“Do as many deadlifts as you can for the amount of time that the person you’ve lost has passed,” Borowska said she told the class.

“That can represent either the months or years you’ve been grieving.”

Borowska partnered with Grief, Sweat & Tears to offer that class catering to grieving New Yorkers. Founded in December 2025, GST is an initiative that hosts pop-up workout classes across the city each month.

It’s “where grief meets fitness,” read the Instagram post announcing the $30 class.

Borowska has taught Liftonic weight-training classes for five years, but her pop-up grief class was the first time she opened a session by sharing how she lost her mother to lung disease.

“Let’s keep going,” Borowska urged on the night of the class. “Grief is heavy, but we’re stronger than that, so let’s prove to ourselves and each other how strong we are.”

A workout class mixing sweat and tears isn’t a rare event. Rage cycling sessions, anxiety yoga and dozens of similar fitness initiatives have gained traction in recent years, inviting people to choose workout classes based on experiences and emotions.

Do these classes actually help people process grief, rage and heartbreak? Dr Ryan Martin, a psychologist and author, said there isn’t much research yet available on the topic.

“It’s not unusual for pop culture to be a little bit further ahead than psychologists are when it comes to advocating some of these things,” Martin said.

Finding community

Amid the rise of pickleball tournaments and run clubs, fitness activities are increasingly becoming a venue for social connection. The social networking app Meetup reports more than 3 million members registered across about 2,200 fitness groups globally.

The relationships built within these emotion-centered classes reflect another way adults can make friends. But the shared emotion offers participants opportunity for a more specific connection.

Community is one of the most valuable parts of a workout class like this, said Martin, who is dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay.

For someone searching for a grief community, a grief or trauma support group might seem intimidating. Walking into a grief weight-lifting class, though — that could be an easier task.

“This might provide a community where you know you’re connecting with other people’s similar experiences, but you’re not just doing it over that experience, which could be too much,” Martin said.

Betsy Kaplan, 29, had that idea in mind when she founded Grief, Sweat & Tears. After she lost her father to suicide eight years ago, Kaplan didn’t have a “grief space” at home in New York. She wanted to create a “no-pressure zone,” where no one felt obligated to share their grief stories.

“We’re here to work out,” Kaplan said. “We’re here to meet people who get it and just make new connections.”

At an early GST event, Kaplan connected with Jake Montiel, who quickly became one of her best friends. Montiel lost his mother three years ago when he was 30. As part of GST tradition, participants say the name of the person they’ve lost at the start of each workout class. Montiel said he was petrified the first time he shared his grief out loud, but he found community in the young woman standing next to him, who’d lost her mother.

They clicked immediately, but they also had the workout to bond over. “It’s really an honest, open safe space to basically open up and get that weight off your chest just from saying those powerful words of who you’re grieving,” he said.

Over the past six months, about 400 people have participated in a GST class, according to Kaplan.

A workout for every emotion

In Westminster, Colorado, Elisa Thurston held her engagement party at E-motion Fitness, an event space that’s branded as part rage room, part gym, part sanctuary.

Participants smash paint-filled glass bottles against the walls, one of which they’ve decorated with an emotion they’re feeling, such as rage or fear. Trainers then lead participants in a 45-minute full-body workout before the class moves into another room fashioned as a recovery space with art and quiet music.

Thurston wanted her family to experience a session — and get out last-minute wedding jitters, she said.

After all, the class was her sanctuary through a breakup, during feelings of inadequacy and when she was frustrated with work.

She needed “to sit and reflect with a group of people that I know care about me, and to be able to talk about that together, and then to be able to express that in a really fun and cathartic way,” Thurston said.

“Talk therapy is great to talk through things with somebody, but I do feel like this workout class is just a different way of engaging my whole self in that experience.”

Exercise isn’t the one-size-fits-all solution

Participants often describe “releasing” negative emotions during a workout class, but Martin, the Wisconsin-based psychologist, cautions against saying this. The emotion isn’t going anywhere.

While the concept of choosing to box or run when you’re on the brink of an emotional breakdown might seem like a positive outlet, it isn’t for everyone, according to Martin.

“Be wary. One of the things that cardiovascular activity does is it simulates panic in a lot of ways,” Martin said.

“For a person who is prone to panic disorders or has difficulty with panic, simulating that in some settings might be dangerous.”

Among refugees who’ve experienced significant trauma, a 10-week physical activity programme led to “significant reductions” in PTSD, depression and anxiety, a March study found. Yet researchers still don’t understand specifics around the effects of exercise on people in adverse emotional states.

“What we don’t know yet is exactly why it worked so well — whether it was the exercise itself, feeling safe and supported while exercising, connecting with other people, or some combination of all of those things,” Martin said of the study.

Those considering emotion-centered workout classes should ensure they are able to opt out of a workout whenever they need to, said Dr Ethan Kross, professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

He said he encourages people to “self-experiment.”

How to deal with emotions

What’s Martin’s biggest piece of advice? Don’t just rely on workout classes to process adverse emotions. If you’re dealing with profound trauma or grief, work with therapists or in group therapy, he said.

There are other ways to process negative emotions, Martin said. In addition to therapy and exercise, he recommends speaking to your doctor about medication, spending time in nature and reading books about grief.

Kross said he advises participants to first recognise there are multiple tools to deal with their experiences. If you’re someone who engages in negative self-talk, think about how you’d talk to a friend in the same situation, he said.

He also suggests “adopting a more detached perspective on what’s happening, becoming an observer, a fly on the wall, thinking about what’s happening to you from a distance.”

Kross said the community component of a workout class is “just the tip of the iceberg.” These classes could do more to help people process their emotions, but there isn’t much science informing the class workout structure, he said.

For instance, venting anger might seem like a good idea, but it could sustain it, a 2024 study by The Ohio State University found.

In Borowska’s Liftonic class though, it’s a Friday night — and no one is concerned about the science. Participants gathered outside the studio, mixing laughs at weekend plans with the tears of grief and deadlift-induced sweat.

Montiel and Kaplan, who both attended the session, carried the class’ momentum into a local bar.

“I now have a boatload of friends who, if I’m having a ‘grief moment,’ I can pick up the phone and call. … I can ask if they want to meet for coffee, and I’m seeing it with other people, too,” Kaplan said.

“It sucks that we’re all in this club, but it’s really great to know we have this.”

This article was written by Sneha Dhandapani and published on CNN on Aug 27, 2026.

So here’s a little bit about me.

I came to yoga from journalism.

I was a Singapore Press Holdings scholar, and after completing my National Service I went to Columbia University in New York on a full scholarship. My parents are not particularly well-educated, and I’m the first person in my family to study overseas.

So Columbia was a big deal.

The scholarship paid for everything: tuition, room and board, flights, food. I even had a computer and clothing allowance. Felt like I had won the lottery.

Going to New York changed my life, though not entirely in the ways I had expected.

I was 24 when Rusty, my partner, became ill — during my junior year at Columbia.

It was my first relationship after I had come out in New York as a young adult.

But instead of drinking and partying, and doing what young people did in their 20s, I was taking care of my partner who was dying of cancer. Because Rusty was an only child living on his own, I moved in with him and became his primary caregiver for the next three years.

I went with him to every hospital visit.

I sat in countless waiting rooms, held his hand as he slept, managed his doctors’ appointments, spoke to a steady stream of surgeons and oncologists, traded notes with the nurses, tracked his medications at home, gave him his jabs, and researched new treatments, all while living our lives from scan to scan, amid what felt like unrelenting rounds of chemotherapy and clinical trials.

We fought really, really hard.

Then, when I was 27 and he had just turned 33, in an unremarkable room at a hospital in New York, I told him it was okay to stop fighting.

When the nurse pronounced him dead, two thoughts flashed through my head. Why wasn’t I dead? Who was going to take care of him now?

I didn’t know what to do. As it turned out, there was a lot to do.

I organised two funerals — a burial service in Virginia, where his family lived, and a memorial in New York for our friends. Then, as his named executor, I packed up our apartment, closed his bank accounts, wrote cheques to his friends and family, and gave away his clothes and belongings as he had asked.

By the time it was done, months had gone. I remember crying a lot — not much else.

Looking back, I can’t... it feels like what happened, happened to somebody else, not me. I feel so much tenderness today towards the person who went through that.

Years later, my therapist likened what I had gone through to PTSD. I didn’t realise that at the time; I couldn’t have. I didn’t understand what was happening to me.

I just kept going.

Keep going

After Rusty died, I returned to Singapore and joined The Straits Times, the country’s paper of record, where I had, mostly, a good career.

I was given a lot of responsibility quite early, including covering religion — a particularly sensitive beat in Singapore — and I was among the first to report on the S$50 million City Harvest embezzlement scandal in 2010, as questions about the church’s finances began to emerge.

Later, I helped found the International Association of Religion Journalists and briefly consulted for the Alliance of Civilisations at the United Nations.

I did really, really well.

But what most people didn’t know was that behind the byline, I was barely holding it together. Throughout what was probably the most high-profile period of my journalism career, I was grieving.

For the first two years, I cried on every bus ride home from work. Not a single day went by when I didn’t think about Rusty.

I remember one evening vividly. My best friend was visiting from New York. We hadn’t seen each other for some time, and we sat down to dinner.

She asked me, “So how are you?”

And I crumbled. I cried in front of her for four hours.

I don’t remember much of what we said to each other, but I remember her face — how worried she looked, how she had no idea what to say, how hard she was working to understand what was happening in front of her.

I think that was the first time it occurred to me how much I had been holding in, and the walls I had built around myself simply to function.

Soon after, I left The Straits Times and founded an editorial services company.

Again, I did well. We specialised in a more journalistic style of copywriting and editing, and at my busiest, I was able to charge as much as S$400 an hour for editorial consulting.

But none of it addressed what I was going through emotionally. In fact, I think my “success” made my pain easier to ignore. I was able to do all these other things that made me feel like I was normal. I was working. I was making money. I even managed to go on a few dates.

From the outside, I was functioning perfectly well.

Inside, I had completely shut down.

Now we begin yoga

I wish I could point to a single moment when things began to change, but there wasn’t one.

What there was, over and over, was a room, a mat, and a teacher’s voice asking me to do something I had not done in years: notice what I was feeling.

The cues were always simple, not profound in any way.

Meet yourself where you are today. Come back to your breath. Notice what is actually happening inside your body.

None of it was therapy in the clinical sense of the word, but it was time and space, an hour or two each time, in which I had no story to chase and no deadline to meet — nothing to do and nowhere else to be but be with myself.

I began to see I had been living from story to story — the way I had once lived from scan to scan.

Yoga was the first thing that made me stay put long enough to uncover what I was feeling, and then, slowly, to let myself feel it.

Gradually, I began to do less of my editorial work and more of yoga, until ultimately I decided to devote my time and effort to studying yoga and to my own practice.

And I really did devote myself to it. I was practising at least two hours a day, travelling regularly for workshops and trainings, sometimes spending three to four weeks in New York and Bali practising daily and studying with teachers from all over the world.

That set me on the path towards becoming a yoga teacher, and somehow, I’ve now been teaching for nine years.

I wouldn’t say I run a successful yoga business, though I am very fulfilled in my work. I don’t earn a lot of money, and I haven’t for many years now, ever since I left my corporate life behind.

A studio pays me S$70 to teach a class, which, according to the reporting I’ve just done for The Yoga Edit, is already higher than what most yoga teachers earn in Singapore. But it’s not S$400 an hour.

I feel much more aligned with who I am now. For me, teaching yoga has never been just about the movement practice. It was all of it that opened a way forward: the philosophy, the meditation, the awareness of my breath, and learning to move through the world in a different way from how I had before.

Teaching is a way to offer a little of what yoga has given me to others who may be walking a similar path through grief and loss.

For much of my life, I had been bound by conventional definitions of success. I spent most of it achieving things: getting the scholarship, going to Columbia, seeing my name on the front page of The Straits Times, building a business and being paid very well for my work.

Yoga gave me a different way to measure my life.

Of course, I still get drawn back into the old way of thinking, especially now that I run The Yoga Edit, where I’m constantly thinking about growing the publication, converting readers into subscribers, and keeping people engaged.

But having gone through what I’ve gone through, I’m very conscious that those markers are no longer enough for me to understand my life and what I want out of it.

The present

And that brings me to where I am today.

After teaching yoga for nine years, my heart has begun to open again. And that, really, is where The Yoga Edit comes from.

It brings together my years in the newsroom with what I have learnt on the mat, and what I’d like to contribute to the yoga space here.

There is another part of this that is more personal: I am also in love.

When Rusty died, I thought I had nothing left to give to anyone. I was completely exhausted, and for a very long time, I couldn’t imagine loving someone again, because I believed that there was no love left in me.

Or that I was so broken by grief that no one could love someone like me.

I took Rusty’s death as my failure, and I carried that guilt for years.

Then came John.

I met John in 2023, roughly 16 years after Rusty died. Early in our relationship, I told him he was my second chance at love, and it was only recently that I understood what those words meant — that perhaps I had been alone all those years because I didn’t think I deserved a second chance.

Learning to love John has been, in equal measure, learning to forgive myself. Letting him love me has meant taking down walls I didn’t know I still had.

I don’t know that I can draw a straight line from yoga to where I am today. But I do know that the way I live now, the way I teach, the way I love, and the way I understand my work are all connected to what happened to me, and to the years I have spent trying to understand it.

I am coming back to my editorial work a very different person from the person who left it. And in that sense, The Yoga Edit brings together the last 20 years of my life, and points towards where I hope to be for the next 20.

One year in, I realise that I still care deeply about doing good journalism. I still think about being successful, and I certainly wouldn’t mind being paid S$400 an hour again.

But those things no longer tell me everything I need to know about whether my life is going well.

Twenty years ago, perhaps they did.

Today, I have my writing. I have my practice. I have someone I love.

And, perhaps most importantly, after spending so many years believing I had nothing left to give, I now know that I do.

You’re not alone

If you are grieving — or if reading this has stirred something you haven’t had room to process — you do not have to go through it alone.

Singapore — Call the national mindline on 1771 or Samaritans of Singapore on 1767. Both also take WhatsApp: 6669 1771 and 9151 1767. All available 24 hours. The Singapore Hospice Council maintains a list of bereavement-support services.

United States — Call or text 988, or chat through the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, at any time. Many local hospices also run bereavement groups — often free, and open to the community, whether or not your person was in their care.

United Kingdom — Call Samaritans free on 116 123, at any time. For grief-specific support, call Cruse Bereavement Support on 0808 808 1677, Monday to Friday; hours vary by day.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November

Changes to my subscription model are coming, but for now, The Yoga Edit is still free to read, with the full archive of over 200+ articles available to everyone.

Become a subscriber here.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

On Wednesday, I published Nobody Talks About Yoga Teacher Pay, one of the most extensively reported stories The Yoga Edit has produced.

Thirty-one teachers responded to my survey. Four studios answered my questions about what they pay and how those rates are determined. Friends reached out to their own networks, asked other teachers to participate and helped the survey reach more people than I could have ever on my own.

To me, that shows a level of trust I don’t take lightly.

I’ve been teaching yoga for nine years, and over that time, I’ve worked alongside teachers, built relationships with studio owners and become part of the community I’m now reporting on.

Had I not spent those years working in the industry and making those connections, I’m not sure people would have trusted me with this story — with their numbers, their experiences and, in some cases, their livelihoods.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone who spoke to me, everyone who completed or shared the survey, and the four studios who were willing to explain the financial pressures on the other side of the room.

The response to the story has already been extraordinary.

In a single day, it became the third most-read story on The Yoga Edit. The Instagram post about it has received more than 14,000 views and was shared over 150 times.

A yoga teacher working in Lisbon, Bruce Chung, has started asking similar questions about pay in Europe. Rebecca Sebastian, who runs the Inside Yoga Magazine in the United States, has begun thinking about whether we could work together on a global study of yoga-teacher pay.

When I talk about The Yoga Edit elevating conversations in yoga, this is partly what I mean. Journalism cannot resolve an industry-wide problem by itself, but it can give people information, context, and analysis to help us ask better questions.

The responses at an individual level have been really moving too.

Teachers wrote to thank me for highlighting the issue and to share how low or stagnant pay has shaped their lives. Some have returned to full-time jobs and given up teaching. Others can only afford to teach part-time, fitting classes around their other work and leaving them too burnt out to offer the presence and energy they want to bring into the room.

I think there is another story to be told here — about what the industry loses when good teachers can no longer afford to stay.

Studios understandably talk about managing staffing costs to keep their businesses sustainable. But sustainability cannot apply only to the studio. What does it take to sustain the passion, energy and presence of the teachers on whom those businesses depend?

There is a lot happening behind the scenes at The Yoga Edit too.

In November, The Yoga Edit turns one. Yikes. Has it really been a year already?

It’s incredible to think about how many stories I’ve written, and how many amazing teachers and practitioners I’ve met and spoken with — in such a short time.

Over the next few months, I’ll be looking back at some of the stories that have shaped my first year. I’ll also be introducing some changes to the membership tiers for year two, alongside a subscription campaign running from October 1 to December 31.

Much of that campaign will unfold on social media — follow me on Instagram at @yen.yoga if you’d like to take a peek at what I’m cooking.

And next Wednesday, I’ll be publishing one of my most personal columns yet. It’s about the circumstances that led me to leave journalism and become a yoga teacher — and asks why, nine years later, I started The Yoga Edit.

That’s all from me today. If you’re joining me at the Edit class tomorrow at Priyan’s studio, see you there! And if not, I’ll see you back here next Friday.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November

Changes to my subscription model are coming, but for now, The Yoga Edit is free to read. Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Free members-only classes
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga — and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

They put it in writing, but nothing came back — no counter-offer, no explanation, no refusal. The request simply went unanswered, and the per-class rate stayed the same.

One of the teachers who signed the petition had been teaching for 16 years. Across the studios she worked at, her classes averaged S$37 each.

The request was not without consequences.

“Since then, I have not been given assignments because I wanted to negotiate for a higher rate,” she said.

She teaches more than 15 classes a week. It is her only income. She estimates each one-hour class requires an additional three hours of unpaid work, including preparation, travel, admin, and speaking to the students who want a word afterwards.

At S$37 per class, that works out to S$9.25 an hour.

She is the most experienced teacher who answered my survey, one of the hardest-working, and the worst paid by the hour of anyone in it.

Around the world, yoga pay has been stagnant for years, with very little data to track whether it has kept pace with inflation or other wages. I wrote about this in a previous story you can read here.

In Britain, most teachers are paid £26 to £40 a class — roughly what the job paid in 2001. Count the unpaid travel and preparation, and the effective hourly rate can fall below minimum wage.

The United States does not count yoga teachers separately at all. It files them with gym trainers and aerobics instructors, whose median pay was US$22.20 an hour in 2024 — less, after inflation, than the same work paid in 2020. And that figure leaves out the self-employed, which is to say most yoga teachers.

Singapore has had even less to go on: no survey, no benchmark, and while martial arts instructors have their own occupational code, like in the US, yoga teachers are grouped together with general fitness instructors.

What 31 teachers said

Earlier this month I created a survey and put a question to yoga teachers in Singapore that the industry has never answered publicly: What are you paid?

Thirty-one teachers responded. Two of them set their own prices rather than being paid a rate — one teaching only corporate sessions at S$150 a class, the other her own classes at S$250 — and both sit far outside the studio market. Excluding them leaves a core dataset of 29, most of whom teach in studios or gyms.

Here’s what they told me:

The median rate for a group class is S$52.50.

Of the respondents, 83 percent earn S$60 or less, and nine teachers are paid exactly S$60. Twenty of the 29 sit between S$50 and S$60 — so the market appears to be a narrow band with a few teachers on either side of it.

The rate rarely moves.

Of the 23 teachers also teaching three years ago, 13 are on precisely the same fee today. Nine have gone up. One has gone down.

Experience does not reliably predict pay.

Teachers in their first year report a median of S$44.50 a class. Those with one to three years report S$60. Four to seven years: S$50. Eight to 10 years: S$60. More than a decade: S$60. The bands are small — four to nine teachers each — but not one of them clears S$60.

The highest-paid teacher in the survey, at S$90 a class, has been teaching for less than a year. The teachers with more than 10 years behind them range from S$35 to S$85 — spanning almost the entire market on their own.

Half of them are doing this for a living.

Fifteen of the 29 said yoga teaching is their main source of income. Based on their reported group-class rates and weekly teaching loads, their median income from group classes works out to about S$20,800 a year, or S$1,733 a month— and even that assumes they teach 52 weeks a year without sick leave or holidays.

Almost nobody is happy with what they can earn.

Asked to rate their satisfaction with their earning potential from 1 to 5, the average answer was 2.41. Just over half scored it 1 or 2.

Not one teacher, at any rate, at any level of experience, gave it a 5.

The pandemic cut that never came back

One reason yoga teacher pay in Singapore may have stalled is the 2020 pandemic. Teachers who responded to the survey said that Covid pushed the rates down, and it has never fully climbed back.

A Bikram teacher I spoke with began teaching in 2013 on S$55 a class, but within about 18 months her pay was raised to S$80 at one studio and S$70 at another.

That dropped back to S$60 as these studios closed and she found work at others. Then came Covid. Facing social gathering restrictions and empty rooms, her studios cut all Bikram teachers’ rates — regardless of experience — to around S$50 for a 90-minute class. The reopening simply reset the market lower.

Only in the past two years has her rate recovered to S$60 — still S$20 below what she was earning a decade ago.

“As a rule, freelance teachers have relatively little bargaining power,” said this teacher, who also has a full-time job. “In practice, if a teacher was unhappy with the rate, the main option was often simply not to take the class or to teach elsewhere.”

Pandemic cuts are only half the picture; the rest comes down to basic market saturation.

Ask instructors why compensation has flatlined and the answer points back to supply and demand. “The general fitness industry is quite competitive, and yoga isn’t exactly the most popular — Reformer Pilates, Hyrox are kind of the craze now,” said Aileen Yang, a teacher of nine years.

“So yoga studios can’t charge a lot. And given rental rates are expensive, most studios actually aren’t very big, and can’t fit many mats in a class.”

At the same time, the supply of instructors has surged as 200-hour teacher training courses proliferated. “There are so many yoga teachers now,” said Yang. “Many studios offer YTT now, as compared to eight to 10 years ago where there are only a handful of them.”

Not everyone agrees that experience should dictate pay. One respondent — in their first three years of teaching, but already on S$60 a class — argued that pricing by experience is what drags the market down.

She said: “A new teacher deserves to be paid fairly according to market rates. Offering classes at a lower rate eventually results in market forces driving average teaching rates down.”

Instructors inside big-box gyms face tighter ceilings still. “The gyms don’t seem to really appreciate group classes as they don’t see a direct impact to their income,” said one trainer, who teaches at gyms as his main income. “As such, we feel exploited.”

Another gym-based teacher was told the question was already settled: “Gyms and clients are unwilling to raise the price because they feel we are already overpaid.”

“There are very few industries where it is treated as norm to not raise pay rates, not pay for extra work, not have medical or maternity leave, not have bonus, not have CPF and even have pay rates decreased without discussion,” said another respondent, referring to the Central Provident Fund, a state savings scheme that employers must pay into for staff but not for freelancers.

What it costs to run a room

I sent questions to 10 yoga studios in Singapore to learn more about how each studio structures their teachers’ pay. Four replied, three on condition of anonymity.

The first runs three pay tiers by seniority, each combining a base fee with a per-attendance bonus. A mid-level teacher earns roughly S$40 to S$90 a class depending on turnout.

“We calculate it against our monthly overhead,” the owner said. “The pay has to work within what the studio can sustainably carry each month, not just what feels fair to offer.”

Attendance never returned to pre-2020 peaks, he said, while commercial rents and renovation loan repayments climbed. The studio cut support staff and automated operations to survive.

The second studio pays between S$50 and S$70 a class — some of it fixed, some tiered by how many students turn up.

It did not always work that way. “I used to fix it per class as I was paid that way when I started, regardless of how many attendees there were,” the owner said.

“But it started to make more sense to reward teachers based on the class size. It helps us to manage cost and also encourages teachers to connect more with the students and in turn get a more consistent crowd.”

Rent and staff are a studio’s two big costs. Rent rises every year. Class prices, however, can only go up so much to keep customers happy.

“Rentals are constantly increasing, but consumers’ mindset always remains the same,” the owner said. “They are not willing to pay more for a yoga class even if they like the studio, so they will turn to cheaper alternatives or ClassPass to practise.”

Which leaves teachers’ pay stuck at the same levels: “Unless they are able to fill the classes more than others, I will then consider to increase their rates.”

The third studio pays a flat S$40 to S$55 a class, with no attendance component at all. Its co-founder said the band has not moved in three years, though individual teachers have been adjusted by 5 to 10 percent. She sets it, she said, by market rate and by reviews of the class and the teacher.

Asked what a teacher should do to earn more, she did not point to the rate: “Teachers looking to earn more should consider taking more classes, especially personal training during off-peak hours, rather than looking at pay per class only.”

One teacher described to me how she watched these pressures unfold at a studio where she taught. She said that management cancelled any classes with fewer than three students booked — and the cancellations became frequent.

The owner, who was paying his teachers S$30 for a class, eventually put a proposal to the teachers: accept a lower rate for under-attended classes, or the cancellations would continue.

The teachers said no. A few months later, the studio closed permanently.

From freelance to full-time

While boutique studios lean heavily on freelance talent and variable rates, larger operators are beginning to test corporate employment structures.

Yoga Movement (YM), which operates nine studios in Singapore, confirmed that while part-time instructors remain on an hourly rate, the company revised and formalised a full-time compensation scheme in late 2025.

Under the model, full-time teachers receive a structured employment package including paid annual and medical leave, an annual training allowance, internal professional development, and performance bonuses.

Monthly salaries are tiered based on a mix of teaching experience, tenure, class quality reviews, and student ratings. Teachers familiar with the structure say starting packages for early-career instructors begin around S$3,000 monthly for a minimum schedule of 60 classes a month.

Like the independent owners, the company tied its pay philosophy to commercial realities: “Class capacity and utilisation, pricing, rent, staffing and other operating costs all have an impact on what we can sustainably pay,” said YM’s program performance manager Jan O.

“For us, the goal is ultimately to make teaching yoga a viable full-time career and to create an environment where teachers can build a long-term career with the company.”

The cost of passion

This is a tough market. My checks of corporate records, Google listings and fitness and booking platforms identified as many as 500 businesses offering yoga classes in Singapore. Many are standalone, single-location spaces, trying to survive in a city where rent is punishing and rising.

It is not that owners do not value their teachers; many plainly do. But they are setting teacher pay against overheads they cannot control, for students who have come to expect classes to be plentiful and cheap.

Many of those owners are teachers and practitioners themselves. For them, this is what it costs to turn a practice into a business.

The same is true on the other side of the room. Ask a yoga teacher why they teach and the answer is rarely about money. Most people come to it — I did — after something difficult: an injury, a loss, a period of burnout or grief. Yoga gave them a way of moving through the world that made more sense than the one they had.

Teaching is how we hand that to someone else.

But while a sense of purpose can explain why teachers accept being underpaid, it does not justify it. An industry cannot keep balancing its overheads on the willingness of its teachers to be paid in meaning.

Then there is the silence. One owner made the point that rates and running costs are commercially sensitive: disclosing them invites comparison, and nobody wants to become the benchmark every teacher in Singapore produces in their next negotiation.

I get that. But an industry that cannot afford to pay its teachers more should at least be able to say what it pays them. A negotiation in which only one side knows the numbers is not much of a negotiation at all.

And when teachers ask — individually, or together — the answer is often no, or no answer at all.

Until now there has been nothing to answer that with. No survey, no benchmark, no published rate anywhere in Singapore. True, 31 teachers do not make an industry, and S$52.50 is not a verdict on what a class is worth.

But it is the first time the question has been answered out loud.

The teacher who signed that petition a year ago still teaches more than 15 classes a week, still averages S$37 a class, and still has not been given an answer.

She has a number now. It’s not a raise, but it’s the first thing she can put on the table.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November

Changes to my subscription model are coming, but for now, The Yoga Edit is still free to read, with the full archive of over 200+ articles available to everyone.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

I’m writing this from a café in Serangoon Gardens, with a croissant and a flat white in front of me, and slightly jetlagged, having just stepped off a plane not two hours ago.

The last couple of days have been emotional. Saying goodbye to John is never easy. But, I’m happy to be back, to see Charlie, my family — and just like that, fall back into the rhythm of life in Singapore.

Men’s Hot Yoga returns tomorrow, and next weekend is our Yoga Edit Members’ Class at Nithya Priyan School of Yoga — our first class together at Priyan’s studio. Both classes are fully booked, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am that the Edit classes are taking off. Three classes so far and every one of them full.

Thank you.

So for now, I’m trying to look forward rather than back. And there is quite a lot to look forward to.

I’m now ready to announce the retreat dates for the first half of 2027, including something new: the first-ever Yoga Edit Retreat in March, followed by the 5th Annual Men’s Retreat in May.

Save-the-dates will go out next week, so keep an eye out if you’re hoping to join me.

I’ll also be announcing September’s Men’s Hot Yoga and Yoga Edit Members’ Class dates. I have a feeling the Members’ Class will fill up particularly quickly this time because, for the first time, I’m offering a crystal bowl sound bath to Edit members, conducted by the lovely Angeline at Sarwaria Crystal Centre.

And then there is November.

The Yoga Edit turns one.

Over the next few months, I’ll be looking back at some of the stories, people and conversations that have shaped the publication’s first year, while also thinking much more seriously about what the next year should look like.

That will include a new subscription structure for new members going into 2027, as well as more ways to participate in the community beyond simply reading the stories.

For now, though, here are this week’s stories:

• Why a yoga session may lift your mood just as much as a moderate bike ride;

• How an attempt to teach Pilates instructors about East Asian clients crossed the line from cultural sensitivity into racial stereotyping and pseudo-science; and

• What to watch out for while running a retreat in Bali as Indonesia increases scrutiny of foreigners working in the wellness industry.

Let’s get into it.

What I liked about this study was that it challenges our assumptions about what exercise has to look like in order to “work”.

Participants reported a similar improvement in mood after gentle yoga and moderate cycling, despite the two activities placing very different demands on the body.

That leaves us with a more interesting question than simply whether yoga or cycling is “better”. For people who dislike running, high-intensity workouts or getting drenched in sweat, that seems like rather good news.

An article published on The Core, the editorial platform of Pilates equipment and education company Balanced Body, attempted to explain how instructors should work with East Asian clients.

There absolutely is value in teaching instructors to work thoughtfully across different bodies, cultures and lived experiences. But cultural sensitivity cannot begin by turning millions of people into a list of supposed physical deficiencies.

Good education should make teachers more curious about the individual standing in front of them — not teach them what to assume before that person has even walked through the door.

Bali has become so closely associated with yoga retreats that it can sometimes feel as though running one there is simply part of the international yoga ecosystem.

Book a resort. Bring your students. Teach some yoga.

The immigration reality is considerably more complicated.

If we expect participants to trust us with their money, their travel and several days of their lives, understanding whether we are legally permitted to run the retreat seems a fairly basic part of the job.

OK! That’s all from me today.

It feels good to be home, and even better to know that there is so much to look forward to over the next few months.

If you’re joining me at Men’s Hot Yoga tomorrow, I’ll see you on the mat. And if not, I’ll see you back here next Friday.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November

Changes to my subscription model are coming, but for now, The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga — and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

Four days later, the man who organised it was blacklisted, put on a plane, and told never to come back.

Indonesian immigration identified him only as PJ, a 55-year-old Australian. It said he entered the country on a tourist visa but worked as a meditation instructor at an event called “7 Day Inner Growth” at Villa Boreh in the village of Sembiran, within the Buleleng Regency.

The event that Indonesian immigration has described matches — in name, venue and dates — a retreat advertised by Skillful Mind, an Australian company founded in 2010 by the meditation teacher and former Buddhist monk Peter Radcliffe.

British and Australian press reports have named Radcliffe as the deportee, but no Indonesian source does; I checked 15 sources including Tirto, Tribun Bali, Kumparan, Newspatroli and The Bali Times, and every one gives the deportee’s initials only.

Every headline I’ve read about this incident has focused on the man and his deportation, but I don’t think that’s where the real story is. This is a story about a gap — between a wellness industry that assumes it can carry on running retreats in Bali, and an immigration service that has decided it cannot.

Because whoever PJ is, he is not an outlier. He is the third foreign wellness teacher removed from the same small regency in three weeks.

The going rate

Last month, on July 15, the Singaraja Class II Immigration Office that serves North, West and East Bali announced three deportations. AKG, 48, an Indian national, and RN, 44, a Singaporean, had both been teaching yoga at villas in Buleleng — one on a Visa on Arrival, the other on the ASEAN visa-free facility.

The third, a Chinese national, had been installing factory machinery in neighbouring Karangasem. All three were deported and recommended for the exclusion list.

“Every foreign national must use a visa and stay permit in accordance with the purpose of their arrival,” said Anak Agung Gde Kusuma Putra, who heads the Singaraja office. He said almost exactly the same thing three weeks later about PJ.

Buleleng is not Canggu or Ubud. It is the quiet north, the part of Bali that still feels untouched by tourism — which is a reason retreat operators like to go there. In 2024, the immigration office deported 30 foreign nationals, 21 of them for working illegally. Four cases across three weeks this July and August involved foreigners on visitor permits, and three of the four were wellness teachers.

The tougher enforcement is not confined to Buleleng.

Bali removed 342 foreign nationals in the first half of this year; nationally, immigration recorded more than 10,900 “administrative actions” and added 2,102 names to the exclusion list. Visa-free permits fell 87.9 percent, from 438,423 to 52,999, while visa revenue rose 6.4 percent.

Fewer people, paying more, watched more closely.

Director-General Hendarsam Marantoko called the approach a “digital transformation and selective policy,” meant to ensure every foreigner entering Indonesia “provides added value to the national economy.” In Bali, the instrument is Patroli Dharma Dewata, a task force the director-general inaugurated in April to sweep areas with high concentrations of foreigners.

There is also a tripwire that did not exist a few years ago.

Law No. 63 of 2024, in force since October that year, made guest reporting a standing duty. Every hotel, guesthouse, villa and short-term rental must register foreign guests through APOA, the Foreigner Monitoring Application, and managers who fail to do so face three months’ imprisonment or a 25 million rupiah fine.

A retreat is, by definition, a group of foreigners staying at one address for a fixed week. In theory, that makes a retreat one of the easiest patterns for immigration authorities to spot.

So why does anyone risk it?

Because it’s no secret in the yoga industry that retreats are where the money is. A studio class pays a teacher somewhere around US$30 to US$50 in the markets I’ve taught in — so about US$450 to US$750 for a 15-class week. A seven-day retreat at US$2,000 a head with 10 guests grosses US$20,000.

Even after expenses, it isn’t close.

Teacher trainings can be even more lucrative. StudioGrowth, a studio-management software company, estimated in March that trainings are typically priced at US$2,500 to US$5,000 per participant and achieve margins of 70 to 80 percent.

You can see the result without any market research at all. One booking platform currently lists 155 yoga teacher trainings in Bali. Many advertise well-known foreign teachers who fly in, teach, and fly out.

When the money is that good, nobody stops to ask what visa they are on.

Permission slip

So what visa should a foreign yoga teacher actually use for a one-week retreat? The surprisingly difficult answer is: there does not appear to be a single, clearly stated route.

One thing is considerably clearer: a visiting teacher cannot simply arrive on a tourist visa and start working. In practice, retreats generally require an Indonesian entity to sit behind the event — an organiser, retreat centre, hotel or studio — holding a business identification number, or NIB, that covers running events, and taking responsibility for sponsorship, permits and tax.

The revenue flows through that entity rather than into a visiting instructor’s personal bank account. From there, the permit is one of three — and this is where the grey market lives, because only the first is watertight.

1. A work KITAS, index E23

The safest route: comprehensive, disproportionate, and slow. An Indonesian entity must employ you, with ministry approval, roughly US$800 to US$1,100 in fees plus US$1,200 a year in foreign-worker levy paid upfront, four to eight weeks to process.

Worth it if you teach in Indonesia regularly. Absurd for one week a year.

2. C10, a 60-day visit visa

Its stated scope covers speakers and presenters at “exhibitions, conventions, retreats” — the word is in the description. But it explicitly excludes course instructors, and leading a retreat as a facilitator and teaching a 200-hour training are not the same activity in the eyes of the law, even when they happen in the same villa.

3. C7C, a 30-day visit visa

Introduced in June last year when Indonesia overhauled its visa classifications, cutting 133 indexes to 110. It covers arts, culture and skills activities and, critically, permits the holder to be paid, which the C7 series previously did not.

It needs an Indonesian sponsor, costs 3 to 4.5 million rupiah, and processes in five to 10 working days. Several Bali consultancies now market it to yoga instructors, alongside chefs and photographers.

Whether it stretches to a retreat is another matter: a foreigner running daily paid sessions for a week is a long way from a one-off demonstration, and immigration has never said publicly that it does.

And that’s partly where the lines start to blur. The latter two visit visas are cheap, fast and arguably designed for this, but neither has been publicly tested on a retreat, and immigration has never said which it accepts.

Even bali.com’s own guidance for yoga teachers states flatly that there is no straightforward visa solution for short-term retreats.

Mind your business

If all this sounds confusing, it’s because it is — and if you flout the rules, it’s not just you that’s on the hook.

Article 122(b) of the immigration law applies the same penalty a foreign teacher faces — five years, 500 million rupiah — to any person who gives that teacher the opportunity to misuse a stay permit.

Setiap orang: any person. On the face of the statute, that is not just you. It’s your venue, and whoever’s name is on the booking.

So the question to ask before you sign anything is not whether the resort or venue is beautiful or provides any props. It’s whether their NIB actually covers organising events rather than just accommodation, whether they will sponsor your work authorisation, and whether they will put that in writing.

Plenty of beautiful villas are licensed to house your guests and have never registered to run your retreat.

A venue that has thought about this will have an answer ready. A venue that shrugs has just told you everything — because their exposure is as real as yours, and they haven’t looked at it either.

The market, meanwhile, does not seem to care too much.

There are still plenty of retreats being hosted in Bali, and hundreds of teacher trainings still taking deposits for an island where, for the most part, it is business as usual.

An industry that has spent the last two decades selling presence has been counting on nobody checking.

Well, here’s a reason to be even more mindful: someone is finally checking.

Reporting note: Indonesian-language sources for this piece were located and translated with AI assistance.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November

Changes to my subscription model are coming, but for now, The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga — and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

They have “a relatively flatter lumbar curve” and the women have “comparatively lower upper-body strength”. And there are three more things to expect, set out in a tidy bulleted list. “Increased fascial stiffness.” “A higher incidence of scoliosis.” “Reduced coordination and body awareness.”

The explanation offered is that these clients grew up “in densely populated environments where access to space for physical activity was limited,” and that “cultural emphasis on academic achievement has historically reduced opportunities for consistent physical training.”

Cramped flats and too much homework, in other words.

There is more. “Punctuality and time structure are deeply embedded in Western professional culture,” the article observes, but for East Asian clients “the importance of arriving early for proper warm-up may not yet be fully understood.”

The article, published last month on The Core, the editorial platform of Balanced Body, is titled “Teaching Pilates in a Multi-Cultural World” and written by Los Angeles studio owner Ivy Pan Ploor. Surprisingly, it is still live on the website.

Balanced Body is an American equipment and teacher-training company. On its website, pilates.com, it calls itself “the global leader in Pilates equipment and education”.

Nick Haslam, a personal trainer and Pilates instructor, called out the article on Sunday for lazy journalism and casual racism on his Instagram, prompting outrage in his comments section.

Joshua Norris-Ongso, another Pilates instructor, wrote on Haslam’s post: “As an Asian person with East Asian heritage, I was so offended. This is wrong on so many levels. How could this even be allowed to be published?”

“That is insane, and I’m not making this up… I don’t think anyone benefits from sharing these generalisations, the author may believe in this, but they mirror racist tropes,” said Haslam.

Ploor is writing about clients she actually teaches. She is Taiwanese-American, Mandarin-speaking, and describes a real population: adult immigrants at her studio, largely affluent women, many new to structured exercise. Some of what she notices is plausible and worth writing down.

Then she calls them “East Asian clients,” and the piece stops being observation and becomes something else.

Crooked science

Let’s start with scoliosis.

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis is, as the name concedes, idiopathic — meaning it has no known cause. It is a multifactorial condition with genetic predisposition, alongside hormonal, neurological and biomechanical factors.

Differences in scoliosis prevalence have been reported between populations. What the article does not establish — or even cite evidence for — is its implied explanation: that constrained space, academic pressure or reduced childhood exercise somehow account for it.

“Fascial stiffness” is worse still. Stiffness measured how? Compared with whom? By what diagnostic or assessment standard? The article supplies none. It simply turns an impression into a population characteristic by putting it in a bullet point.

This is not nitpicking. These claims are being framed as professional guidance, and made to sound like clinical fact, when they are not.

Racialised assumptions about bodies are not new.

Take the spirometer, the device that measures lung capacity. For most of its working life it came with a race correction built in: test a Black patient, and the machine lowered what it counted as a normal result by around 13 percent.

The scholar Lundy Braun traced where that number came from in Breathing Race into the Machine — measurements taken on plantations, and then used in medicine. Manufacturers, she found, “program race into the machines so operators do not necessarily know that lung function is automatically adjusted.”

The effect is easy to deduce: a Black worker had to show more lung damage than a white colleague, doing the same job in the same factory, before qualifying for the same compensation.

Nor is any of this racist pseudo-science safely in the past. The American Thoracic Society only recommended dropping race-specific equations in 2023.

And in a 2016 study published in PNAS, researchers surveyed 222 white medical students and residents on false beliefs about biological differences between Black and white people — that Black skin is thicker, that Black nerve endings are less sensitive.

Roughly half endorsed at least one of these beliefs. Those who did rated Black patients’ pain as lower, and made less accurate treatment recommendations.

Like Ploor, nobody in that study set out to harm anyone, I don’t think.

But intent is beside the point. The problem is what happens when an unsupported belief about a racial group starts influencing how a professional sees the body in front of them.

The stereotype in the room

Yoga teachers were not the intended audience for Ploor’s article. But we should be.

In a 2019 essay for the journal Race and Yoga, the Indian-American teacher Lakshmi Nair describes doing henna for a group of white yoga teachers preparing for a fashion show — a position she calls “very servile” — when one of them mentioned she couldn’t find clothes in India to fit her “guns,” because “people in India don’t do yoga.” The others nodded along.

It is the same reflex that decides a Black student is strong, an older student is fragile, a larger student is in need of modifications, a man’s hips are tight and a woman’s core is weak.

It is also older and deeper in the method than most of us realise. In a 2014 paper in Dance Research Journal, Sarah W. Holmes argued that the way Pilates manuals teach the pelvis — hips immobile, controlled, contained — encodes “historically constructed social behaviours of dominant Anglo-European culture” as neutral technique.

Holmes’ argument raises an uncomfortable possibility: that some of what movement disciplines call “correct alignment” may be culturally specific aesthetics taught as anatomical neutrality.

And here is what makes the anatomical claims useless even on their own terms: not one of them changes what you do as a yoga teacher.

You assess the spine you can see. You test the strength that is there. If a student has a flat lumbar curve, you’ll know that because you’ve looked, not because of where their parents were born. Racialised anatomy adds nothing to the assessment and should not be a substitute for your work.

Notice, too, that the article contradicts itself. These clients allegedly have reduced body awareness and coordination — and “a deep appreciation for precision and technical refinement,” and an appetite for advanced work.

They are “reserved”, yet expect more direct feedback than Americans. When the writer cannot keep her own story straight, you know it was assembled from anecdotes rather than actual research.

Which brings me to the central issue: this is squarely an editorial failure, because Balanced Body ran this on The Core without a citation, without scoping the claims to one studio’s clientele, and — at the time of writing — without an editor’s note.

This would be sloppy enough on a personal blog. On the platform of a company that trains Pilates teachers around the world, it’s malpractice.

Ploor’s identity was the only credential the article offered: “the only Mandarin-speaking Balanced Body Educator in North America.” But belonging to a group does not automatically convert impressions into evidence, and leaning on an instructor’s biography to wave through unsourced population claims is not editing.

I’ve spent much of the past year arguing for the necessity of critical editing in yoga media, and what happens without it. Well, this is what it looks like.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November

Changes to my subscription model are coming, but for now, The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga — and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin’s Dell Medical School and the University of Alabama set out to compare what different kinds of movement do to both mood and body chemistry in the minutes right after exercise.

Researchers recruited 88 healthy adults and compared four 30-minute sessions: moderate cycling, easy cycling, gentle yoga and simple stretching. Before and after each session, they measured mood alongside several exercise-related signalling molecules in the blood.

What they were after were exerkines — signalling chemicals that tissues release into the blood during exercise, and one of the main reasons movement is thought to be good for the brain.

Two got most of the attention. Endocannabinoids (the ones measured here are called anandamide and 2-AG) are the body’s own cannabis-like compounds, now considered the real drivers of the so-called “runner’s high” — not endorphins, as the old story went.

The other, BDNF, is a protein that helps brain cells survive and form new connections, often described as a kind of fertiliser for the brain.

Alongside the blood work, participants rated how they felt in the moment — positive feelings like being upbeat and energised, negative ones like tension, and a separate rating of anxiety.

On the chemistry, only one thing moved: moderate-intensity cycling raised anandamide levels. Easy cycling, yoga and stretching left it unchanged. The second endocannabinoid, 2-AG, didn’t budge in any group, and BDNF stayed flat across all four conditions.

The mood results told a very different story. Every single activity — including gentle yoga and simple stretching — reduced anxiety and negative feelings. And when it came to lifting positive mood, yoga, stretching and moderate cycling all worked, while easy cycling was the only one that fell short.

In other words, yoga matched a heart-pumping bike session for mood, without producing the internal chemical spike that cardio did.

The people who got the biggest anandamide bump did report the biggest lift in positive mood — but yoga got people to a similar place by another route entirely.

A different route to calm

If it isn’t the “bliss molecule,” what is doing the work in yoga?

Other research points to different machinery. A Harvard-affiliated study using brain scans found that a single 60-minute yoga session raised levels of GABA — a calming brain chemical that tends to run low in anxiety and depression — by about 27 percent, an effect walking didn’t produce.

And a network meta-analysis comparing exercise types found yoga had the strongest effect of all on lowering cortisol, the main stress hormone, likely by shifting the nervous system toward its “rest and digest” mode.

Put together, the picture is that yoga’s calming payoff may lean less on the cardiovascular burn and more on breath, stillness and nervous-system down-regulation — which is roughly what practitioners have always claimed, now with mechanisms attached.

What it means for the mat

For teachers and studio owners, the practical takeaway is reassuring: the mood benefit doesn’t have to be earned through sweat.

A gentle, accessible session — the kind suitable for beginners, older students or anyone put off by hard cardio — was enough to measurably shift how people felt in just 30 minutes. That’s a useful thing to be able to tell a nervous first-timer.

It’s worth being clear about the limits, too. This was a single session in healthy young adults, and the yoga tested was deliberately gentle — a “sweaty” vigorous flow might behave more like the cardio condition, something the researchers say should be studied next.

The findings also don’t mean yoga substitutes for aerobic exercise where that specific endocannabinoid response matters, such as some experimental exercise-plus-therapy approaches for anxiety and PTSD.

But for the everyday question of whether a calm practice can genuinely change how someone feels, the answer here is yes — and it doesn’t appear to depend on how hard the heart is working.

Subscribe by Sep 30 to enjoy our Summer Members’ Rate: Free subscribers can join members-only group classes for S$10 (regularly S$15 from October), while paid subscribers attend complimentary as part of their membership.

The Yoga Edit turns ONE in November!

The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga—and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

It’s been almost a week and I’m still coming off the high of last Saturday’s Men’s Yoga class in London.

We had a wonderful group come together, and what made me happiest was that everyone stayed for dinner afterwards. The class itself was lovely, but sitting around the table afterwards, talking, laughing and watching people share stories with one another reminded me why I started organising these classes in the first place.

The feedback afterwards was overwhelmingly positive, and I’m already excited about organising another Men’s Yoga class when I’m back in London in October.

On Sunday, John and I went to the Columbia Road Flower Market, came home with sunflowers and pink lilies that are now blooming beautifully around the house, and I ate an excellent sausage roll, which frankly deserves its own mention.

It was also Singapore’s 61st National Day. Happy birthday, Singapore! 🇸🇬

I managed to get onto the mat a couple of times this week too.

I took a really good Baby Grasshopper class with Scarlett Woodford at MoreYoga, which left me thinking about the trade offs we make as yoga teachers when we are teaching class after class after class every day.

How do you protect your own energy while continuing to arrive fully for the people in front of you? How much presence can we realistically ask of a teacher who may be teaching several classes that day?

It’s also because I’ve also spent much of this week working on teacher pay.

My story, What Should A Yoga Teacher Be Paid?, looks at how surprisingly difficult it is to answer one of the most basic questions in our profession. In London, teacher Norman Blair has spent years simply asking studios what they pay and publishing the answers. That work has made conversations around pay much more transparent.

I’d like to try to do something similar in Singapore. So far, 29 teachers have responded to The Yoga Edit’s anonymous pay survey. I was originally hoping for 30, which now feels tantalisingly close — but if we could get to 50, that would give us something much more meaningful to work with.

I’ve also written to 10 Singapore yoga studios asking about their rates and how they determine teacher pay. So far, only one has agreed to respond — on condition of anonymity. Looks like there’s more reporting to do.

I also had my last class of this London trip with Jacqueline Harvey this week. It became unexpectedly emotional by the end. I think I’ll leave that there for now, except to say that I’m very grateful for the time I’ve had here simply to be a student again.

Back in Singapore, something else I’m very excited about begins today.

The Singapore Yoga Association is starting a new community partnership with WECare Community Services, with volunteer teacher Anna leading our first yoga session for people in the centre’s recovery programme.

I’m incredibly grateful to Anna for giving her time, and to WECare for trusting us with the opportunity.

This is exactly the kind of role I hope the association can play more of: connecting teachers who want to contribute with communities where yoga might genuinely be useful. If you work with an organisation that might benefit from something similar, I’d be very happy to have a conversation.

And finally, London is sending me off with an absolutely ridiculous amount of heat. This weekend, John and I are escaping to Cornwall for a few days by the coast. It’s my first visit, and I’m very excited to see another part of the UK.

I’ll be back in Singapore next week, in time for Men’s Hot Yoga on August 22, which is fully booked.

There are still a few places available for the next Yoga Edit Members’ Class on August 29 at Nithya Priyan School of Yoga in Chinatown, followed as always by dinner together afterwards — drop me a note if you’d like to join us!

Now, onto this week’s stories:

• Why nobody can seem to answer the simple question of what a yoga teacher should be paid — and what happens when teachers start sharing their numbers;

• Why Alo Yoga has entered mainland China with a “store” that exists entirely on a phone, and what its online-first strategy says about the increasingly competitive premium activewear market; and

• How a six-week programme combining yoga with social and emotional learning is adapting tools usually taught to children for neurodivergent adults.

Let’s get into it.

This story has been brewing in my head for a long time because “How much should I charge?” is one of the questions newer teachers ask me most often.

The uncomfortable answer is that I don’t really know. What Norman Blair’s work in London showed me is that transparency doesn’t necessarily have to begin with a regulator or a professional organisation.

Sometimes it begins with teachers simply being willing to say: This is what I am paid. What are you paid?

That feels particularly important in a profession where we are often encouraged to think of one another as competitors for classes.

My hope with the Singapore survey is to replace some of that guesswork with actual information: 29 responses is good; 50 would be much better.

So if you teach yoga in Singapore, please take a few minutes to add your voice.

I love the slightly absurd premise of this story: Alo Yoga has opened its first mainland China “store”, except there is no shop to walk into.

Rather than arrive with an expensive flagship and hope people come, Alo has spent months building visibility online and is beginning by selling through a platform already used by millions of Chinese consumers.

China is also a useful reminder that enormous markets are not necessarily easy markets. Alo is arriving alongside Lululemon, other international brands and increasingly sophisticated domestic competitors.

Opening the store may turn out to have been the easy part. The more interesting question is whether Chinese consumers want what Alo is selling.

What interested me about this programme was not simply that it included yoga, but that what happens to all the structured support we build for people when they become adults?

Social and emotional learning is usually associated with children — recognising emotions, communicating clearly, managing stress and learning how to respond to difficult situations. This project asks whether some of those tools can be redesigned for neurodivergent adults navigating workplaces, relationships and everyday life.

OK! That’s all from me today.

I’m off to Cornwall — hopefully somewhere slightly cooler — and then back to Singapore next week.

Have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you next Friday.

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The Los Angeles activewear brand launched an online flagship on Alibaba’s Tmall carrying more than 300 products, which will serve as its exclusive e-commerce channel in the country.

Tmall says the partnership gives Alo access to more than 62 million 88VIP members — Alibaba’s paid loyalty tier. Physical stores are expected to follow, but for now the entire mainland business runs through a platform.

That completes a campaign Alo began in June, when it confirmed its China entry and opened accounts on WeChat, Xiaohongshu and Douyin.

Since then it has added an event-booking WeChat Mini Program, appointed a global brand ambassador, and held its first China wellness event at a luxury Shanghai hotel. Mainland stores have been reported for Beijing’s Sanlitun and Shanghai’s Jing An Kerry Centre, and its Hong Kong flagship at K11 Musea has been in fit-out since February.

The in-store commerce, in other words, is arriving last. Which is going exactly to plan.

“Launching an online store first in mainland China allows Alo to capitalise on its existing social media traction and test consumer demand and product preferences, with lower upfront capital expenditure than physical stores,” said Maggie Xie, associate director at S&P Global Ratings.

The hedge is warranted, because the market is not the landgrab the launch announcements imply.

Grand View Research puts China’s athleisure market at roughly US$25.3 billion in 2025, rising to about US$59.2 billion by 2033 — but gives the mass segment 68 percent of that revenue. The premium tier Alo is entering is the minority of the market, not the bulk of it.

Xie describes yoga apparel in China as still very popular but slowing, with growth now resting on athleisure demand, product innovation and penetration into lower-tier cities rather than the tier-one saturation that carried the category for a decade.

Chinese fitness spending is also diversifying, with running, tennis and golf all pulling attention away.

Alo arrives with momentum — past US$1 billion in revenue by 2022, around 169 stores worldwide — but positioned as a street-fashion brand rather than a performance one.

Xie’s warning is pointed: “Alo will need to justify its price points as a fashion brand [appealing] to Chinese consumers, who in general focus on quality versus price paid over the long term.”

It will have to make that case in a crowded room. California’s Vuori plans to grow from eight China stores to 20 by the end of next year, and NikeSKIMS has its first mainland location under construction in Shanghai.

The most serious competitor may be domestic. Anta, China’s largest sportswear group, took a 75.13 percent stake in Maia Active in October 2023 specifically to hold the women’s yoga segment.

Maia’s entire pitch is fit for Asian women’s bodies — an axis on which no American brand can credibly compete. It has grown from about 36 stores in May 2024 to around 45, targets 55 by year-end, and has deliberately rebalanced from pure e-commerce toward a majority-offline mix.

And then there is Lululemon, having a difficult year in the market it had been relying on. Mainland revenue rose 30 percent in its most recent quarter, but comparable sales grew only 13 percent — meaning roughly half the growth came from opening doors rather than selling more through existing ones.

Group operating margin fell to 11.2 percent from 18.5 percent, North American sales declined, and the full-year forecast was cut. Then came the drum, and an apology in June for a Japanese-looking instrument at a Great Wall yoga festival.

A weakened incumbent is the obvious way to read Alo’s timing. It is not the only one. A consumer soured on how one foreign brand handled Chinese culture is at least as likely to buy domestic.

And perhaps none of it describes a category as large as the noise around it.

Worth remembering what Steve Cho, president of Maia Active, has said plainly — that yoga remains niche in China compared with running or basketball, and the tier-one and tier-two expansion everyone is pricing in is a five-to-six-year project.

Which is why, for now, Alo’s whole China business is a storefront on a phone.

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Today I am paid about S$70 for a group class. That sounds like a big jump — except I was paid S$70 four years ago too, in 2022, when things began picking up again.

For private clients at my home studio, I charge S$120 to S$180. I raised those rates this year, for the first time in three years. Before that, they were S$90 to S$120.

The lowest I have seen anyone charge for a private session is around S$60 — barely more than a single drop-in class at some studios, which run close to S$40.

Anyway, I can tell you all these numbers — but what I can’t tell you is whether any of them is the “right” amount to charge.

“How much should I ask for” is the question new teachers ask me more than any other. Someone finishes their training, gets offered a regular class, and wants to know if the rate they have been quoted is fair.

I know what a handful of studios pay because I’ve worked in those studios. I know what I charge. Beyond that, I’m guessing, and so is everyone I ask.

There is no official industry-wide figure for what a yoga teacher in Singapore earns. There is no data showing whether rates have moved with inflation, or with other wages generally, or at all. When I raised my private rates, I did it by feel, not knowing whether I had been undercharging for years.

OK, if you look hard enough, you can find some numbers for Singapore, but they are not all that helpful and, in my view, quite misleading.

At the time of writing, Indeed’s estimate for the average yoga instructor salary in Singapore was S$6,783 a month, but that figure swung dramatically when I looked at different neighbourhoods, producing estimates that made no sense: Kallang — S$1,716; Punggol — S$7,008; Little India — S$2,609.

WorldSalaries gives a median of S$96,340 a year, a range running from S$41,700 to S$138,200, with an average of S$88,260, or S$7,355 per month.

None of these figures tell us very much. Indeed’s average is based on two reported salaries, and even though WorldSalaries seems to offer a more thorough breakdown, it does not identify the underlying datasets, sample size or methodology clearly enough for anyone to assess them.

Both also treat yoga teaching as conventional salaried employment, whereas many teachers I know — myself included — work freelance across multiple venues and are paid class by class, with rates determined through a variety of calculations.

Still £30, 22 years later

None of this is unique to Singapore. What is unusual about Britain is that someone decided to go and find out.

Norman Blair, a London teacher and author, began teaching in 2001, when £30 an hour was the standard rate in most gyms and studios. In 2023, 22 years later, he wrote, the standard rate was still about £30.

He set that against what else had changed. Average UK house price, £90,000 to £290,000. A pint, £2.04 to £4.23. A first-class stamp, 27 pence to £1.10. A loaf of bread, 50 pence to £1.30.

A survey of teachers’ pay and conditions run by Santosha Marketing, built from 121 responses, puts most British teachers in a similar band: around 70 percent earn between £26 and £40 a class. Where the class belongs to a gym, the average is £27.12. Where teachers run their own classes, it is £39.83 — nearly 50 percent more for the same hour of work.

Blair also makes a point yoga teachers everywhere will recognise: a class is not an hour of work. Add setting up, arriving early, answering questions afterwards, travel, admin, insurance and marketing, and he argues the honest divisor is at least 2.5.

On that basis, the average gym rate of £27.12 is closer to £11 an hour. The UK minimum wage is £12.71. The real living wage, calculated on what people actually need to live, is £13.45, and £14.80 in London.

Most freelance teachers are not protected by minimum-wage law. But the comparison shows how easily work paid by the class can fall below what would be legal in conventional employment. As one teacher told Blair: “Far too many days where unpaid hours are long and paid hours are short.”

The range he has documented is wide. MoreYoga in London pays between £32 and £38 across more than 400 teachers. Third Space runs six rates from £35 to £60, though few teachers reach the top of that. At OrangeYoga in Cheltenham, where teachers take 50 percent of gross takings, the most popular teachers earn around £100 a class.

Every one of those figures exists because Blair asked and the studio answered.

Not all of them do. In 2023, when two large studios opened in London, both claiming to pay among the highest rates in the city, he wrote to both. Love Supreme Projects replied with its numbers: a 50/50 split with teachers, a guaranteed minimum of £50 a class, average pay above £100.

Mission, which calls itself Europe’s largest yoga and movement centre, did not reply. Blair wrote twice. A teacher there later told him they had been required to sign a non-disclosure agreement preventing them from discussing their pay.

The biggest market, the least data

Britain’s numbers exist because one teacher spent years asking for them. Take that person away and you get the United States: one of the largest yoga markets in the world, and remarkably little reliable information about what anyone is paid.

American yoga teaching largely operates outside conventional salaried employment. Practitioner estimates put group-class pay at roughly US$25 to US$75 a class, depending on the venue and teacher. Gyms and YMCAs tend to sit toward the bottom of that range; studios somewhat higher. Private sessions typically run from US$75 to US$150 or more, while corporate classes can pay US$75 to US$200.

The closest official comparison is the Bureau of Labor Statistics median wage of US$22.20 an hour for group fitness instructors, but no government agency or industry body collects per-class pay data for American yoga teachers. Every figure above comes from practitioner reporting and industry publications rather than survey data, and those sources tend to cite one another.

What makes this stranger is that the organisation best placed to fix it has been in the room and left without asking.

Yoga Alliance is the largest registry of yoga teachers in the world. In 2022 it ran a global study across 10 countries, surveying not just practitioners but, in four of those countries, teachers and studio owners directly.

For its US figures, it reported that 88 percent of American yoga teachers are white, 85 percent are women, and 82 percent hold a college degree against 30 percent of the general population. It also found that Americans spent more than US$21 billion on yoga in 2022.

So many numbers — but not a single one was about teacher pay.

More than movement

There is a deeper reason the number is hard to find. If you want to know what a government thinks a yoga teacher does, the Australian Bureau of Statistics will tell you in six lines.

Occupation 462232 plans and delivers sessions, demonstrates practices, assists with alignment, assesses skill level, modifies poses for restricted movement, and applies knowledge of biomechanics — all in service of “physical fitness and wellbeing.”

That is the whole description. The code sits in unit group 4622, titled Pilates and Yoga Instructors, at the second-lowest of five skill bands.

I suppose we should be grateful; Australia is the only country I found with a dedicated yoga occupation code at all, created in 2024 after advocacy by AUSactive, the fitness industry’s peak body.

The United States has no yoga code whatsoever. An American teacher sits in SOC 39-9031, Exercise Trainers and Group Fitness Instructors, next to personal trainers and spin instructors, attached to wage data that excludes the self-employed by design.

Singapore is no different. Search the national classification for a yoga teacher and you will not find one. What comes back is code 34223, “physical fitness instructor”, with “yoga instructor” listed as an alternative title for it. Martial arts instructors have a code of their own. A yoga teacher is a fitness instructor by another name.

This is partly why it stings when someone asks me how much I charge — because I know they will compare my work to a fitness instructor’s, which is not how I would describe my work at all.

Yes, yoga teachers teach movement. But movement is often not the whole of the work; it is in fact only one limb — asana — out of eight. A teacher may also be teaching philosophy, pranayama, meditation, holding a room through someone’s grief, or noticing that a student has gone quiet in a way that needs attention rather than correction.

For many of us, holding space and offering our energy and presence to the room is not a layer on top of the job. It is the job. Yet none of it appears in the occupational classification, which means none of it is recognised in the wage data attached to it.

It pays to speak up

Reclassification is a long game, and I am not holding my breath. But something has changed in London over the past few years, and it did not come from a statistical agency or a trade body.

The Reset Rooms, in north London, now pays £50 an hour plus extra per head once a class passes half capacity, and £60 an hour for teachers with more than 10 years’ experience. Yoga On The Lane, also in north London, raised its rate this year to £40 an hour, with £4 per person after the sixth student.

Blair knows of at least one case where teachers challenging a company directly produced a higher offer. But he believes the change came from something less confrontational: teachers sharing their rates openly, which gave others the confidence to ask for more.

That’s all it takes. Not a survey, not a regulator, not anyone’s permission. Teachers saying what they were paid, publicly and repeatedly, until the figure became something a studio could be asked about.

You don’t need a mailing list like Blair to start. Find one other working teacher in your area — someone you do not think of as a competitor — and have one honest conversation about what you are actually charging and what you are actually making. That conversation is the first step towards the industry transparency we all deserve.

So the next time a new teacher asks me what they should charge, I still won’t have the industry number, because there isn’t one and there may not be for years — at least, not in Singapore.

But I’ll happily share mine: S$70 now per group class, about the same as four years ago. For privates at my home studio, S$120 to S$180 per session.

That’s from me — one teacher, in one city, over four years. That’s not real data — not even close. So, what’s your number?

The more of us who answer, the less the next teacher has to guess.

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Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

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To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

Sydney Ostroff, a student in the Occupational Therapy Doctorate at the Katz School, presented the six-week programme at the 2026 Symposium on Science, Technology and Health. It combines yoga with social and emotional learning, or SEL, and is aimed at neurodivergent adults, who rarely have access to this kind of structured support once they leave school.

“While these skills are often taught in schools, there are very few programmes specifically designed for neurodivergent adults,” Ostroff said. “I wanted to explore how we could create an intervention that was meaningful, relevant and accessible for this population.”

A central part of the project was rewriting “social stories” for adult life. Social stories are short, plain narratives that walk a person through a social situation. They are usually used with children — helping an autistic child understand what to expect at a party, say — but Ostroff adapted them for workplaces, community settings and everyday adult situations.

After the programme, participants talked through their experiences in recorded group discussions, which Ostroff analysed for common themes.

Four came up repeatedly: managing emotions, communicating with others, being ready for work, and making thoughtful decisions. Participants said they became more aware of what their bodies and minds were doing under stress, and found techniques that helped them feel calmer and more grounded. Several connected the skills to real workplace situations, such as handling pressure or talking to colleagues.

Ostroff said the results point to a clear and ongoing need for programmes built specifically for neurodivergent adults, rather than borrowed from children’s settings.

What the wider evidence says

The research behind both parts of the programme is mostly drawn from children, and it is not as settled as the enthusiasm around it suggests.

On yoga, a 2021 review of yoga and mindfulness in early-childhood settings found that 13 of 16 studies reported improvements in skills such as self-regulation and focus.

But the same review warned that the studies varied widely in quality, which made them hard to compare. It also found that programmes worked better when they ran for at least six weeks — the length Ostroff chose.

When researchers have looked specifically at neurodivergent young people, the evidence thins out. One review of yoga in schools said it could not confidently recommend yoga for these groups because there simply wasn’t enough research.

The evidence for social stories is more mixed still. Some organisations treat them as an established, evidence-based practice; others disagree.

One review found that only one of 22 studies offered strong proof that social stories caused the improvements seen, though the approach appeared to help between roughly half and nine in 10 of the participants studied — suggesting it works well for some people and not others. Most experts advise using social stories alongside other methods rather than on their own.

Almost all of this research, for and against, involves children. The evidence for adults is scarce — a handful of small studies. Ostroff’s project is an early attempt to test whether tools designed for the classroom can be rebuilt for adult life, and her participants’ feedback suggests they can.

“Everyone deserves access to tools that support emotional well-being, communication and participation in the activities that matter most to them,” Ostroff said.

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Are we actually allowed to play music in class?

It’s a question that affects almost every yoga teacher who uses it, and almost none of us were taught the answer.

Ooi Jian Yuan’s explainer laid out the law, while my follow-up investigation examined what happens in practice — which turns out to be something quite different.

I’m already beginning my next investigation, into pay and wage transparency for yoga teachers. Look out for that in the coming weeks.

The other major piece I published this week came from a very different experience of sound.

Last Saturday, I attended one of Kerry Spark’s Sound Paths sessions at St Stephen Walbrook in central London. Lying on the floor of the church, surrounded by live music, spoken word and an immersive soundscape, I experienced a profound sense of calm and connectedness that I have struggled to describe ever since.

The write up that emerged, Did I Touch God on a Church Floor?, is more spiritual than my usual columns, but I wanted to try and articulate what I experienced, so that I will remember what I felt, and maybe it might connect others to their own memories of something similar.

Away from my desk, it has also been a lovely week of catching up with people.

I had a drink with Amanda, a former student of mine who is continuing to build her life and teaching practice here in London. You can read my interview with her here. She recently launched Hjem Studios, and I’d warmly encourage anyone in London — or anyone who connects with her work online — to check out what she is creating.

My brother was visiting this week too, and he joined John and me to see Oh, Mary! at the Trafalgar Theatre, with the play’s writer and original star, Cole Escola, in the title role.

It was completely deranged, brilliantly performed and one of the funniest things I have seen in a theatre. By curtain call, everyone was on their feet. Go and see it if you can.

A few spaces are still available for the next Yoga Edit Members’ Class on August 29 at Nithya Priyan School of Yoga in Chinatown — a beginner-friendly stretch and strengthening practice, followed by dinner together nearby. Get in touch on WhatsApp if you’d like to reserve a mat.

Both men’s classes are now full: my first Men’s Yoga community class in London tomorrow, and Men’s Hot Yoga in Singapore on August 22. Thank you to everyone who signed up and helped spread the word.

I’m excited — and, truthfully, a little nervous — to bring a community I first began building in Singapore to London. Wish me luck!

Now, onto this week’s stories:

• Why playing music in a commercial yoga class is legally different from listening to it at home — and what every yoga teacher in Singapore should understand;

• What happened when I asked Singapore’s licensing bodies, studios and teachers who is actually responsible for the music played in class; and

• How lying inside an immersive soundscape on a church floor led me into unexpected questions about ego, connectedness and God.

Let’s get into it.

Most yoga teachers use music, but very few of us receive any guidance on the legal responsibilities that come with playing it in a commercial class.

That is why I’m so pleased to begin this new legal series with Jian Yuan. He has taken a complicated and easily misunderstood subject and turned it into a practical guide for teachers: what rights may be involved, where responsibility can fall, and why a personal streaming subscription does not necessarily cover professional use.

What emerged from my reporting for this story was not a simple story of teachers or studios deliberately breaking the law. It was a system in which responsibility is widely misunderstood, practices vary considerably, and the people playing music in class are often the least informed about what is required.

That gap matters because music is not incidental to many modern yoga classes. It is part of the atmosphere, the teaching and, for some studios, the brand itself. Yet the systems governing its use remain largely invisible to the teachers and students hearing it every day.

I still cannot say exactly what happened on the floor of St Stephen Walbrook. I don’t know whether I encountered anything divine, or whether sound, stillness and imagination simply allowed my usual sense of self to loosen for a while.

But writing the piece gave me permission to take the question seriously without pretending I had found an answer. Perhaps that is enough: to recognise that there are experiences we may never fully explain, but which nevertheless change something in the way we understand ourselves and our connection to the world around us.

OK! That’s all from me today. I’ll see you back here next Friday.

Enjoying The Yoga Edit?

The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
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By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga — and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

Stay Connected

The best way to follow my work is through my dedicated channels:

The Weekly Edit: For independent news, interviews and opinion pieces about yoga, subscribe to The Yoga Edit here or join The Yoga Edit Official Telegram Channel.

To join the conversation and receive direct updates on classes and retreats, join my WhatsApp group. I’m also open to remote copyediting and copywriting work, and always keen to connect with writers and collaborators.

Thank you for reading!

At no point did anyone discuss whether they had permission to do it.

“I was not aware of any fees paid by the studio to COMPASS as the licensing body,” said Ooi, a former lawyer, adding: “although I’m happy to stand corrected.”

That gap — between how music is used in class and what the law requires — runs through much of the yoga and fitness industry in Singapore and elsewhere.

Under Singapore’s copyright framework, playing recorded music to a room full of students in a commercial setting is considered a “public performance”, and a public performance of commercially released music generally requires two separate licences, from two separate organisations.

Ooi, who examined the issue in a blog post republished on The Yoga Edit on Monday, said the confusion “boils down primarily to lack of public education and enforcement”, with copyright often becoming a secondary concern — if at all — behind business priorities.

It takes two

In Singapore, the public performance of music is administered by two collective management organisations, and they license different rights. Every recorded song contains at least two layers of copyright: the song that was written, and the particular recording being played.

COMPASS — the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore — licenses the song itself: the composition and lyrics, on behalf of songwriters and publishers.

Music Rights Singapore (MRSS) licenses the sound recording rights, and administers these licences on behalf of participating record labels.

Play a commercially released track in a class, and both rights are in use — which means, in most cases, both licences are needed.

Asked whether a studio holding a COMPASS licence would still need an MRSS licence, an MRSS licensing representative who requested not to be named was unequivocal: “Yes. A COMPASS licence does not cover the rights administered by MRSS.”

Both organisations confirmed that the source of the music makes no difference. Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, downloaded files and CDs are all treated the same for licensing purposes. The licensing requirement attaches to the public use of the music, not the platform. Consumer streaming subscriptions cover personal listening only, and pressing play through a studio’s speakers falls outside their terms.

“A common misconception is that a subscription to a consumer music streaming service automatically permits music to be played in businesses or public classes,” said the MRSS representative.

Who pays?

In general, responsibility sits with the studio: studio owners are typically expected to obtain the necessary public performance licences, but the liability does not stop at the front desk.

Where a class takes place at a venue that holds no licence, the teacher is “also liable” and is required to obtain the licence themselves, said a COMPASS licensing representative, who also requested not to be named.

This has implications for freelance teachers, who move between studios, rented rooms, corporate offices and outdoor venues. Depending on the arrangement, the responsibility could fall on the venue, the studio, the event organiser, or the freelance teacher independently organising a class, said MRSS.

Ooi said freelancers may not have a separate legal duty to audit every venue’s licensing arrangements, but given teachers can themselves be exposed when music is played without permission, he considers checking to be good business practice.

His own habits have changed, he said: “I am more sensitive now to music delivered via streaming services for class use.”

Teachers who livestream face another hurdle: online classes need a separate licence covering the transmission of music over the internet, according to COMPASS, on top of anything covering the room itself.

What the studios say

Yoga Movement, one of Singapore’s largest studio brands, says music is fundamental to the member experience and an essential part of its brand identity. Rather than leaving individual teachers to build their own playlists, the company curates its music centrally, with the approach extending beyond the studio to reception, changing areas and other shared spaces.

“From the moment members walk into the studio until they leave, every soundtrack is intentionally curated to create a consistent experience,” said Kamesh Waran, head of brand and marketing at MOVE [REPEAT], the lifestyle collective that operates Yoga Movement.

Waran said Yoga Movement, which operates nine studios in Singapore, uses a licensed music-streaming solution in its studios, but declined to disclose which platform or discuss the specifics of its commercial arrangements.

I asked Waran how that related to Yoga Movement’s publicly available Spotify playlists, and whether those were intended for members’ personal listening while music played in the studios came through a separate licensed service. He did not answer that question.

At Jal Yoga, music is not a standard part of most classes. Co-founder Jasmine Loh said its Indian teachers generally teach without it, although some local and part-time instructors play music during class or for the final few minutes of savasana.

Jal Yoga is one of Singapore’s larger home-grown yoga businesses, operating nine studios across Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines that serve over 5,000 practitioners.

Until our conversation, Loh said, the issue of licensing had not crossed her mind. “From a business owner’s point of view, this would not be my priority at all, especially if it incurs additional costs.”

If licensing bodies believe compliance is important, she added, they need to educate both instructors and studio owners directly.

Otherwise, a costly or complicated system may produce a simpler response: “If this is going to incur quite a lot, then just tell everyone not to use music.”

A global patchwork

Singapore is far from alone in asking studios to pay for the music in their classes — but few countries have arrived at the same answer.

The United States is the most fragmented. Gyms and studios may need to license music from four major performing rights organisations — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC and GMR — and wilful unlicensed public performance carries statutory damages of up to US$150,000 per song.

In 2020, Peloton had to cough up roughly US$49 million in settlement and litigation costs after music publishers sued the indoor cycling company over more than 1,000 allegedly unlicensed songs in its workout videos.

The United Kingdom went the other way. Since 2018, its two licensing bodies have operated a joint scheme called TheMusicLicence, allowing fitness businesses to obtain both rights through a single licence. Responsibility is also clearly divided: fitness centres license music played on their premises, while freelance instructors license classes they run independently.

Australia has adopted a similar one-stop model through OneMusic. Canada also allows businesses to obtain both rights through a single licensing system.

Set side by side, Singapore’s system sits somewhere in the middle — more consolidated than the American patchwork, but without the one-stop licensing convenience found in the UK, Australia and Canada. For a studio here, compliance still means two organisations, two licences and, for anything online, more.

The icing, not the cake

None of the teachers interviewed for this story argued that recorded music is essential to yoga.

“In most traditional schools of yoga, classes were taught without recorded music, with the emphasis placed on the teacher’s instruction, the breath and the practitioner’s internal awareness,” said Zoei Zhang, president of the Singapore Yoga Association.

“There are exceptions, such as Bhakti Yoga, where mantra, chanting and kirtan form an integral part of the practice. However, the use of recorded background music in classes is largely a modern development.”

Music can be “a valuable creative tool,” Zhang said, but that freedom “should be exercised responsibly” — and she called for “clear, accessible guidance from the relevant rights organisations” to help independent teachers and smaller studios understand their obligations.

Cora Lee, a yoga teacher and mentor to teachers, used to play music in every class. She stopped when she moved into detailed alignment teaching, and now prefers silence — even in savasana.

Her advice to teachers who discover their music use may not be compliant: check your sources, make sure the music is properly licensed, and then move on.

“Music is really the icing on the cake in a yoga class,” she said. “It’s not the cake itself.”

Both COMPASS and MRSS encouraged studios and teachers who are unsure of their obligations to contact them directly. For everyone else, one option remains fully compliant in every jurisdiction, at no cost.

Silence.

Enjoying The Yoga Edit?

The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga—and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

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And a pair of headphones.

This was Saturday morning at St Stephen Walbrook in central London, and I was there for a sound bath — or more precisely, a Sound Path, which is an immersive musical experience created by Kerry Spark, whom I interviewed earlier this year.

We put the headphones on before anything began, and almost immediately I heard Kerry whisper into my ear.

Then we moved. Breathing first, standing, stretching the spine, then coming into tabletop, cat-cow, then seated with the legs long, before being guided down onto our backs. Pillows under the knees. Eyes closed, mask on.

Once I stop moving, the journey begins.

Kerry’s voice takes me into a forest. I can hear leaves rustling. Wind whistling through the wood. There is a stream in the distance, and a boat on it. I’m now in the boat. Aside from his deep baritone voice, I also hear the water, birds, other people talking, completely out of sight.

Then the headphones come off, and new sounds surround me. My eyes are still closed, and I hear a cello, or a violin. More crystal bowls. There must be other musicians moving around the space, because the sounds around me travel — an instrument close to one ear, crossing above my head, arriving at the other.

I am not listening to a concert. I am inside one.

And then I fell asleep, I think. It was a wakeful kind of sleep — half sleeping, half awake, an awareness of something in the middle.

The next thing I knew, 40 minutes had passed.

I don’t remember too much of what happened in those 40 minutes, but what I do remember is the sound of waves. Crashing waves, over and over — surging, relentless, overlapping, falling on top of one another.

It made me think of a tsunami.

The waves, again

I thought of it because I knew something of Kerry’s past.

In 2004, when Kerry was 13, he was on holiday in Phuket with his family when the Boxing Day tsunami came ashore.

When we spoke about it in Islington earlier this year, he described to me the ground shaking, the birds going quiet, the pool emptying of water. Water appears often in his work: rain, waves, the feeling of being carried by sound.

I can’t tell you if the waves I heard were meant to take me to the past, but I can try to tell you where they took me.

Underneath the crashing waves I heard long, low tones. Something deep and unhurried, and settling. And as the waves kept breaking, the tones beneath them kept opening outward, and time seemed to expand, until I felt my consciousness no longer tethered to the present, but to something eternal.

I no longer really knew where — or when — I was.

The 2004 tsunami was one of the most destructive events in living memory. Yet within that expansive, seemingly infinite soundscape, even an event of such magnitude suddenly seemed to me a single moment in the vastness of time.

Lying there, inside this cocoon of timelessness, what I felt was an immense and unexpected calm.

There is something not quite right and perhaps even obscene about feeling calm while contemplating a disaster that took 228,000 lives and tore apart hundreds of thousands more. Had I been in Phuket that morning I certainly would not have found any of it peaceful. Kerry didn’t. He came home, by his own account, 13 years old and 30 years old at the same time.

So I can’t tell you whether what I felt was a glimpse of something true, or simply the luxury of distance — of being permitted, 22 years later, to feel something other than pain.

But I can tell you this. In life, we are often told we are the sum of our words and actions, of what we inherit and what we pass on. But in that moment, none of it seemed to matter. I was no longer attached to any fixed sense of myself, but connected instead to something far larger than I had ever known.

I know how this sounds. People talk about feeling connected — to a partner, to a community, to a cause. But who talks about feeling connected to the universe? To the clouds, the trees, the ground, the asphalt, the cars, every living thing in it?

As a yoga teacher, I have read about this kind of connectedness many times. It is often described by people who have come close to death and returned. I have spoken about it in class. I have taught around its edges.

But until then, I had never felt it for myself.

All roads lead to

When the session ended, the room came back slowly. People sat up. Someone folded a blanket. The instruments sat quiet in the middle of the circle, and the church was a church again — cold stone, high dome, an ordinary Saturday.

Afterwards, over coffee, my friend Luke asked if I had touched God.

I had been telling him about my experience, not very coherently, about waves and time and the size of the universe, and the cheeky question was perhaps his way of telling me I was getting carried away.

I laughed, but if I’m being honest, I really wonder if I did.

Bruce Greyson, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of Virginia, has spent 50 years collecting accounts from people who came close to dying. The same features keep surfacing: an overwhelming sense of peace, a feeling of cosmic unity, of being one with everything, an altered sense of time, a light.

Between 10 and 20 percent of people who survive a cardiac arrest describe something similar, and the core of the experience recurs across varying cultures and traditions.

Long before that, in 1960, the philosopher Walter Terence Stace set out what he believed the world’s mystics were pointing at: unity — becoming one with everything that exists. The falling away of time and space. Sacredness. Deep peace. The sense of having glimpsed something true.

And, last on his list: ineffability. That it cannot be put into words.

I had walked through a door people have been walking through for a very long time, by every available path — dying, praying, fasting, meditating.

And, apparently, lying on a church floor on a Saturday morning, with Kerry’s voice in my ear.

So, did I touch God?

If God is somewhere in that expanse — that timeless, unhurried calm spacious enough to hold all our pain inside it — then I find that a comforting thought.

Maybe the calm I felt is what becomes possible when everything is held across a large enough span of time. Pain exists and joy exists; they are part of the same life.

Is there divinity in pain? In joy? In us? Where do we find it in our humanity, made up of so many difficult feelings, like grief and love and longing and loss?

I don’t have the answer.

I didn’t say any of this to Luke over coffee. We talked about other things, and the day carried on.

But perhaps that, too, is part of being human: to continue without certainty, to carry grief and love within us, and still remain open to a rare moment when the world widens just enough for us to glimpse something beyond our understanding.

Even with our eyes closed.

Read my full interview with Kerry Spark here, and catch his next Sound Path retreat at Covent Garden’s Actor’s Church, on October 3.

Music is part of how many yoga teachers create atmosphere and shape the energy of a class. A carefully curated playlist can build momentum in a Vinyasa class, shape the specific energetic vibe in a Yin yoga class, and ease the transition into savasana. For many teachers, selecting music feels as integral to class preparation as sequencing poses.

However, what most teachers do not realise is that playing music in a yoga class is not the same, legally, as listening to music at home. The moment music is played in a commercial setting — a studio, a rented space, a corporate office, even an outdoor class that students pay to attend — different rules apply.

This post provides a practical overview of what those rules are in Singapore and what options are available for teachers who want to use music legally in public classes.

Personal use versus commercial use

Streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube are licensed for personal use only. Their terms of service permit individual listening — at home, in your car or in public through headphones — but not playback in public and for commercial purposes. Playing music streamed from a personal Spotify account through a studio’s speakers during a paid yoga class may breach those terms of service.

This distinction catches many teachers by surprise. The platform looks the same, the music sounds the same, and the act of pressing play feels identical whether you are at home or in a studio.

But the legal framework treats these situations differently because of who is listening and in what context. Personal use means private listening. Playing music to a room of paying students in a commercial setting is a public performance, and public performance of copyrighted recorded music generally requires clearance from two separate collective management organisations (CMOs): a COMPASS licence for the underlying musical work and lyrics, and, since the Copyright Act 2021, an MRSS licence for the sound recording itself.

Public performance licences: COMPASS and MRSS

In Singapore, two collective management organisations (CMOs) license the public performance of recorded music: COMPASS and MRSS. Each administers a different copyright interest in the same recording, and a studio playing recorded music may need licences from both.

COMPASS, also known as the Composers and Authors Society of Singapore, collects licence fees on behalf of songwriters, composers, and music publishers, and distributes those fees as royalties. A COMPASS licence covers the public performance of the underlying musical work and lyrics.

MRSS, or Music Rights (Singapore) Public Limited, is the CMO established to collect music and music video copyrights on behalf of its members, who are record labels and music producers. Ever since the Copyright Act 2021 introduced a right of equitable remuneration for the public performance of sound recordings, MRSS has administered a separate public performance licence for the sound recording itself — the specific recorded track being played — as distinct from the underlying composition.

Both a COMPASS licence and an MRSS licence cover the playing of background music in commercial settings, including fitness and yoga studios. The fees payable under each depend on factors such as the size of the space and the type of use. For a small yoga studio playing background music during classes, the annual fees are generally modest under both.

In practice, it is usually the studio, not the individual teacher, that holds these licences, since they attach to the premises where music is played. However, teachers should be aware of several things.

First, not all studios hold both licences, and playing recorded music in a studio missing either one means the music is being performed publicly without full authorisation.

Second, if you teach in settings outside a licensed studio — at a corporate office, in a rented community space, or at an outdoor event — the licences held by your regular studio do not follow you. The venue or the organiser of the event would need its own licences, or you would need to make alternative arrangements.

Third, because COMPASS and MRSS licence different rights, holding one does not substitute for the other; a studio can hold a COMPASS licence without an MRSS licence, or vice versa, and still fall short of full coverage.

Royalty-free and licensed music libraries

An increasingly popular alternative is to use royalty-free or subscription-based music libraries that provide tracks specifically cleared for commercial use.

These services can allow teachers to build playlists legally without needing to hold a separate COMPASS or MRSS licence — but only if the library’s clearance genuinely covers both the underlying composition and the sound recording.

Not every service marketed as “royalty-free” clears both rights, so it is worth checking the licence terms rather than assuming full coverage from the label alone.

Royalty-free does not mean the music is free of charge. It means that once you have paid for access (usually through a subscription or one-off purchase), you do not owe additional royalties each time the music is played.

Several platforms now cater specifically to yoga and wellness professionals, offering ambient, instrumental, and nature-based tracks designed for class use.

For teachers who lead online classes, royalty-free libraries are particularly important. Streaming or recording a class that includes copyrighted music introduces additional complexity beyond public performance rights.

If you publish online or livestream a class with background music that is copyrighted, platforms like Zoom or Facebook may flag or mute the audio due to automated copyright detection systems.

If you record and distribute the class — for example, as part of a paid on-demand library — you may need synchronisation rights, which go beyond what a standard COMPASS licence covers.

Royalty-free libraries typically include streaming and recording rights within their licence terms, making them the simpler and safer option for online teaching.

Sharing playlists with students

Teachers often share playlists with students after class, and this is generally fine if it is done within the platform’s own sharing mechanisms.

Linking to a publicly available Spotify or YouTube playlist is acceptable, because you are directing students to content hosted on a licensed platform, and they will access it through their own personal accounts.

What is not acceptable is downloading tracks and distributing them directly — sending audio files via WhatsApp, uploading them to a shared drive, or embedding them in course materials. This constitutes unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material, regardless of whether or not there is a commercial transaction underpinning the distribution.

Recorded mantras, chants, and cultural works

Special care is needed when using recorded mantras, chants, or cultural works in class. These are subject to copyright like any other musical recording.

A recording of a kirtan session, a commercially produced mantra album, or a curated collection of Tibetan singing bowl sounds is protected by copyright as a sound recording in its own right, separately from whatever copyright may or may not exist in the underlying chant or composition.

Even where the chant itself is traditional or in the public domain, playing the recording during a paid class is a public performance of that sound recording, which may require an MRSS licence in addition to any COMPASS clearance needed for the underlying work.

Live music is treated differently. If a teacher leads chanting, plays a singing bowl, or uses a gong — performing the sounds herself rather than playing a recording — no licence is required from either COMPASS or MRSS, unless the teacher is performing a copyrighted composition written by someone else, in which case a COMPASS clearance may still apply.

MRSS’s right is specific to sound recordings, so it does not arise when no recording is being played. Original or traditional works performed live by the teacher are not subject to music licensing requirements otherwise.

What this means for you

The practical position for most yoga teachers in Singapore is straightforward. If you play recorded music during in-person classes at a studio, check whether the studio holds both a COMPASS licence and an MRSS licence. If it holds both, your standard class use is likely covered.

If the studio is missing either one, and if the studio requires as part of its internal policy that teachers play music in classes, the studio should obtain the missing licence, as the combined cost is modest relative to the legal and reputational risk of operating without full coverage.

If you teach outside a licensed studio, or if you teach online, consider using a royalty-free music library that covers public performance of both the underlying composition and the sound recording, as well as streaming or recording rights.

This avoids the need to navigate multiple licensing arrangements across two separate CMOs and gives you clear, documented permission to use the music across different teaching contexts.

And if music is not central to your teaching — for example, if your classes are conducted in silence — then none of this may be relevant to you at all. Not every teacher needs to use music, and choosing not to use music is a perfectly valid decision that should carry no legal or professional risk whatsoever.

This article was first published on Calm Space by JY, and has been edited for housestyle and clarity.

Disclaimer

The content in this document is for general educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. It should not be relied upon as a substitute for professional legal advice specific to your circumstances. Laws and regulations may change, and the information provided may not reflect the most current legal developments. No solicitor-client relationship is created by reading this content. For advice on your specific situation, please consult a qualified lawyer.

Hello everyone!

This has been one of those weeks when the different parts of my life have felt particularly well connected: writing, reporting, practising, and building community.

The story I found most fulfilling to work on was my investigation into Yoga Alliance. It allowed me to return to the kind of reporting I’ve always loved: reading documents, following the numbers, sending questions, and trying to understand what an organisation actually does — rather than simply accepting how it describes itself.

The other meaningful piece this week came from a very different place: the yoga mat.

I attended a class with London teacher Stewart Gilchrist at Mission in east London, which was physically exhausting, intellectually provocative and, by the end, unexpectedly emotional. I walked out unable to decide whether I had enjoyed it — and spent the next few days thinking and writing about it.

That class became my latest column, When Did Yoga Become So Nice? It asks whether modern yoga has become so focused on delivering a pleasant customer experience that we have forgotten a practice can also unsettle us, frustrate us and reveal things we were not expecting to find.

Between Stewart’s class and another wonderful practice with Jacqueline Harvey this week, I’ve felt very grateful to be a student again. Writing, teaching, and creating content have become such a large part of my life that it can be easy to forget how nourishing it is simply to come onto my mat and connect with my own practice.

This Saturday, I’ll also be attending one of Kerry Spark’s Sound Paths sessions at St Stephen Walbrook. I interviewed Kerry earlier this year about how he moved from the West End stage into sound, spoken word and guided awareness, so I’m really looking forward to experiencing his work for the second time in London.

Next Saturday, August 8, I’ll be teaching my first Men’s Yoga community class here in London. We now have a lovely group signed up, with room for a couple more people. The class is free, beginner-friendly and followed by dinner — an extension of the men’s community I’ve built in Singapore.

When I’m back in Singapore, my regular Men’s Yoga class returns on Saturday, August 22 (Fully booked — thank you!). The next Yoga Edit Members’ Class will be held on Saturday, August 29 at Nithya Priyan School of Yoga in Chinatown.

There are still spaces available for the Members’ Class, which will be a beginner-friendly stretch and strengthening practice followed by dinner together. Paid subscribers of The Yoga Edit attend for free, while free subscribers can join for S$10 until the end of September.

Please get in touch on WhatsApp to reserve your mat.

Now, onto this week’s stories:

• A new study showed twice-weekly yoga improved depression, leisure satisfaction and nervous-system regulation among nursing-home residents;

• South Africa want to bring yoga out of private studios and into schools and colleges as a response to the country’s youth mental-health crisis;

• Yoga teachers pay Yoga Alliance nearly US$10 million in fees each year. I take a closer look at its finances — and the alternatives emerging around the world;

• And after a bruising class with London teacher Stewart Gilchrist, I ask what yoga loses when the practice is redesigned principally to make the customer feel good.

Let’s get into it.

What interested me most about this story was that the benefits may have extended beyond the postures. Twice a week, residents had somewhere to be, a familiar routine and other people moving beside them.

The study cannot prove yoga itself caused the improvement, since another shared activity might also have helped. But that may be the point: yoga gave their days structure, movement and connection.

South Africa’s plan to bring yoga into schools and technical colleges is ambitious and encouraging. It challenges the idea of yoga as a lifestyle product for those who can afford studios, opening the practice to young people who might never otherwise encounter it.

But the scale of the plan raises important questions: who will teach, how they will be trained, and how the practice will be adapted for different communities. Yoga may support attention and emotional regulation, but it cannot solve a complex mental-health crisis on its own. The initiative will need proper investment, qualified teachers and clear boundaries around what yoga can — and cannot — provide.

Since publishing this story, I’ve seen some people ask what a CEO’s salary has to do with what an individual yoga teacher is paid.

The honest answer is that there is no direct connection. Yoga Alliance does not set teachers’ rates, and its CEO’s salary is not a pot of money that would otherwise be divided among registered teachers.

The more important question is what the compensation reveals about the priorities of an organisation funded overwhelmingly by the fees of yoga teachers and training schools. If teachers are collectively contributing millions of dollars every year, what tangible professional value are they receiving in return?

I didn’t leave Stewart Gilchrist’s class thinking it was the best I had ever taken. I left irritated, inspired, exhausted and still trying to understand what had happened. Days later, it’s still unfolding — perhaps a more meaningful measure than whether or not I enjoyed the class.

OK! That’s all from me today. See you back here next Friday.

Enjoying The Yoga Edit?

The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga — and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

We had barely begun to move. About 20 of us, standing on our mats at Mission on Fashion Street in east London — and the man at the front, thin and wiry, sporting grey dreadlocks and a beard, taking apart the industry for what it has done to the practice.

Then, for the next 90-plus minutes, he proceeded to take us apart.

Gilchrist is a London legend. He has taught for more than 25 years, founded the East London School of Yoga, trained hundreds of teachers, and came to the practice the hard way — through a severe back injury in the 1980s that left him in constant pain, and an unlikely recovery through intensive Ashtanga practice.

He holds an MA in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation and is a PhD candidate at SOAS University of London. He calls what he teaches “Authentic Radical Yoga” — authentic because it is anchored in the classical texts he studies, radical because it is fused with the socialist politics he has carried since his punk days in 1970s Scotland.

The class itself was relentless. Vinyasa krama woven through an Ashtanga backbone, arm balances arriving without ceremony, an endless stream of chaturangas, and running through all of it — a commentary that swung between philosophy, politics and humour.

As he has said in interviews, if everything is political, then yoga is political too.

He didn’t take things too seriously, yet at the same time took things very seriously, if that makes sense. I walked out of that studio physically wrung out, and I could not have told you whether I’d enjoyed it or hated it.

What I actually thought, standing out on the pavement afterwards, slightly discombobulated, was: I’m still trying to figure out what happened.

It’s been some time since a yoga class did that to me.

The experience economy

My friend Cora — a fellow yoga teacher from Singapore, in London at the same time by a happy accident — put her finger on it in our chat on WhatsApp after the class. This, she said, was definitely not the “nice yoga” we get back home.

She’s right, though I don’t think this is a Singapore problem. It’s an industry problem.

Somewhere in the last 20 years, as yoga became a global business worth well over US$100 billion, the modern class converged on a formula: a warm welcome, a curated playlist, smooth sequencing, generous encouragement, nothing too strange, nothing too long, everyone out the door feeling good and — this is the important part — likely to come back.

There are commercial reasons for this. Teachers are often rewarded by how well attended their classes are. Studios live and die by retention. Platforms like ClassPass have turned every session into something that gets rated afterwards, like a restaurant or a Grab or Uber ride.

In 1998, business theorists Joseph Pine and James Gilmore announced the arrival of the “experience economy” — the idea that companies would increasingly stage memorable experiences rather than simply sell goods or services.

Boutique fitness may be their thesis most fully realised.

The modern yoga class is staged, lit and soundtracked. The teacher is not only teaching but delivering an experience, and the student is both participant and customer.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that. Gilchrist’s class was, after all, an experience I am unlikely to forget. The problem comes when a yoga class is judged principally through ratings, retention and whether the customer wants to buy it again.

The questions students learn to ask become consumer questions: Did I enjoy it? Did I feel good? Would I recommend it?

These are not illegitimate questions. But they are different questions from the ones the practice of yoga has traditionally asked: What did you resist? What did that bring up? What are you avoiding?

Nice is not the same as kind. A kind teacher keeps you safe, meets you where you are, holds the room with care. A nice class is something else — a class engineered so that nothing in it will unsettle you enough to leave a bad review.

Somewhere along the way, yoga in the modern world stopped being a practice and became an experience.

The complex, from inside

I am part of the problem, so to speak. I took Gilchrist’s class dressed in Alo from head to toe. I brought my own mat, from Manduka, which cost me over $200. I run members-only classes, and lead yoga retreats at luxury resorts. I publish a newsletter with subscriber perks.

By any reasonable definition, I am as embedded in the yoga industrial complex as it is possible to be. And at the same time, I feel I am entirely sincere in my practice — which, I suspect, is exactly how most of us inside the complex feel.

Gilchrist himself carries the same contradiction. He delivered his critique of the industry from the front of a beautiful boutique studio in London, to a room full of strong practitioners who had paid to be there, many of us wearing the same billion-dollar brands his sermon was aimed at.

Is this hypocrisy? Perhaps sincerity and complicity are not mutually exclusive, and the critique is worth making even when — especially when — you can’t make it from clean hands.

I don’t think the question is whether we’re part of the machinery. We are. The question is what the machinery is taking from our practice, and whether we notice.

During savasana, after more than 90 minutes of practice, Gilchrist played Roberta Flack’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” — and I broke down.

Quietly, on my mat, in a room full of strangers, grief I thought I had long since made peace with rose up in my body and I felt tears run down my face.

The yogic tradition offers a way to understand this. In the Taittiriya Upanishad, the self is described as five koshas, or sheaths, nested one inside the other: the physical body (annamaya), the breath and energy (pranamaya), the mind (manomaya), the deeper wisdom that discerns (vijnanamaya), and innermost, a sheath of bliss (anandamaya) wrapped around whatever sits at our centre.

Most classes never move past the first sheath, and most of the time that’s fine.

But looking back, I could see the class moving through those layers almost in sequence: the body exhausted by effort, the breath held by the rhythm of the practice, the mind engaged and provoked by the commentary, discernment stirred by the philosophy — and then, in stillness, something underneath all of it.

A practice reaches that far not by being sentimental but by being demanding — until something you’ve been carrying simply surfaces.

Gilchrist’s class didn’t create my emotions. It revealed them.

And this is what nice yoga, for all its virtues, rarely does. Not because nice teachers lack skill, but because comfort is the product — and what a practice reveals is not always comfortable.

An experience is judged by how it felt while it lasted. A practice is judged by what it does to you afterwards. They are not the same thing, and an industry optimised for the first will, even with the best intentions, slowly stop delivering the second.

Which may explain why I couldn’t tell you whether I enjoyed Gilchrist’s class. Would I take it again? Probably.

I’ve spent much of the past year at The Yoga Edit asking what has happened to yoga — who owns it, who sells it, who regulates it. But somewhere in east London, Gilchrist’s class turned the question back on me instead.

What has my practice revealed about me? I’m still figuring that out.

Enjoying The Yoga Edit?

The Yoga Edit is free to read, with articles available to everyone for three months.

Paid members receive:

✨ Access to the complete archive of articles
🧘 Members-only community classes at discounted rates
🌿 Early access to workshops and retreats
💛 Member discounts on workshops and retreats

By becoming a paid member, you’ll also be supporting thoughtful, independent writing about yoga—and helping The Yoga Edit continue to grow as a community for curious practitioners and teachers.

Become a member here.

Last week, it became something else — a set of numbers that are difficult to unsee.

According to Yoga Alliance’s most recent federal tax filing, covering 2024 and filed in October last year, CEO Shannon Roche earned US$519,881 in 2024: $473,451 from Yoga Alliance directly, $8,730 from its sister foundation, and $37,700 in other compensation.

That is 5 percent of the organisation’s entire $10.3 million revenue for the year — and a 66 percent increase on her 2023 package of $313,300.

The raise landed in a bruising year for everyone else. The filings, which I reviewed on ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer, show the organisation’s workforce shrank from 51 employees to 38 — a cut of one in four — while Yoga Alliance posted a loss of $241,449, its third consecutive year in the red, after losses of $678,516 in 2023 and $506,082 in 2022.

The figures were first surfaced by Rebecca Sebastian of Inside Yoga Magazine, whose detailed analysis, published a week ago, also noted a discrepancy between the organisation’s own documents: audited statements disclosing a new CEO employment agreement effective January 2024, and a federal filing for the same year stating the last compensation review took place in May 2019.

Sebastian’s comparisons are pointed. The American Massage Therapy Association pays its two top executives a combined $546,078 — about 2.3 percent of its $24 million revenue. The American Dental Association’s chief earns more than Roche in raw dollars, at $870,723, but that is 0.37 percent of a $237 million budget. Run the same maths on Yoga Alliance’s budget and Roche’s share is more than 13 times larger.

For a yoga teacher in the United States earning roughly $50 a class — $39,000 a year at a punishing 15 classes a week, with no sick days and no holidays — the arithmetic is stark.

But the more consequential story isn’t the salary. It’s what the salary reveals about an organisation that has positioned itself, for a quarter of a century, as the global standard for an entire profession — and what the rest of the world has started doing about it.

A registry, not a regulator

It is worth being precise about what Yoga Alliance actually is, because the organisation’s authority rests partly on the widespread assumption that it is something it is not.

Yoga Alliance does not certify teachers. It is a registry: schools pay to have their training programmes listed, and the graduates of those schools pay to register as RYTs, or Registered Yoga Teachers.

There is no examination, no practical assessment, no audit of teaching competence, and no legal weight anywhere in the world. No government requires Yoga Alliance registration to teach yoga.

As a 501(c)(6) trade organisation, it exists to advance the interests of its members. Yet its mission statement (“to advocate for yoga, in its wholeness, and for all human beings in theirs”) does not mention members at all.

A word search that I ran on its Strategic Plan 2024–2030, which was updated in January this year, found zero instances of the words compensation, wages, salary or income — a point noted by Sebastian in her reporting as well.

Nearly all of Yoga Alliance’s revenue — $9.99 million of its $10.3 million total in 2024 — comes from fees paid by its registered schools and teachers.

Other trade bodies offer their members liability insurance, retirement plans, business support. But Yoga Alliance’s registered teachers — most of them independent contractors patching together classes across multiple venues — receive little more than a listing in a database.

For years, this arrangement held because there was no alternative with comparable reach. That is no longer true.

The world builds its own

Look around the globe and a pattern emerges: country by country, yoga communities are concluding that they can do the job themselves — and in some cases, do it better.

Australia offers the clearest case, which I wrote about last year. Yoga Australia, founded in 1999, runs a four-tier credentialing system that begins with a provisional 200-hour registration and culminates in a Senior Teacher designation requiring 1,000 hours of training, 12 years of personal practice and a decade of teaching.

Crucially, it includes a Recognition of Prior Learning pathway for teachers trained in traditional, lineage-based settings without conventional certificates.

That framework now has tangible value. From 1 July last year, the Australian government reinstated yoga as one of seven natural therapies eligible for private health insurance rebates, following the Natural Therapies Review led by Professor Michael Kidd.

Coverage applies to yoga delivered for health conditions, and insurers require teachers to belong to an approved professional body. In practical terms: an Australian teacher’s Yoga Australia credential can now connect them to the health system. An American registry listing cannot.

“It has always been unpleasant when I inevitably end up paying an American company to rubber stamp my courses,” one Australian studio owner said in a statement by Yoga Australia for its 25-year anniversary last year.

In India, yoga’s birthplace, the Yoga Certification Board, which was established in 2018 under the Ministry of AYUSH, describes itself as the only certification body for yoga established by any national government.

It certifies — not registers — teachers across multiple levels, and studios, hospitals and schools across India increasingly require YCB credentials. Whatever one makes of the politics of state-sponsored yoga, the symbolism is hard to miss: the country that gave the world the practice does not outsource its standards to the West.

Singapore is now moving in the same direction. The Singapore Yoga Association, established in 2022, is developing a national registry intended as “a shared professional framework,” the association’s president Zoei Zhang said in a statement to The Yoga Edit.

The framework, still in consultation, covers first aid and CPR preparedness, continuing professional development, mentorship, and pathways into work with seniors, people living with dementia and individuals in recovery.

“Many yoga teachers are not trained as first responders, and responding confidently to a medical incident in class is not something typically covered in teacher training or international registries,” said Zhang.

“We believe this is one practical area where a professional body can better support teachers while helping to strengthen confidence and safety across the profession.”

In the US, Yoga Alliance’s home turf, challengers have emerged.

The American Yoga Council certifies teachers — with assessment, not registration — and makes teacher livelihood its mission. Its founder, Andrew Tanner, voluntarily disclosed his salary to Inside Yoga Magazine: $60,000 a year, a figure that reads like a pointed footnote to Roche’s.

Yoga Unify, a newer non-profit, is experimenting with peer review as an alternative to hour-counting. In the UK, teachers have long had homegrown alternatives — the British Wheel of Yoga, recognised by Sport England as the practice’s national governing body since 1995, and Yoga Alliance Professionals, a separate organisation despite the confusing name.

None of these bodies has Yoga Alliance’s scale. But they don’t need it. Each only has to be more useful than Yoga Alliance within its own borders — and that, it turns out, is not a high bar.

What fragmentation costs

That’s not to say all this is an unambiguous win for yoga teachers.

A world of national credentialing bodies is also a world of credential confusion. A teacher trained in Singapore who moves to Sydney, or a Melbourne teacher leading retreats in Bali, currently relies on Yoga Alliance registration precisely because it is recognised — or at least recognisable — everywhere.

Portability is the one thing a fragmented system cannot easily offer, and the international teaching economy of retreats, trainings and online classes is not going away.

There is also no guarantee that national bodies will govern better. Smaller organisations can be hijacked by founders and factions just as large ones can; Yoga Australia’s own anniversary statement, for all its substance, is also a marketing document from an association that sells memberships.

The test for every one of these bodies is the same one Yoga Alliance failed: not what they say about yoga, but what they demonstrably do for the people who pay them.

Do they offer liability insurance? Retirement pathways? Business support? Advocacy with governments and insurers? A credential recognised outside the yoga world?

Yoga Australia can now answer yes to the questions that matter most in its market. Yoga Alliance, on the evidence of its own filings and strategic plan, struggles to answer yes to any of them.

The metric that matters

Yoga Alliance did not respond to my questions — covering Roche’s compensation, the absence of member services such as insurance and retirement support, and the rise of national credentialing bodies — but it did announce a review of its credentialing approach in an update to its strategic plan, promising to better support teachers and trainers in “sharing their unique lineage and traditions”.

(The page containing the update was no longer accessible on Yoga Alliance’s website as of Monday.)

Meanwhile, the alternatives are not waiting. The story of the next decade in yoga professionalism is unlikely to be a single successor toppling Yoga Alliance.

It will likely be more local than that: an Australian teacher whose credential gets their clients’ classes rebated, or an Indian teacher whose government certificate opens hospital doors to more specialised work.

The organisation that positioned itself as the global standard now faces yoga teachers everywhere doing the maths Sebastian laid out: what they pay, what they receive, and what the person at the top takes home.

For a growing number of RYTs, the answer no longer adds up.

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As university and TVET college students confront severe mental health challenges that have had tragic consequences in recent years, government officials and wellness advocates are championing a bold initiative: integrating yoga directly into the classroom.

Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training Dr Nomusa Dube-Ncube said the gathering comes at a critical moment in history, as the world is filled with deep uncertainty. She cited that across the world there is severe conflict and a massive migration crisis.

She said that in South Africa, particularly in KwaZulu-Natal, these pressures are felt directly.

“Migration brings complex challenges to our local communities. It can test our resources and stretch our social fabric. During these times of tension, our greatest weapon is not division, it is peace,” Dube-Ncube said.

She said yoga teaches that before people can bring peace to the world, they must find peace within themselves. “When we clear our minds of fear, we remember that every human being deserves dignity, safety, and respect,” she said.

Dube-Ncube delivered her remarks at the Durban Amphitheatre in June during the 12th International Day of Yoga, which focused on the theme “Yoga For Anti-Ageing”.

Dube-Ncube said the youth must be protected because students at universities and TVET colleges face social ills.

“The pressures of student life have driven many into severe anxiety. Last year alone, in one campus, which is DUT (Durban University of Technology), in one month, we had about 10 students losing their lives, and that was one too many,” Dube-Ncube said.

“So the pressures of student life have driven many into severe anxiety, which far too often leads to tragic heartbreak and student suicides.”

She said yoga provides mental clarity, teaches self-control, and reduces overwhelming anxiety, giving our youth a healthy anchor.

“Today, I want to make a bold and unapologetic statement: It is our official wish and firm intention to take yoga out of private spaces and bring it directly into every school and TVET college across South Africa,” Dube-Ncube said.

“By introducing yoga to our schools, we will transform our learning environments: It will replace anxiety with focus, helping students resist peer pressure, drugs, violence, and gambling.

Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa said: “Our young people face immense pressures, including anxiety, social challenges, and exposure to harmful influences.”

Hlabisa said yoga offers them discipline, mental clarity, emotional resilience, and a constructive pathway away from substance abuse and crime.

“At the same time, our elderly citizens, who remain the custodians of our heritage and wisdom, benefit from improved mobility, flexibility, and overall well-being through these practices,” Hlabisa said.

He said yoga becomes not only a wellness tool but a bridge across generations.

Sivananda World Peace Foundation president Prince Ishwar Ramlutchman Mabheka Zulu said the foundation is continuing to promote yoga in schools.

“We have seen an increase in the pass rate, and I think on numerous occasions, even the premier has acknowledged this,” Ramlutchman said.

He said one of the schools present has achieved a 100 percent pass rate for the past five years, up from 46 percent to 50 percent in previous years.

This article was written by Thobeka Ngema, and was first published in June 2026, on The Star.