivery, and earned confidence, then I will tell you the truth. Most of us could work in any industry, but we choose to work in this industry because the practice of yoga changed our lives, and we want to give back to others. The tone that you hear in this article is the voice of a powerful woman, and people love to shut down a powerful woman who is speaking the truth. But this same quality you may not like here, is the same reason you likely had such a great experience when I was involved in a studio, a training, or a challenge that you participated in.

And if you’ve seen me cleaning floors and picking up laundry, and you think I’m not intelligent, I graduated 10th in my high school class (tied with my bestie and got to sit next to her at graduation) among a class of 763 students; I had my pick of Ivy League schools to go to but I stayed local to save money; I graduated with a 4.0 in college, and I have a Masters degree from one of the most world-renowned philosophy and literature schools in the country. And if you think I am uncentered, or I don’t project the love and light and kumbaya spirit you think is appropriate in yoga, I will tell you successful studio owners and managers are the most type A, high performing, disciplined human beings you will ever come across. 

And if you think I am emotional, I will tell you that people tend to enjoy my emotion when it is joyful or funny or deeply loving, but the other side of that is a capacity to experience deep pain and anger, and even though that is not popular, I accept the fact that I feel deeply in all ways, and I affirm myself and my rationality inside of my emotion.

I could pitch this article to magazines, but I’d rather publish it myself, have complete control over the messaging, and know that people in my corner of the world will read it and maybe it will make a difference. I’m going to save my first real publication credit for something I actually want to write, like your next summer beach read, airplane thriller, or a book of poems you can open each day and meditate on.

And finally if you have had some trials and tribulations in this industry that broke you, like you had to fire your whole team in one day, your business partnership broke up, you opened a studio and had to walk away, you were sued, you lost your best friends…I could go on and on… I will tell you that the people who have any grit and longevity in this business have multiple moments in their careers like this. 

This is not a business for the faint of heart.

Welcome to the yoga industry.