The Business of Belonging

By Rebecca Sebastian

I will never forget the first time someone in the yoga space said the phrase: I’m glad you’re on our side.  Since that time, I have had so many people say some version of the same phrase.

It’s usually said warmly. Often with a smile. Sometimes as a gesture of appreciation, or solidarity, or shared purpose. And yet, every time I hear it, something in me tightens—not because it’s mean or rude, but because of what it quietly implies. As of that moment, I am no longer just a person in the room. I am a position. A signal. Frankly, I‘ve just become an asset.

I don’t think this is intentional. In fact, it often emerges in spaces that claim to care deeply about community, advocacy, and collective wellbeing. But it marks this subtle shift—from being known as a human to being useful as an asset, from relationship to alignment and employment. And once you notice it, you start to see how often belonging in the yoga world is negotiated not through friendship, but through value.

This is not a story about mean girls or interpersonal drama. It’s about something quieter and harder to name: how easily we begin to treat one another as transactions instead of humans, especially in an industry shaped by scarcity, visibility, and survival.

As of that moment, I am no longer just a person in the room. I am a position. A signal. An asset.

The Language of Polite Extraction

The world is saturated with girl-boss language and hustle culture. We use words like collab and alignment, and phrases like pick your brain, to signal that we are offering something more than a transaction. These words suggest mutuality, curiosity, even care. They imply that a relationship exists—or is about to—before one has actually been built.

In the yoga space, this language often carries an additional promise: that we are bound not just by work, but by shared values. We’ve adopted words like sisterhood—a term rooted in Black women’s liberation movements of the 1970s and later co-opted by white wellness culture—to signal unity and collective purpose. But that unity is often conditional. It only holds as long as we are aligned under the most palatable, sanitized version of whatever is being promoted.

These words imply that a relationship exists before one has actually been built.

This is where the language becomes insidious. Words like sisterhood carry an implied intimacy that can short-circuit discernment. When someone says it, I often find myself thinking: I don’t actually know you. And yet the word assumes closeness, trust, and shared obligation—before any of those things have been earned.

I know I’m not alone in this. Performative intimacy has become a common social currency, especially in professional spaces that rely on warmth and relational labor to function. But intimacy without consent is not connection. When familiarity is assumed rather than built, power dynamics quietly shift. The person being addressed is no longer just a peer—they are a resource, an amplifier, a bridge to something else.

What makes this difficult to name is how polite it all sounds. Nothing overt is being taken. No demand is explicitly made. And yet, something is extracted: attention, emotional or intellectual labor, credibility, access. The language does its work softly, leaving little room to ask what is actually being exchanged—or whether the exchange was ever agreed to in the first place.

Intimacy without consent is not connection.

Beyond Mean Girls

When conversations about harm in the yoga industry surface, they are often flattened into familiar narratives: mean girls, cattiness, toxic personalities. These stories travel easily because they are personal, legible, and emotionally satisfying. They offer villains. They offer distance. And they allow us to believe the problem lives somewhere else.

But transactional relationships are not a personality flaw. They are learned cultural behavior.

Transactional relationships are not a personality flaw. They are learned cultural behavior.

Framing these dynamics as drama obscures the larger forces at work. It suggests that if we could just be kinder, more evolved, or more self-aware, the problem would resolve itself. It ignores the reality that many of us are operating within systems defined by precarity, visibility economies, and limited opportunity—where access often feels more valuable than connection, and alignment becomes a form of survival.

This is not to say that we as individuals bear no responsibility. We are still accountable for how we treat one another. But it is equally true that we have been trained—by platforms, by branding culture, by hustle logic, and often by our own teachers—to see people as conduits to resources rather than as relationships in their own right. When everything feels scarce, extraction begins to look like efficiency.

The language of “toxicity” further complicates this discussion. Disagreement, discomfort, or unmet expectations are often labeled as harm, shutting down any possibility of repair. True connection, however, is rarely seamless. It requires tolerance for tension, miscommunication, and the slow work of staying in relationship with others even when things become awkward or unclear.

Transactional culture, conveniently, avoids this messiness altogether. It thrives on enthusiasm without depth, intimacy without history, and connection without obligation. And when the exchange is complete—when the post is shared, the introduction made, the labor extracted—the relationship quietly dissolves.

This is not drama. It is a pattern. And it is worth examining not just because it makes people feel bad, but because it reshapes what belonging itself begins to mean.

The Cost of Being Useful

For those of us who work in yoga, these dynamics don’t remain theoretical for long. When relationships are shaped primarily by usefulness, the cost is felt in the body as much as in the mind. What begins as mild discomfort slowly becomes exhaustion, then withdrawal. You start to notice how often connection feels conditional—how interest peaks when you are visible, productive, or strategically valuable, and fades when you are not.

Over time, this erodes the desire to show up fully. It becomes easier to keep conversations surface-level, to stay guarded, to conserve energy. Not because you don’t care about community, but because caring has begun to feel like unpaid labor. The very spaces that promise connection start to feel isolating.

Over time, even connection begins to feel like unpaid labor.

This is one of the quieter pathways to burnout. It isn’t just the long hours, the inconsistent pay, or the emotional labor of teaching and holding space. It’s the accumulation of relational disappointment—the sense that even connection has become something you must perform, offer, or leverage in order to remain relevant.

When belonging is contingent on contribution, rest becomes risky. Stepping back can feel like disappearing. And so workers learn to stay visible, stay agreeable, stay useful—often at the expense of their own capacity for genuine relationship.

It is in this context that people themselves begin to feel transactional.

When Workers Become Transactions

Transactional culture doesn’t announce itself. It arrives through enthusiasm, opportunity, and shared language. Someone reaches out to connect, and the conversation unfolds easily—until it becomes clear that the connection was a prelude to an ask. A project to promote. Content to boost. Insight to lend credibility. Access to share.

What’s often missing is consent.

The ask is rarely named upfront. Instead, it emerges after familiarity has been established, after warmth has been exchanged. Declining then feels uncomfortable, even rude. The relationship has already been framed as mutual, making refusal feel like a breach rather than a boundary.

For workers, this pattern is especially destabilizing. Time, attention, and expertise are offered under the guise of connection, then quietly converted into labor. And when the value has been extracted, the relationship often goes dormant—until the next opportunity arises.

None of this necessarily requires bad intent. In an industry built on unstable work, people are encouraged to maximize every interaction. But when everyone is operating this way, relationships flatten. People become platforms. Community becomes infrastructure. And belonging becomes something to be managed rather than felt.

This is the moment where many workers begin to pull back—not because they are disengaged, but because they are tired of being mined.  And I can’t blame them one bit.  I am tired of it too.

People become platforms. Community becomes infrastructure.

When Belonging Becomes a Business Model

These transactional dynamics are made so much more complicated by the fact that many yoga businesses are built on belonging itself. Studios often function as micro-communities—spaces where people share interests, values, routines, and, if we are being honest, often similar bodies and social identities. This closeness can feel nourishing. It can also blur important lines.

Yoga businesses are rarely marketed as places to simply attend a class. They are framed as families, sanctuaries, communities, home-away-from-home spaces. Belonging becomes part of the promise. And I say this with humility, because I participated in it too: over time, I began to see how belonging itself had quietly become something we were selling.

When belonging becomes the business model, relationships begin to carry the weight of survival

The cost of this becomes visible when circumstances change. A student’s finances shift. A teacher’s schedule no longer works. Someone moves on. Leaving then doesn’t feel like a neutral decision—it can feel like a rupture. Not just the loss of a service, but the loss of a group they were told was family.

Studio owners are often navigating this tension while deeply dysregulated themselves. Running a small business is precarious, emotionally demanding work. In that state, loyalty can begin to feel like safety. Loyalty from students. Loyalty from teachers. When that loyalty falters, it can register not as choice, but as betrayal.

Breaking up with a studio is rarely clean. It’s not like canceling a subscription or switching platforms. There is often an expectation of explanation, justification, even emotional reckoning. People are asked—implicitly or explicitly—to account for why they are leaving, or why the space no longer feels sacred to them.

This tension becomes even more pronounced when belonging is used as a marketing strategy during periods of financial stress. When businesses struggle, the language of community can quietly shift into the language of obligation. “Support local” becomes less an invitation and more a moral appeal—one that frames purchasing as care, and disengagement as harm. Students and teachers are asked, implicitly or explicitly, to show up not because they want to, but because the alternative feels like abandonment and betrayal.  Guilt should never be used as a marketing tactic. 

Guilt-based belonging turns choice into responsibility

What makes this especially fraught is that it often emerges from genuine fear. Precarity narrows your scope of seeing. When survival is on the line, it really can feel reasonable to lean harder on relationships that already exist. But guilt-based belonging blurs the lines of consent. It turns choice into responsibility, and community into a test of loyalty—one that disproportionately weighs on those with the least flexibility or financial margin.

This is what makes the business of belonging so difficult to untangle. Community does support retention. Retention does create stability. Stable income means fewer payroll emergencies, fewer staffing crises, fewer moments where survival eclipses care. These realities are not trivial.

But when belonging becomes the business model, relationships begin to carry the weight of financial survival. And when that happens, the line between care and extraction becomes increasingly hard to see.

Repairing Belonging

If belonging has been shaped by extraction—by systems that reward efficiency, visibility, and loyalty—then repair cannot happen only at the interpersonal level. It also cannot wait for systems to become ethical on their own. Repair lives in the space between: in the choices institutions make, and in how people practice relationship inside them.

At a structural level, non-extractive community begins with restraint. The opposite of love-bombing. It looks like spaces that allow belonging to emerge rather than promising it upfront. It means being honest about what a studio, organization, or collective can and cannot offer—and refusing to substitute emotional closeness and friendship for fair pay, clear boundaries, or sustainable systems. Ethical community does not ask relationships to carry the weight of financial survival.

But repair also requires something quieter and more difficult: a shift in how we relate to one another as humans.

Real relationships move at a different pace than a transactional culture allows. It requires curiosity without agenda, attention without the immediate need to educate, perform or promote, and a willingness to stay present even when nothing is being exchanged. It allows connection to be uneven, slow, and sometimes painfully awkward. It makes room for misunderstanding and repair rather than disappearance.

This kind of relationship resists the optimization culture we all belong to. It cannot be rushed into intimacy or leveraged for relevance. It asks us to notice when we are reaching out because we want connection, and when we are reaching out because we want something. It asks us to name expectations early, and to receive a no without turning it into a rupture.

Belonging was never meant to feel like leverage.

Belonging was never meant to feel like leverage. Or loyalty tests. Or proximity to power. It was never supposed to resemble a cult, or a funnel, or an MLM dressed up in loving language. At its best, belonging is quiet and unremarkable—it shows up in check-ins that don’t lead anywhere, in conversations that aren’t optimizing for outcome, in relationships that remain even when usefulness fades. If there is an invitation here, it is a modest one: to reach out without an agenda, to stay in touch when there is nothing to promote, and to let connection be inefficient again. Not because it’s strategic, but because it’s human.