“The Art and Business of Teaching Yoga”
Info: amyippoliti.com
When you turn your favorite hobby into your career, it changes.
When Amy Ippoliti, of Boulder, decided to follow her love of yoga to become a yoga teacher, she didn’t just immediately start making a living doing yoga all day.
Sometimes, it’s hard to find time and desire to do her own personal yoga practice at all, she says.
Sometimes, it’s hard to deal with the pressure of upholding the image of being a yogi on social media. Like it or not, #yogateacher is a crazy popular hashtag on Instagram, and sharing pics of poses in beautiful locations has become a new, major marketing tool for the industry, Ippoliti says.
To make it a full-time career, she has had to essentially run four different business models at the same time: group classes, workshops, retreats and private sessions. Add to that the teacher trainings she leads, the online classes she runs and the book she just co-wrote.
All of the ohms and mantras don’t change the fact that being a yoga pro — especially in this day and age, especially in Boulder County — can be a tough business.
That’s why Ippoliti, along with local yogi and entrepreneur Taro Smith, recently published the book, “The Art and Business of Teaching Yoga: The Yoga Professional’s Guide to a Fulfilling Career.” The book, released this summer, is available at most local and national booksellers, and it piggybacks on Ippoliti’s online yoga teacher training courses.
When she began teaching yoga in 1996, she says she struggled to find work. Back then, because there wasn’t the demand. Not as many people were doing yoga, so there weren’t enough classes to support a steady career.
A few years later, Ippoliti was teaching teachers, and her students couldn’t find work. This time, it was for the opposite reason, but it led to the same result: Yoga had become so popular that too many people jumped into the field, creating a glut of teachers and classes.
Although the book doesn’t report the number of yoga teachers in America, the Yoga Alliance alone boasts more than 90,000 members. That’s only a sliver of the field.
“My graduates were having trouble finding a job, because now there were so many teachers, and it was hard to stand out,” she says. “It broke my heart, because I was a trainer, and my kids weren’t doing well.”
Even over the past few years, the increase in interest has been dramatic. In 2012, 20.4 million Americans had practiced yoga, according to a report by Yoga Journal and Yoga Alliance.
By this year, that number has surged to 36.7 million.
Nearly one-third of all Americans have taken a yoga class at least once, according to the report.
Although Ippoliti doesn’t know of numbers in Boulder, the city’s reputation as a yoga hub suggests that percentage may be even higher.
The Yoga Journal named Boulder one of the country’s top 10 cities for yoga.
Boulder is the home to the Hanuman Festival (a yoga and music event that draws participants from around the world every year), as well as other yoga-related big businesses, from Gaia to Prana. Boulder is also home to a handful of internationally known yoga masters, such as Richard Freeman.
Here, competition is extreme, Ippoliti says.
She says she saw many people getting trapped in the “vicious cycle of being a yoga teacher.” They would teach as many hours as possible (sometimes for a flat per-class rate instead of per student, which she frowns upon) while trying to live a healthy, conscious (and expensive) lifestyle. They would save money for continued training, with the hopes that it would help them stand out, but while they were training, they would lose students or get injured from pushing too hard. They would return home to an even faster rat race, trying to make up for the time lost while they were away, and the spiral would continue downward, Ippoliti says.
“They were heroes, because they came into a community to make people feel better about themselves, lead a better life and get out of pain, yet they were getting nothing,” she says.
That discrepancy inspired the book.
It offers tips to help yoga teachers stand out from the competition, as well as general business advice and insight on how to treat the work as a professional, not just hobbyist.
That’s another battle in the yoga scene, she says. Not all teachers treat it as a career. This can lead to teachers not showing up to a class. This kind of attitude undermines the entire industry, Ippoliti says.
“Remember that teaching yoga, as enjoyable as it is, is a profession, not a hobby,” she says. “When you hold your career as a profession, you don’t undermine other professionals. You elevate them.”
These days, amid hefty competition, careless teachers neglecting their students are less of a problem. But one issue that remains is the tension of running a business with spiritual undertones, Ippoliti says.
“There’s a lot of confusion about should I be making money as a yoga teacher? In this country, church is free,” she says. “But spiritual doesn’t mean you’re not teaching something educational. It’s an education, and as such, you get paid.”
She addresses these philosophical struggles in the book. She offers marketing and business advice, too — something people approaching yoga from a spiritual perspective can be unprepared for.
“There’s a new crop of yoga teachers who have gained ridiculous popularity on Instagram, and they parlay partnerships with big brands and create passive income streams,” Ippoliti says.
These are often the teachers making the good money, she says. She says she doesn’t see many local yoga teachers taking advantage of social media’s power.
“Boulder yoga studios are not above social media, but they have more going on in life than social media. And that’s a great thing. They prioritize the practice more than taking yoga photos,” she says. “It’s somewhat of a superficial endeavor. But at the same time, when you have a curated gallery on Instagram, it does get people watching you and following you. If you have beautiful captions with yoga teachings, it can help you have more visibility.”
Like it or not, that’s one way to stand out.
She would know. Ippoliti has 41,500 Instagram followers, more than 60,000 on Facebook and 20,200 on Twitter.
“Harness social media,” she says. “As annoying as it can be, it is an asset that you can harness.”
Aimee Heckel: 303-473-1359, heckela@dailycamera.com or twitter.com/aimeemay
