Tick Tock.
What's Already Happened to the Yoga Industry, and What's Left to Save
Table of Contents
We're Late For A Very Important Date
Trend #1: Off With Their Heads. The Data Problem.
Trend #2: Institutional Abandonment. The Mock Turtle.
Trend #3: Whoooo Arrrree Yooouu? The Extraction Economy.
Trend #4: It Is Always Six O'Clock. Always Tea Time. The End of the Portable Career.
Trend #5: The Online Gap. A Cheshire Cat of a Problem.
A True Trend. The Menopause Pivot. So... Which Tweedle Are You?
A report on the state of the yoga industry in 2026. Six trends. One argument. Thirty pages. Longer than anything you'll read this week — read it anyway.
Written by Rebecca Sebastian
This originally started out as a trend report. As we were compiling data for the mid-year trend report for the yoga industry space, I started to see a pattern that made it feel like it was much more crucial that we do a report that reflects where we are in the industry right now. What that means is that several of the 'trends' here are not trends at all. They are reflections of a shift that already happened, right under our noses. The trends that are reported here are the result of the past, more than they are any indication of our future. Our future remains deeply in flux, as we see the window open for industry change, but it is closing rapidly before us.
Let me explain what I mean.
Many, if not most, of the professionals in the yoga space–be it casual teachers, yoga studio owners, teacher trainers, or yoga therapists are quite aware that things feel like they are at a crossroads. The industry has changed dramatically since 2020, and we have gone through several micro-iterations in the last six years that have shaken up how things are consumed in the yoga space (as we will discuss in depth on trend 5), and we have failed to meet the moment.
We fantasize that we are now like Alice, looking down that fateful hole at the base of the tree, wondering if we should follow a funny white rabbit with a pocket watch. We imagine that there is a choice to be made, a right decision out there somewhere. There isn't. We went down that hole in 2021, ate the cake that made us giant by the end of that year, and are now definitely feeling the effects of the “drink me” bottle that has made us very, very small.
This report exists to tell you the one thing we've been ignoring for five years. The fact that we actually left home at all.
When we look at people who might be perceived as “winners” of the yoga professional space over the last five years, many, if not most, of them left the yoga space entirely. I discussed transferable skills in my December 2025 trend report. We still haven't grasped how much of our work transfers to non-yoga settings. People working in corporate wellness, healthcare settings, and educational institutions have built their own exit. They now get paid actual salaries and have figured out how to take yoga to a new population. All this while the industry that should have built pathways for them did nothing.
Some people are holding tightly to the old model. That is the vast majority of us in the middle of the professional world. We feel like we are at a crossroads, and we long for those “good old days” where nostalgia and yoga celebrity culture reign supreme. The truth is, we are not even in the middle of the fall from the edge of a cliff anymore. That was 2024. We’ve landed, and for whatever reason, we lay there, at the bottom of a canyon with a broken leg and dislocated shoulder, trying to see the best-case scenario. What we actually need is emergency medical care.
And there is a small group of people who have something rooted in the full depth of the yoga tradition, have built healthy relational communities, and carry on innovating and shifting. I wish I could say that these people were financially thriving; they certainly deserve to be. But what they have built is something real and steady enough that they will carry on and likely find what thriving means for them after conditions shift in their favor.
The industry you thought you were in no longer exists, and hasn’t for a while now. Where we are today is much harder, much more complicated, and potentially more beautiful than we imagined. We have wandered into Wonderland to witness the career paths built in the 2000s and 2010s fail in real time.
This report will take you longer to read than most things you run into this week, and that is by design. And each of the upcoming trends will be connected to a character in Alice’s story, specifically. This will not only hopefully make the deep dive into industry jargon more manageable to read, it will also help you place where each of these trends is along the story of our current profession. When you see the Mock Turtle’s performed grief and lamenting of Reeling and Writhing lessons, you can’t unsee it. Or our place in that story.
What you are reading here today isn’t a trend report in the sense that it is a prediction of the future of yoga. Although some of what is said will be relevant for that. This is much more a state of how things are, shown through several different faces or characters. The question becomes, where will you fall as we sort through the old guard of the yoga space, and work towards building a future that benefits more than a handful of people?
And who am I for this report? Well, it seems that for this, I am a very well-dressed rabbit with a watch. And I worry, deeply and truly, that we are incredibly late.
Trend #1: Off With Their Heads. The Data Problem.
The 2010s were a bubble time for yoga and wellness. That bubble has burst.
It is incredibly difficult to make informed decisions about anything without access to the information that would make any choice you made “informed”. However, we have been doing this in the yoga industry space for what feels like ages. In the last 10 years, we have had some industry reporters talk about what is happening in the yoga industry, but we are often, if not always, bucketed into the “yoga and pilates” category. While that suited us, as yoga professionals, for a long time, we now look at our shrinking industry and think…maybe we should be operating on our own data set.
Last year, plenty of people, myself included, got excited about projections showing the wellness industry climbing steadily through 2030. It felt like a relief after years of uncertainty. Things were finally on the rise.
Here's the problem. The data being cited doesn't separate yoga from Pilates. It can't. Even IBISWorld, a reputable industry research firm, only tracks "Pilates and Yoga Studios" as a single combined category. There is no yoga-only number anywhere in their report. According to their February 2026 data, that combined industry grew at an 11.1% CAGR from 2020 to 2025, reaching $19.2 billion. That's the number getting passed around as evidence the industry is healthy.
But look at what's actually driving that growth. Pilates participation surged from 9.2 million people in 2019 to 12.2 million in 2023. Pilates was ClassPass's most popular workout two years running. Yoga still generates more total revenue, $9.1 billion to Pilates's $3.2 billion, but the growth story, the momentum, the trend lines everyone is pointing to as proof the industry is thriving, are coming almost entirely from Pilates. Yoga is riding in the same car. It isn't driving.
And even inside that growth, the cracks show. Revenue dipped 2% in 2025 alone. Profit margins are contracting. IBISWorld itself classifies the industry as "mature" (the stage right before decline) and forecasts a nearly flat 0.8% growth rate through 2030. That is not a booming industry. That is an industry that peaked and is coasting on momentum borrowed from a different practice entirely.
So when a yoga teacher reads a headline about wellness industry growth and feels reassured, she's reading someone else's chart.
Paint The Roses Red
That's the market data problem. But there's a second, more deliberate and intentional problem at hand.
Invisibility is a choice. The choice to bucket yoga in with Pilates, with recording industry data, serves a purpose. It serves to shield those who benefit from a rosy outlook on our future. Why would we continue paying a trade organization like the Yoga Alliance, for example, if they have actively chosen not to advocate for the trade in any way?
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a deeper look at their 2030 strategic plan and see what they say. Or in this case, what they don’t say. In a very polished 20-page document, they have quite literally no pillar of a plan for worker compensation, career sustainability, or professional labor standards. They Say Nothing.
'Would you tell me,' said Alice, a little timidly, 'why you are painting those roses?'
Five and Seven said nothing, but looked at Two. Two began in a low voice, 'Why, the fact is, you see, Miss, this here ought to have been a red rose-tree, and we put a white one in by mistake; and if the Queen was to find it out, we should all have our heads cut off, you know. So you see, Miss, we're doing our best, afore she comes, to—'
From this perspective, the Yoga Alliance has chosen to do something that gobsmacked me to no end. According to their 2030 Strategic Plan, they will “prioritize work that broadly serves the community or that we are uniquely positioned to offer, rather than duplicating existing efforts”. That, my friends, is how a labor organization writes itself out of its own labor problem.
Off with our heads, apparently.
The Margin Nobody's Talking About
Here's the part that should stop you. According to IBISWorld's own numbers, the combined Pilates and yoga studio industry posted a 16.9% profit margin in 2025, which is higher than the broader fitness sector average. That sounds like a healthy industry. And it is not what it looks like.
Wages account for only 32.6% of industry revenue. The broader fitness sector average is 55.13%. Studios in this industry are maintaining above-average profitability, specifically by paying below-average wages relative to comparable businesses.
This is not evidence that yoga and Pilates studios are thriving. It is evidence of who is absorbing the cost of an industry that stopped growing the way it used to. The studios are not failing. The workers are financing the appearance that they aren't.
I want to be careful here, because this is not a story about villainous studio owners. Most of the people running these businesses are barely making it themselves, squeezed between rising rent and a pricing ceiling set by free YouTube content and an oversaturated local market. They often cannot afford to pay more. That's a different and equally important conversation, and one I'm going to take on fully in a separate piece, because it deserves its own room rather than just a paragraph here.
What belongs here in this report is simpler: the data shows margins are being protected by wage suppression, in an industry whose largest trade organization has, as we just established, no strategic interest in compensation at all. Put those two facts next to each other, and you start to understand why nobody with the power to fix this has bothered to look.
What We Do Have
Right now, we have our own data project in motion: the Real Hours Project, an anonymous survey of working yoga professionals run through this magazine. It is not a 31,000-person dataset backed by a research firm. It's grassroots, it's ongoing, and it's imperfect. And we say that openly, because transparency about a data project's limitations is part of what makes it trustworthy.
What it has found so far is not subtle. The core finding from our first wave of responses: doing high-quality yoga work financially punishes practitioners. The more training, the more specialization, the more a teacher has invested in becoming excellent at this work, the less that investment tends to show up in their paycheck. That is not how a healthy profession is supposed to function, and it is exactly the kind of finding that a 20-page strategic plan with zero compensation data would never surface.
This is the kind of project that only works if more people are willing to be honest about what they're actually making. If you haven't filled it out, that's the easiest thing you can do today to help build the dataset we keep wishing already existed.
There are accounts online of studios shifting, changing, and closing. There are data projects that are often run by professionals in the industry, but the challenge we have is accessing those projects. We have heard secondhand that the people who run many of the industry data projects are often obligated to share data with major trade organizations first, and those organizations sit on the data, or the people who run them don’t have a platform to get the word out to the people.
We also have signals of enrollment in yoga teacher training programs. As we collect data for our 2027 Trend Report in December, we will be running surveys of yoga trainers to see if their numbers for YTT enrollment reflect the trends we are seeing elsewhere in the industry. As we start grassroots efforts to put data together and distribute it to the people, we will attempt to show a fuller picture of what is happening in the industry.
What This Really Means.
When we look at systems that aren’t working for the vast majority of participants, I want us to get in the habit of asking, “Who does this benefit?” We are often under the impression that everyone is just in a mess, and we will have to work together to get out of said mess.
But remember, there is a Queen of Hearts, and she’d just as soon chop off our heads than admit her own inadequacies. It is much more difficult to organize and act for change when we don’t have data to back up the claims of what we are seeing in our own communities. It is interesting that the Yoga Alliance, the biggest yoga organization on the planet, took up a stance of no longer producing its own data. The question is, why do they want to keep you in the dark? Is it possible that without the employment, wage, or professional data, we cannot fully ask them to do their jobs? Do we continue to believe that they are operating in good faith towards the same goal we are: a fully thriving and healthy yoga industry?
So What Can We Do?
The first thing we need to do is demand data from the organizations that claim to represent us within the industry. No matter where you are in the world, any organization should be able to share both the results of previous data projects and clear plans for data projects currently in motion. This is the bare minimum. It is the organizational equivalent of asking questions about the other person on a first date. Expected. Obvious.
We also need to support other grassroots efforts to collect good data within the industry. If you know people who are putting together good data projects, please point them in the direction of the magazine. We would love to help lift them and their projects up.
Finally, we can ignore the data of aggregate data collection companies that are not transparent about their data collection practices. They, purposely or not, tend to offer up misleading data, and their collection practices are often murky. So they have data, but where did they get it from? Treat those data sources with a bit of skepticism, and instead lean into those imperfect grassroots data collection projects that have transparent data practices and will distribute their results to the people.
Trend #2: Institutional Abandonment. The Mock Turtle.
The organizations that were built to professionalize yoga have left the building.
Before we begin an honest analysis of the organizations that are currently controlling the helm of our profession in North America, we first need to define what the devil they are supposed to be doing.
A trade organization is a group of businesses or individuals who come together to share information, promote their common interests, and advocate for the needs of their collective. A trade organization exists to benefit the trade. For example, a dentists’ trade organization exists to promote, stabilize, and advocate for the profession of dentistry. They are not designed to create new ways of cleaning teeth; that is the dentists’ job. They are there to support the dentists themselves, not to promote dentistry.
What that means, in clear terms, is that dentists’ reimbursement rates, contract negotiations, and retirement benefits would all fit under the umbrella of what they cover. That trade organization is not necessarily there to promote clean teeth. That is a different thing entirely.
As we travel through our Yoga Wonderland, we have now met our Mock Turtle, riddled with grief over a past that may or may not have been an illusion. That is what we continue to do, and as the White Rabbit I encourage you to both get motivated to move–because we are late, and to consider the thing you have been grieving all of these years was a fictional story of what we were…not a reality we need to let go of.
Now, let’s apply what we have learned about trade organizations to the organizations that operate in the yoga sphere in North America, and see where they land.
The Yoga Alliance.
The Yoga Alliance is a 501(c)(6) — a business league or trade association. That classification legally requires them to promote the common business interests of their members.
And yet, when we look deeply at the strategic plan of the Yoga Alliance for 2024-2030, we get a very different picture of what they see themselves doing. It is shocking, even as a long-time yoga organization observer who has more than passing experience in how organizations are run, to see a 20 page document of a strategic plan that has literally zero plans for worker advocacy.
Nothing. No wage protections, no professional rights, no retirement, nothing that refers to worker advocacy. And let me remind us all, that is the entire reason they exist and collect dues.
I did a work search in this document. Here are the words related to worker advocacy and how many times they appear in the document.
Compensation: 0
Wages: 0
Salary: 0
(This remains the biggest issue facing all yoga workers–our ability to make enough money to live)
Employment: 0
Career Stability: 0
Income: 0
Labor: 0
The organization has been led without apparent firsthand knowledge of working teacher economics, and the strategic plan confirms that. Not a single metric, not a single data point about member income or career sustainability appears anywhere in the document. They certainly wouldn’t know from any data or critical thinking they have done about the industry.
Want to know how I know? It’s in the report.
A Dive Into Appreciative Inquiry.
For those who didn’t know, there are leadership structures that are the equivalent of “focus only on the positive”. Thought those ‘good vibes only’ days were behind us? Well, let me introduce you to the academic framework of Appreciative Inquiry.
Developed in the late 1980s, Appreciative Inquiry is a way of organizational leadership that focuses on identifying what is going right rather than what needs to be fixed. It consists of positive questions that lead the organization to vision what is possible for the grandest part of their future.
For organizations that are functional and healthy and are trying to build culture and direction, Appreciative Inquiry is an incredibly reasonable, in some cases even innovative, choice. However, for a credentialing organization whose industry is in structural decline, whose members cannot make a living, and whose primary challenge is an accountability deficit, it is a framework specifically designed to avoid seeing the problem clearly.
The choice of Appreciative Inquiry for this strategic plan is in no way neutral. It is a methodological decision that guaranteed the resulting document would contain no deficit analysis, no accountability framing, and no labor economics.
From the strategic plan: “Appreciative Inquiry focuses on what's working in a system.”
In an informal poll of members of my 1,500-person yoga professional community, 31 people responded. The sample is small and self-selected. However, the results were not close.
I asked, “What do yoga organizations get most wrong?”
Pay & Job Opportunities: 6%
Worker Representation & Advocacy: 17%
Standards & Credentialing: 4%
Not Democratic: 3%
All of It: 70%
So remind me, what is the point of focusing on what is right, exactly?
The Most Damning Quotes.
There were three quotes from this strategic plan that I find eyebrow-raising at best, appalling at worst.
From pages 8-9:
"As a steward of member resources, we will prioritize work that broadly serves the community or that we are uniquely positioned to offer, rather than duplicating existing efforts or impeding others."
This is them, writing themselves out of the labor problem altogether.
"Yoga Alliance's role within the yoga community is to serve as a steadfast advocate for yoga and to lift up and support those who share its teachings, not to step into the shoes of either."
With rumors that the Yoga Alliance is seeking to leave credentialing entirely (read that twice), these are the first hints that this is exactly what they intend to do.
And finally, the quote was directed exactly to people like me.
"These perspectives may run counter to what is best for the community and for yoga as a whole, though they may be conveyed by community members with considerable influence or standing."
When an organization pre-emptively frames member criticism as spiritually suspect, it is not doing advocacy work. It is doing reputation management
The International Association of Yoga Therapists.
Yoga therapists have a work problem. While they are among the most highly educated, highly invested groups in the yoga professional sphere, the reality that people face when they leave a yoga therapy training is a grim one.
There are few jobs, and few people outside of perhaps the yoga therapist schools themselves are helping to provide opportunities for recent credentialed graduates.
But the institutional issue of the IAYT is one that is almost more egregious than the Yoga Alliance. While the Yoga Alliance holds a 501c6 organization status, classifying them as an organization designed to advocate for the trade of yoga teaching itself, and failing to do so, the IAYT is something different.
The International Association of Yoga Therapists is a 501(c)3 designated organization, which is the designation of an organization I used to run, and is designed specifically to benefit the public good.
How can this be, you might be asking, when they collect membership dues, have a member portal, and distribute tests and credentials as if they are a membership organization? That is the question of the hour.
Recently, in a meeting of yoga therapy schools, according to several people at the meeting, one of the leaders of the organization stated outright that she is attempting to save the profession by moving everything in yoga therapy towards a medical model. A medical model that is, in fact, failing on its own. Especially where holistic health is concerned. You didn’t think we would be talking about the Big Beautiful Bill today, did you? But here it is.
“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed July 4, 2025, created an Earnings Premium metric that applies to virtually all programs at institutions receiving Title IV federal student aid. Dubbed "gainful employment for all," the metric compares graduate median earnings to working adults aged 25-34 who did not complete a comparable postsecondary program. Programs that fail the earnings premium in two out of three consecutive years lose eligibility to participate in the Direct Loan program for two years” (Holland/Knight)
“A program that fails the earnings accountability metric in two of any three consecutive years would be designated a "low-earning outcome program" and would lose eligibility for Title IV funds.” (NAICU)
The law introduced, for the first time in statute, an earnings accountability measure described as ensuring "that students do not leave a program of study financially worse off than when they entered it”.
What this means is that the One Big Beautiful Bill Act created a federal earnings accountability mechanism that will evaluate whether graduate programs produce earnings above a baseline. Yoga therapy programs at accredited institutions are directly in scope. This includes programs that are already running. Those schools that were built in good faith around an industry organization that has failed to provide the guardrails needed to validate the work they are training people to do.
Given what the Real Hours Project and compensation data show about yoga therapy earnings, those programs are incredibly vulnerable to this test. The IAYT's pivot toward positioning yoga therapy as a medical-adjacent credential, without having built the jobs that would produce the earnings to justify that credential cost, is not just a labor problem. It is now potentially a federal regulatory problem for the institutions running those programs.
And the IAYT has said directly that they have no intention of building those jobs.
So this essentially makes the International Association of Yoga Therapists an organization whose credentials require significant worker investment, and then positions itself as a pathway into adjacent fields rather than a builder of yoga therapy jobs. This is not abandoning the labor problem. It is actively redirecting credentialed labor into other industries. The public good of a 501(c)(3) cannot be the advancement of a credential whose primary beneficiary is the organization collecting the credential fees.
Money is one kind of abandonment. However, there is a darker one underneath it.
We Are Sad For Student Safety. The Mock Turtle in Action.
We grieve for the abused, the assaulted, the victims of derision and control issues, cosplaying as wisdom.
We reel and writhe in sadness at the loss of innocence as people are funneled towards predatory programs and teachers, young women, many of them carrying trauma histories that made them precisely the students a predatory teacher would seek out.
We make posts, feign outrage, and call for change to an empty room.
And the organizations designed to protect the trade and advocate for the public good, they are sad too. Tears and grief and “if only they had called the police,” and “use the living principles of yoga to guide you” recommendations to us all.
All of that without any standards of accountability for the predators and perpetrators of those actions that are worth more than just words on a page.
Fake grief indeed.
With no credentialing body that holds real consequences and no accountability mechanism within the profession, that means that there is no accountability of any kind for professional misconduct.
Organizations in this space have long pointed to the criminal justice system as the place where accountability is supposed to happen. Someone gets hurt, they can press charges, and the system handles it. That sounds like a plan. It is not one.
The criminal justice system has a documented, well-studied track record of low reporting rates and even lower conviction rates for sexual misconduct, in part because the bar for criminal prosecution is intentionally high and the process of pursuing it is brutal for the person who was harmed. And even when it works exactly as designed, it does nothing for the much larger category of harm that never reaches that threshold. The boundary violations, the repeated small coercions, the pattern of behavior that makes a teacher unsafe long before it becomes a police report, all apply here. A profession that points to the courts as its accountability system has built no accountability system at all. It has built an excuse.
Without accountability mechanisms within the profession for professional misconduct, we are clearly saying that we are a place where predators can go to play. We already have a lot of the things that appeal to predatory personalities–deep public admiration for teachers and lineage holders, much of it unearned and stolen from the backs of teachers who are long dead.
Along with admiration, we have vulnerable populations of individuals who are susceptible to the unbalanced power dynamic between teacher and student. And finally, we have no true accountability—nobody saying “no sexual misconduct” other than a static website of suggested behaviors. We do, however, have a whole lot of performed grief at the idea that people might be getting hurt.
Much of the consumption of yoga has moved online. People are finding YouTube channels and bringing yoga with them to safe environments. It doesn’t escape me that as the public becomes more aware of the issues of sexual misconduct within our spaces, perhaps this choice is part convenience, and part a safety concern. Because our institutions built exactly zero accountability structures with teeth, people are choosing not to participate in yoga in such a way that might put them or their bodies at risk.
Reading The Signals.
When you apply for a job, it would be ludicrous to expect to be able to write yourself out of the hardest part of that job. That difficult challenge is likely why the job was for hire in the first place. But that is exactly what both the Yoga Alliance and the International Association of Yoga Therapists have done.
The Yoga Alliance has explicitly written itself out of the pay and professionalization discussion in any way. They are not trying to hide it; they have said it outright.
The International Association of Yoga Therapists refuses flatly to work on the one part of the labor problem that would actually make a huge difference in both their ability to shift the profession in a medicalized direction and to the people who pay their dues. While their membership is not who the IAYT has a legal obligation to create benefit for, the only way they can continue their work going forward is if they address the giant elephant in the room. There are not enough jobs. There are, in fact, fewer jobs now than there were 10 years ago.
But if you, as an employer, decided to hire either of these groups, you would expect them to do the hardest part of their job. To not just focus on the positive, or tell Karin from HR that the hard part is really her work. We would never allow this from an employee. And we shouldn’t allow it from an organization.
So What Now?
If we are going to embrace our role as Alice and go forward in the enchanted forest to find our way home, we also need to take notes from her journey. Alice did not sit down and wait for her parents to rescue her. She went forward herself, made friends when she could, learned how to read the signals of those who shouldn’t be friends, and pursued her ultimate goal of getting back home.
We too need to stop waiting for a rescue. And we need to stop being caught up in the grief the Mock Turtle feigns. While it is entertaining, it is also a distraction from the work that needs to be done.
We need to understand that a large part of why these organizations fail to build the infrastructure for our industry that is actually needed and would benefit us is because these organizations have been run by people who are not yoga professionals. Our infrastructure needs to be built by the people who are going to use it. Those who understand what we need, because they are us. And it has been too long since we understood that as our role.
And finally, we need to really have a clear idea of what organizing looks like in the beginning. It is small meetings, a tangle of schedules and ideas, and a lot of people thinking “I want to be a part of this, but I don’t know if I am the one to run it”. That is normal, that is human, and make no mistake: we are going to have to organize anyway.
Some of us are going to have to step up and step in at the beginning and take the reins. And when we build enough of a group behind us, we can pass those reins to new folks and work together to create a collective infrastructure that works for everyone.
I hate to belabor the point, but <checks shiny pocket watch> our time is limited. While we are right now slightly late in the organizing work we need to do, we have a time limit. The opportunity to steer our profession in a direction that benefits the many and sustains itself for the next 20 years is coming to a close. There is a point where, if we don’t take control of our futures, we will end up with an industry that is so exploited and extracted that it will be unrecognizable.
Trend Three: Whoooo Arrrree Yooouu? The Extraction Economy.
There is a real problem of extraction in the yoga space. But what does that even mean, and how is it concretely showing up? Does it actually matter if this leads to more work in the industry?
To answer this question, let’s take a look at mindfulness for a second. While mindfulness is attributed to the Buddhist tradition, many of the practices within the mindfulness canon have been derived directly from the yogic tradition. And now those practices have made their way strongly into the mental health space.
There are a lot of people in the mental health profession who use mindfulness techniques to benefit their clients. There has been a lot of positive correlation between integrating mindfulness practices with mental health therapy, but it does not come without its drawbacks. And it also, in this case, is the perfect example of the extraction of yogic practices.
Many times, and with completely good intentions, mental health therapists are doing what we in the yoga space would consider the bare minimum of training and education before prescribing mindfulness to their clients. They are reading books, watching YouTube videos, and taking weekend courses as an licensed healthcare professional that will give them an overview of what mindfulness techniques are popular and how they can use them.
What we are missing, significantly so, are the guardrails that are embedded in a complete practice of mindfulness that make the techniques safer (they are not always safe for everyone). These guardrails are not often talked about independently because they are embedded within a system that takes practitioners years to become competent in.
Yoga is also stripped for parts in other ways, the most obvious of which is the use of yogic movements, or asana, as a fitness form devoid of the other aspects of the practice–specifically living principles and philosophies-that make movement practices both safer and also more impactful.
Somatic movement has its own version of this problem. It has absorbed yoga techniques into its own practice, often without crediting where they came from, and it is now struggling with the exact same half-trained-practitioner issue yoga is: people offering somatic work after a weekend certification, with none of the years of embodied study the original teachers had. The two practices are increasingly getting confused with each other in the public eye, which means yoga is now absorbing reputational damage for harm caused by people who were never trained in yoga at all, doing something that only resembles it.
The truth is that the guardrails and safety techniques that are built into a complete practice don’t transfer to people who strip yoga for parts. And if we don’t actively work to change this practice of extraction, the yoga industry and yoga practice that we know will become unrecognizable in 20 years’ time. And the guardrails don't transfer. You cannot extract the technique and keep the safety system that was built around it. That's not a metaphor. It's structural.
Integration vs. Extraction.
There are a lot of industries that have use for the work we do as yoga professionals. Educational institutions of all levels are looking to yoga professionals to share their knowledge not only with the students, but more importantly the teachers in those educational environments.
Yoga teachers and yoga therapists are putting their skills to use supporting the educators who teach our youth. An increasingly difficult and stressful job. Offering wellness services in that environment makes sense from not only a worker satisfaction perspective but also a worker retention metric. Teachers who feel supported from their school administration are more likely to not only do better work, but also stay in the field.
Corporations are finding the same. They are utilizing people who have yoga skills to support their workforce, especially as that workforce likely faces massive stresses placed on them due to the integration of artificial intelligence into previously satisfactory business models.
These businesses and institutions are offering yoga practitioners the opportunity to transfer their skills to new markets, and also they offer those yoga professionals a more stable and dependable income opportunity.
Compare that with other well-meaning practitioners, who utilize the techniques of yoga without hiring yoga professionals themselves. This becomes the first steps of an extractive model of dissemination, which hurts both the practitioners and the practice itself.
One aspect of this that is rarely talked about is the fact that in yoga, specifically, there is an expectation that a yoga practitioner also be a sincere and ongoing student of the practice. When we look at professions and corporate programs that are seeking to add yoga services to their offerings for either clients or the workforce, the best of those programs are hiring us, trained yoga professionals, to facilitate the work.
Others, however, hire people who are taking weekend classes, reading a few books, and then attempting the same services. One of these scenarios is deeply extractive, and the other is the logical next step in the integration of yoga professionals into other settings with their transferable skills.
An aspect of this that we are often not discussing is that what makes yoga, as a practice, so generally safe, is that it was built within a complete system that sets guardrails for its practitioners to follow. If you start asana before learning about living principles like the yamas and niyamas, you run the risk of overextending your body and divorcing yourself from the kindness and honesty in your experience that helps you gauge where your body is able to move, and where it might best be served to slow down and pause.
I want to say something directly here rather than side-stepping around it. What I'm describing, the stripping of yoga's individual techniques from the complete system that makes them safe and meaningful, sits inside a much larger and older conversation about cultural appropriation, colonialism, and who profits from a practice that did not originate with the people now monetizing it most successfully. That conversation is real, it matters, and it deserves more depth and more expertise than I can give it in this section. I'm not the right person to fully unpack it, and I'd rather point you toward people who are doing that work seriously than clumsily gesture at it here.
What I can speak to with authority is the narrower problem sitting inside that larger one: competence and safety. Whatever else extraction is, it is also, concretely, this: people using powerful tools without the training that makes those tools safe, and a profession that has let that happen without building any meaningful distinction between the two.
So here is that said distinction, stated clearly. A trained practitioner, with an ongoing personal practice, who understands the full system well enough to know when a tool helps and when it harms, is doing something fundamentally different from someone who has read a book and watched a few videos. Both of them might call what they're doing mindfulness, or yoga, or somatic work. Only one of them actually knows what they're holding.
That's the line. Who are you, the Caterpillar kept asking Alice. She never had a good answer, because she kept changing size, and kept losing track of who she'd been a moment before. The yoga industry has let an entire adjacent economy grow up around its techniques without ever requiring anyone to answer that question. It's time we started asking it.
Trend #4: It Is Always Six O’Clock. Always Tea Time. The End of the Portable Career.
As we arrive at our inevitable tea party, we encounter the Mad Hatter on our march through Yoga Wonderland. The most significant thing about this stop is that so many of us are cosplaying the Mad Hatter, and never notice that for us, time seemed to have stopped.
The portable career started in earnest in the 2000s and came to its full height in the 2010s. You know the portable career already; you just didn’t know this was a way to characterize it. Up until 2021, a lot of us just called it “goals”.
You learn to teach yoga. You become somewhat good at your craft and decide you want to build a following. From there, you start working on specific content that you will hopefully become known for. Then you build workshops, courses, books, and perhaps you even travel around the festival and teacher training special guest circuit, sharing your knowledge with more and more people. You become known for a thing. Call it a niche if you want to, but what ended up happening when you leaned into that is inevitable.
One way or another, your niche became old news. Maybe you got bored. Perhaps more people didn’t need to know about hip mobility, or post-workout recovery, or relaxation for busy professionals.
For me, during those years of the 2000s and 2010s, I built workshops and content around hips, yoga for aging populations, sleep, and eventually the thing I was known for when I exited teaching full-time–self-care for women who felt like they had lost their purpose.
I am a classic example of what I am referring to when I say “portable career”. I had one thing I talked about a lot for a while, I got known for it, and then after I got bored or noticed that the client need was shifting elsewhere, I changed my focus. I was portable to wherever the wind blew me.
There are a lot of factors that contributed to this industry’s operability. The large boom in demand for our services allowed teachers to look at this model as a way to both gain dedicated followers and a real income stream. Money was flowing more easily in the industry during this time, and up until that point, the industry had been led and directed by people who were both incredibly independent or individualist in their thinking and entrepreneurial in their mindset.
This left a lot of space for people who preferred to be left to their own devices and build their careers exactly how they saw fit. People like me. In fact, if you had a similar disposition to mine in the 2010s (independent, slightly anti-authority, ambitious, and entrepreneurial), the sky was the limit to what you could build with time and the right connections. It wasn’t true that you needed to be famous (or infamous) to make a living in yoga. But a certain character type did do better than the others.
This era of the soloist would not live forever. As the industry started to contract, the people who were able to keep operating in this capacity were those who had bigger names, and it forced a lot of people to embark on what I talked about earlier. Figuring out how to take their skills and transfer them to other adjacent industries.
A lot of those people took their skills to places like corporate wellness, healthcare, and education. The early 2020s was the first wave of seeing some of our most highly invested and highly trained workforce shift their skills into new directions. Not necessarily because they wanted out of yoga, but because other industries offered better pay, benefits, better connection, and an exciting new way to share yoga with new people.
For those of us who stayed in the industry, we noticed something incredibly different happening. The opportunities this “soloist” model offered were quickly vanishing. Some of this is attributed to the shift in industry workers that happened in 2020/2021. Because there were fewer workers in the industry as a whole, there were fewer people to buy new training courses, workshops, and to attend festivals.
So the opportunity to narrow down and teach specialized content was slim. Now what do we do?
The Tea Party Had To End. The Case for Generalization.
For years serious yoga practitioners have made the case for people to teach the full scope of yoga. To shift away from the model of teaching only movement, or singling out one of the other practices in the full spectrum of yoga, and using that as a springboard to jump into a career. The main reason for this argument, in its inception, was with respect to the culture. Part of the early argument for this, going back years, was about respect for the tradition itself, a conversation about cultural appropriation that I touched on and stepped back from in the last trend.
I am now here to give you yet another reason to push away the temptation to operate in the extractive model of yoga distribution.
Because the generalists have the best shot of surviving the upcoming industry contraction.
There are a handful of teachers who are dedicated generalists (I would love to consider myself in this group, but as previously mentioned, I did always have a specialized ‘thing’ I was doing) who are as close as we get to thriving. As noted many times in many different industries and data trends analysis, the population of yoga students is aging. They are typically now aged 38-55. As far as newer students go, multiple 2025-2026 reports on Gen Z wellness habits point to the same shift, moving away from fitness-driven motivations and toward spirituality, meaning, and mental health as the primary draw.
So as far as sustainable work is concerned, both practicing and teaching the full spectrum of yoga (philosophy and lifestyle, movement, breathwork, meditation) is currently the best way to set yourself up for a long-term studentship base.
Studios, on the other hand, are much more at the mercy of market forces, and the overwhelming majority of those studios that are sustainable have shifted into the fitness industry direction of offering not just yoga, but also Pilates, barre, strength training, and other movement modalities. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the owners of these businesses believe any less in yoga than they did when they started, but it does mean that they are being forced into answering the call of what the market and economy are asking. Pivot or die.
Either way, the middle route of a career yoga professional–that soloist opportunity to build your path and carve out your future based on the intersection of interests and market demand is shrinking beyond the point of recognition. And we need to talk about it.
Moving Down The Table. What Replaces the Soloist?
We are in the moment of the movie where all the heroes come together.
As we shift place settings, our dear Alice realizes there is no place for her at the table. We watch the Mad Hatter and the Mouse shift down, making room for each other, keeping the party closed to anyone new. There is no seat being made for Alice. If she wants in, she has to pull up her own chair.
That's the moment we're in. Not a moment where someone hands you a seat. A moment where the table itself needs to be rebuilt, longer, with room for the people who've been standing behind the existing chairs for years.
Here's what I mean by that, in practical and concrete terms.
Collective organizing in this industry is not, right now, a single national movement with a headquarters and a hotline. It's smaller than that, and earlier than that. It looks like state-level professional associations, built region by region, starting with the cohorts who have the clearest grievance and the most to gain. That likely means starting with yoga therapists first, in several states, because their situation is the most acute and the most documented. It looks like teachers who used to treat each other as competitors under the soloist model are starting to share rate information instead of guarding it. It looks like studio owners and teachers, who have spent a decade locked in an adversarial relationship neither of them designed, are starting to talk to each other about the actual structural forces squeezing them both, rather than blaming each other for a system built above their heads.
None of this requires you to become an organizer overnight, I promise. It requires something smaller and more achievable: noticing that soloist instinct to keep your numbers private, protect your niche, don't compare notes with the teacher down the street, and realizing it was a survival strategy built for a different decade, and it does not serve you anymore. The thing that made sense when the market was expanding is actively working against you now that it isn't.
So here is where you start, this week, regardless of where you live or what you teach.
Find one other working teacher in your area you do not currently consider a competitor, and have one honest conversation about what you're actually charging and what you're actually making. Not to fix anything. Just to break the silence that's been protecting an unsustainable system for longer than either of you realized. The more transparent we are, the easier it will be to find a path forward for all of us.
If there's a state-level professional association forming anywhere near you (and there are more of these starting than you might think) show up once. Not to commit to anything. Just to see who else is in the room, and to let them see you.
And if you are a yoga therapist reading this, specifically: you are at the front of this particular table, whether you asked to be or not. Your credential is the most acute case of institutional abandonment in this entire report. That makes you the natural starting point for the kind of collective infrastructure the rest of the industry is going to need eventually. If you're not yet connected to others doing this work, that is the single most useful thing you can do this month.
The soloist era asked you to build alone. What replaces it asks you to build next to someone. That's a smaller ask than it sounds like, and it's, frankly, the only one that scales.
What Happens On Monday Morning.
There is the question of “what’s next?” and “what now?” Our answers to those questions are different, but both point toward a fundamental goal. The “what’s next?” is the collective organization and action that stands to protect both our students and us.
But let’s look at “what now?”.
First, you need to start by stripping back the layers of your work to the bare bones. We are building bodies of work, and if you have been operating in the soloist era model, trying to figure out what your next niche is, it is worth looking at things through a long lens. What do you want to build in your career? Who do you want to teach, long-term? Look at your career through the lens of what do you want to contribute to the world, to the yoga space, and build from there.
If you are a person who is a generalist–and by that I mean a person who teaches more than the movement aspects of yoga, but the whole spectrum of the practice, you should assume that people don’t really know what you do. There are a few distinct tropes that the general public assumes about yoga professionals, and you aren’t typically going to fit into any of them.
You aren’t a fitness professional, although you teach movement. You aren’t a deeply enlightened spiritual teacher, although you weave philosophy skillfully into your programming. You aren’t an influencer, although your opinion may be of great influence to those who enjoy you and your teaching.
So know that as you go out to share your offerings with different places, most folks won’t quite grasp what you are doing. That’s okay. The understanding will start after the teaching, most likely. Your job is to just get in the door.
Networking will be your primary tool for work outside the studio space. Finding groups, either in healthcare, education, or corporate wellness, that want what you are offering is crucial. And you don’t find those folks at spiritual sangha nights at your local yoga studio. You find those people with a nametag at your local chamber of commerce meetings. You find those people as you attend a local charity event, which you can likely go to for free if you donate a free private session of yoga. And it is long past time that we, as yoga professionals, embrace that the next step in our careers is coming into those spaces and claiming our rightful work. The people who figure this out fastest are the people who are going to survive the upcoming industry dip with their careers intact.
Self Assessment And Our Place at the Table.
If we enter an era where soloist era work is no longer a sustainable option, for many, if not most, people, this is the perfect time to become clear on what we are offering. If you have set your career and yoga teaching up for expansion–covering more ground and seeing as many humans as possible, consider an assessment. What would it look like if you were teaching (and learning) for depth?
We will have more to offer people if we set ourselves up for the inevitable understanding that we are valuable in our teaching because of the depth of understanding we have, not the breadth of knowledge we can spout off in an hour if we talk really fast.
Get good at your jobs. So good that your work is undeniable. Then your work will always have a seat at the table. Start now, friends. Time is running out to decide what kind of practitioner you're going to be.
Trend #5: The Online Gap. A Cheshire Cat of a Problem.
The yoga industry’s move online on March 16th, 2020, should be studied. It was a moment of collective exhale, in which the entirety of the yoga space learned Zoom, had a plan to distribute links, and get their students into an online yoga class, nearly overnight. By the end of 2020, we had protocols for reminding our students to shut the door so the cat doesn’t bother you, turn off the ringer of your phone (just like in studio class), and take a few minutes to pay attention to your breath and let the noise of the outside world just drop away.
In 2021, I started the podcast, Working In Yoga, and I was interviewing teachers who had seen profound transformations of their students in the online space over the previous year. They were also acknowledging that some people felt even more comfortable practicing yoga at home, instead of coming to a space where room was limited, and you might feel awkward if you aren’t wearing the right clothes or have the nicest yoga mat.
But then, in late 2022, we just…stopped.
I understand, to some degree, the studios’ willingness to drop online options from their schedules. There are a lot of logistics that studios have to navigate. Who owns the videos, are the waivers also good for online classes, how do you pay your teachers for replays, and so much more. This was a problem from the very beginning, but most studios were willing to risk the liability in order to keep their doors open.
Now, in 2026, we feel like online yoga is a bonus, an add-on to a “regular” yoga practice.
The one challenge with this, though: the public really doesn’t.
Ever since our very instant shift to online yoga, which was definitely on the horizon well before 2020, the public shifted with us. There was a desire for people to find yoga that could be done at their own schedule and timing, and for awhile YouTube was the solution we provided. Still today, YouTube represents a large portion of the online yoga space–and they are taking the market that could be filled by yoga professionals who are willing to operate both in person and online.
To call a spade a spade, the industry itself largely abandoned online yoga in favor of in-person teaching, the minute that COVID safety protocols made that possible for us. But those who stayed online and kept building careers–slowly, but surely made something valuable for their students, and for their professional livelihoods. The abandonment of the online space, like the Cheshire Cat disappearing on Alice, left behind only a few major players, and an industry pretending there's no connection between the work they do and the work we provide in person
The most interesting aspect of this online abandonment is that many people do use online services as part of their suite of offerings as a yoga professional. But fewer of those people are actively trying to build online communities. The lead time for this is long, but the potential reward is also higher than in-person teaching. This leads me to believe that there is an incongruency between what the public expects from our services (online and accessible) and our creative imagination being applied to where our work can go. We are not seeing the online opportunities or expectations clearly.
Online Yoga Teacher Trainings
For ages now, many, if not most, of the yoga professional community has insulted online trainings for teachers. This actually applies, from what I have seen, to all online training offerings. But especially the asynchronous teacher training programs.
In true ironic fashion, be it in-person or online trainings, one thing I know for sure is that the overwhelming majority of those trainings are not teaching people how to teach online. And the skillsets are most certainly different.
There are the technical understandings, of course, as in what lights, camera, and mic are needed for people to get the best online experience. But there are also teaching techniques, ones that we don’t need to invent ourselves, that also offer the best possible experience for folks taking our classes online.
And the neglect we have in training new teachers in this is a great disservice to our profession as a whole. As our industry shifts, it is our responsibility to offer as many pathways to a professional career as we can, and our neglect of treating online teaching as a viable and real option is actively choosing to not utilize the opportunities in front of us.
The Yoga With Adriene Problem. How We Disappear Ourselves From the Conversation.
Please bear in mind, I do not find Adriene, or her YouTube yoga channel a problem in any way. But often when I ask people why they are not actively working on building their careers in the online market, they cite Yoga with Adriene as the reason.
The question, it seems, isn’t if you can compete with a mega-channel like this, but where you can find yourself in the ecosystem of online yoga, and yoga in general.
When I owned a studio, I was known to run ads for the studio to people in my local area who followed Yoga with Adriene on YouTube. I knew that her teaching style fit my studio fairly well, and I also knew that eventually people would want to shift from the online-only-no-community model to one with a more interactive element. For me that was the yoga studio in person and the online offerings we provided. So I never saw a YouTube channel as competition, but one facet of an ecosystem that contains us all.
The same can be said for building an online community of yoga students for your business. There are things that you can provide people that an online yoga star cannot. Relationship, responsiveness, community, expertise, accountability are all things that can be cultivated in online settings that a general online teacher from YouTube cannot compete with directly on YouTube itself. There is a difference between a content platform and a working yoga professional. We need to understand where we fit in the ecosystem, and behave and offer our services accordingly.
What To Think On.
It is useful to consider where you fit in the ecosystem of online teaching. There are practical considerations, and also a longer lead time to sustainable income. However, do not discount the freedom that can be experienced when you build an online platform and a teaching reputation. But you need to stop thinking about your online teaching as your channel, and consider it a room that people can enter and leave at will.
This is the one place where the damage isn't done yet, where the opportunity for yoga professionals is still genuinely open, unlike the institutional and economic problems in the earlier trends. It may feel like the online opportunity disappeared, but like the Cheshire Cat, it is reappearing for us again.
The greater, and ultimately more useful question is, how do we behave differently in a room where a relationship is possible, but presence is optional?
A True Trend. The Menopause Pivot. So…Which Tweedle Are You?
In 2026 I have seen no less than 15 teachers shift their teaching towards the trend of perimenopause and menopause content, and I want to talk about it. It, in fact, inspired the deconstruction of the industry that sparked this entire piece of writing.
Firstly, it is important to establish that this is a macro trend within wellness in general. Many data companies have said 2026 is “the year of the woman” or “the year women catch up” in terms of their healthcare as they age. Menopause and perimenopause content is everywhere. Online, on tv, in every magazine you are picking up or flipping through online.
And yoga’s population of primarily woman ages, this is a trend worth noticing. It is also very much a canary in the coal mine. And the upcoming critique of this trend is not one of the topic. That is very relevant, very real, and very timely. But in yoga, I believe it is a sign of something different that we need to be alert for.
The Underlying Pattern. She Doesn’t Even Go Here. She Just Has a Lot of Feelings.
Picture two teachers standing side by side. Same outfit, more or less. Same workshop title. Same soft-focus Instagram graphic announcing "Yoga for the Second Spring." From the outside, they are Tweedledum and Tweedledee, interchangeable, identical, impossible to tell apart. Carroll's twins spend their entire scene in a battle over a rattle, a fight so disproportionate to its object that it becomes the joke. I keep thinking about that scene watching this trend unfold, because the two teachers in front of you are not actually the same person wearing the same outfit. One of them has been doing this work for fifteen years. The other found the rattle three months ago.
This section will bring us back to the soloist era we were talking about in trend #3. The one where yoga professionals, at their height in the 2010s, picked a topic–became a pseudo-expert on the topic, and then built around that. One of the advantages of this model is that once you were done with teaching whatever particular topic, or you found a subject that seemed more lucrative, you could jump into teaching a new thing instead. The model was the same. Topic > workshops > longer courses > book or traveling to conferences.
This is, I believe, what we are seeing with the rise of menopause and perimenopause content .
What I find almost chilling about this trend, are the people who are jumping on it. I have seen more legacy teachers launch workshops on this content than I have seen almost anyone else. People who are heads of established programs, people who have written several books on other topics, people who up until this point were known for their deep knowledge of something else entirely.
Yet here they are, offering “yoga for perimenopause and menopause” free online classes, workshops, and short articles. While they are free, as we all are, to offer content on whatever strikes us as interesting and relevant, the thing that makes me cringe internally is that these people really should not have to switch content topics. Many are in the peri/post menopausal stage themselves, and have been working in the yoga space for 20+ years. By this point they have built a large body of work to show for their teaching years. A pivot to new content shouldn’t be necessary. So the question for me has been, are they curious about the topic or is this something different? A sign of the results of several decades of pushing away from institutional infrastructure, that is now coming back like a bad penny.
Now, one group of people whom I have seen shift to peri and post menopausal content, are folks who have long been in adjacent expertise topics. Folks who were teaching yoga for women’s health type content for years, and to me those folks making the shift to content makes complete sense. The world was ready for the discussion about menopause, and their adjacent skillset and expertise are here to meet the moment.
The way to tell if this is a trend you see someone jumping on, or if it is a logical shift in content direction based on demand, lies entirely in the relationship the professional had prior to this “hot topic” moment. From a distance, they look like the same person. Same content, same urgency, same claim on the moment. But one of them has actually been here. The other showed up when the topic got hot.
Beyond The Individual. Why This Matters.
You might be wondering why this matters beyond the doors of the virtual rooms that are quickly opening up to address menopause and perimenopausal topics. Isn’t this just people doing what they have the right to do? Finding their own way in the yoga world. Well…yes, but it is a little more complicated than that.
First, the current students for these teachers are themselves often coming from the yoga world. As stated upwards in this report, the collective age of yoga practitioners and students is getting older. 38-55 is now our average age range, and the overwhelming majority of those people are women. So almost all of them have entered the perimenopause or menopausal stage.
Those women also deserve teachers who have a true connection with the content of women’s health content, not just people who are here to address a trend. This is a commitment to high-quality expertise-level content that we should all be striving for.
The argument over who gets to claim this content, who was here first, who's more "authentic" (that's the rattle). It's the visible fight, the one that gets attention. The thing actually at stake, the thing nobody's watching closely enough, is whether the women walking into these classes are getting real expertise or a teacher's best guess.
There is also the fact that people shifting into this trend seem to be in the last gasp of the soloist era, and I for one will happily watch this way of working die. While we were all jumping from trend to trend, content to content, and figuring out cute names and sometimes incredibly sketchy ways to tie this to the overall yoga practice, what we built instead of professional infrastructure, was a snake eating its own tail.
Instead of deciding to expand our market for yoga, thus creating a more stable system for everyone, we decided instead that our professional ladder would end at the spot where we could be well known enough to sell our content to other people like us. Over and over again we created certifications, mini-trainings, and sold them to each other. We packaged them, on purpose or not, as a solution to the problem of industry pay. If we could just sell another thing to the 12 people in this industry who were buying, perhaps we would be the one who “made it”.
The Finale of the Soloist.
This menopause trend, and the upcoming trend in 2028 of yoga for older adults (you heard it here first, this is coming for us, hard. I will cover it in depth in the December Trends for 2027 report), these will be the final iterations of this soloist main event that has been the standard for the last 20 years in the yoga industry.
While menopause and perimenopause content is undeniably beneficial for folks, it isn’t the content itself that I take issue with. It is the system that builds celebrities instead of infrastructure that I continue to be concerned about. And this, the last gasp of that era, could give people hope of a career structure that has long gone out to pasture.
So watch this era die. I will not be mourning it.
But before you write off the topic itself, here is the distinction that actually matters. There is a real difference between chasing menopause content because it is trending, and building genuine depth in working with aging bodies because that is where the profession is actually going.
The data backs this up plainly. Industry research shows individuals 50 and older already account for nearly 40% of all yoga and Pilates revenue, and that number is the primary driver of whatever growth this industry has left. The under-30 population is constrained by cost. The 30-49 group is the current center of gravity. But the 50-plus demographic is the only segment with real, sustained momentum behind it; driven by people seeking support for chronic pain, mobility, fall prevention, and yes, the hormonal realities of midlife and beyond.
That is not a trend. That is where the actual students are, and where they will keep being for the next twenty years.
So the question is not whether to engage with this topic. It's whether you're doing it as a costume or as a craft. A teacher who spends real time building clinical knowledge of aging bodies, menopause, perimenopause, bone density, nervous system changes, and the specific ways movement needs to shift across a woman's life — that teacher is doing exactly the kind of rooted, whole-practice work this entire report has been arguing for. A teacher who slaps a new title on an old workshop because the algorithm rewards it is doing one more lap of the soloist era, in different packaging.
If you are thinking seriously about what holds up for the next decade of your career, this is your answer. Not a niche. A population. Build the depth. The students are already here, and they are not leaving.
In Closing.
The biggest trick we have played on ourselves is convincing ourselves that we are in that moment where Alice looks down the hole and decides whether or not to follow the White Rabbit. In reality, we have already fallen (and for the most part, kind of enjoyed the ride) and need to decide if we are going to go through the odd shaped door into a new and strange world.
What has happened is a stratification, or factionalization of a kind, where we have sorted ourselves out via category and are attempting to figure out where to go from here.
The thing is, this stratification will only worsen if we don’t decide to create collective action. Let’s review what we know to be true, as shown in these trends.
The organizations that we pay our dues to are not coming to help us. It is not in their financial interests to keep us employed, secure, or confident in our futures. Confident workers demand what workers in poverty often struggle to ask for. Fairness. Justice. Competency. When people struggle with their basic needs, asking for more almost seems selfish. This isn’t something we can mindset our way out of. This is something that exists by design to benefit a particular group of people.
The ways of the 2000s and 2010s are over. The soloist model, which reflected the deep individualism of the time, and financially rewarded those with a particular bent towards high-risk, self-led work, is over. This model does not work in our modern time, where people are looking more towards teachers who have depth of understanding vs. an expansive reach.
The knowledge tradition we had is fracturing and eroding. Between the fact that many legendary teachers are aging out of the profession, and other teachers who are in my generation of 20+ years are leaving for adjacent professions that pay more–we must make plans to hold on to the knowledge as we know it.
And I list these things to tell you, that we cannot rebuild our home on land that is not cleared yet. This understanding is not here to create despair, but to cultivate a sense of clarity about where we are, and what our priorities need to be going forward.
In some ways we are like Alice, entering a new world that we do not yet know, desperate to go home, but the truth is we do have maps to get there–built by other professions who have gone through similar experiences, that can be used to guide us into the future.
A Note To Those of Us Who Stayed
I want to talk a moment to remind those of us who are still here, teaching, practicing yoga therapy, and honoring the tradition and practice of yoga, that we are here because we made a choice. We made a choice to trust each other, to trust the work, and to trust the power we have in this moment to create change for the better.
We believe in the work, of that I have no doubts. But may I also suggest that belief we have also extend not only to the work, but the workers as well. We are not so different, those of us who teach asana-based movements and those of us who teach philosophy. It would benefit all of us if we saw ourselves in a larger ecosystem that nurtures all of us. Some of us are planting seeds others are harvesting them. Together, we have built a garden.
The rebuilding of our industry is not a metaphor. It is not an idea that we can discuss in committee ad nauseum until we grow weary of the endless actionless discussion–and then carry on with what we have always done. We have real needs. Needs like data infrastructure, collective advocacy, scope of practice standards, accountability mechanisms, and career models built for depth. These are things we can work on. These are things we can build concrete goals and timelines for. Together.
All of this is possible, but it requires you, me, all of us, deciding that we can be the person who makes change. Our rescue isn’t coming. We will need to make our way out of Wonderland ourselves.
You Are The Person.
There are things we need to grieve, and there are things we need to ruthlessly bury in the dirt, shoveling dirt on them without care. We are the people who make change. We will shove the days where you needed to know the right people, pay for the right trainings, or be represented by the right agency or lineage into the dirt, in order to build something for the whole of us. This “pay to play” idea that was popular in the 2010s is dead. I am declaring it so. If you are in rooms where this is the attitude…leave. Leave so quickly the door never had a chance to hit you and everyone left in the room can feel the wind you created as you exited.
Those of us who are still here deserve something better.
Remember, the power has always lived in the workers who were doing the work. The teachers who taught 10-25 classes a week, the teachers who had 20 private clients a month, the yoga therapists who see private clients, do educational workshops, and commit to large amounts of continuing education. The studio owners trying to figure out how to make their numbers work, with no support from anyone else. To all of us who love what yoga is and what it has offered us in our lives.
The power was always ours. We only need to bend over and pick it up.
It is not too late, but we are running out of time. There is no more waiting, no more hoping for institutional rescue, and no more looking around to see if someone else is going to do it. Step through the door, Alice. We need you on the other side.
The time is now. <checks shiny pocketwatch>
Tick tock.