A lot of you have had questions about the American Yoga Council — what it is, what it does, and whether it's worth your attention. So Rebecca went straight to the source. AYC founder and CEO Andrew Tanner joins the podcast for a straightforward conversation about what the organization is building and why: certification vs. registry, accountability reporting, access to data, retirement funds, and what it means to advocate for yoga professionals at an institutional level. Rebecca isn't doing gotcha journalism here — the goal is to give you the information you need to make your own call. She also gets into something she's been developing for the magazine: a theory about why yoga professionals are so cynical about organizations in the first place, rooted in counter-culture identity, 2010s individualism, and the specific kind of betrayal that comes from entering an industry you believed would be different. This is a conversation about whether institutions can actually serve us — and what it would take to find out.

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Working In Yoga Website

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American Yoga Council Website

Rebecca has a name for this kind of content: boring. And she means it as a compliment.

The boring stuff — insurance, disability coverage, retirement planning, banking relationships — is exactly what protects you when something very non-boring happens.

Financial planner Felicia Laab joins the podcast to talk about what yoga professionals are consistently leaving on the table when it comes to protecting themselves and their futures. They get into disability insurance specifically, which most yoga teachers never think about until their body has a bad year and suddenly it's all they're thinking about. They talk retirement — how to stop working before you die, as Rebecca puts it — and what it looks like to start building real financial infrastructure when your income has never been predictable.

This is also the conversation that connects directly to what major trade organizations like Yoga Alliance could be doing for their members and aren't. Worth every minute.

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Working In Yoga Website

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The Back Room

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This episode opens a new series — one that’s a little different from the others. Less “here’s a number nobody told you” and more “here’s the shape of the thing we’re all standing inside.”

The premise: the yoga industry isn’t approaching a turning point. It already turned. Most of what this series will describe over the coming weeks has already happened — it’s just not been named out loud, in order, in one place.

This episode sets the frame and names the urgency without pretending to have all the answers yet. If you’ve had the feeling that something shifted and nobody sent the memo, this is that memo.

RESOURCES

Working In Yoga Website

Working In Yoga Newsletter

The Back Room

Inside Yoga Magazine

Tick, Tock The Trend Report