What is Yoga Alliance?!

Welcome to the Yoga Liberty Podcast with me, Angelica Govert, and me, Justine Kennedy. And we are here to talk to you today about demystifying Yoga Alliance, because let's be real, a lot of people are very confused about what Yoga Alliance is and what it does. So here on the Yoga Liberty Podcast, we provide resources for yoga teachers We discuss things that are important to yoga teachers, and also I do episodes where I interview yoga teachers about their story of how they became a yoga teacher, and that helps to inspire people to maybe become a yoga teacher or show you that you can come from anywhere, you can be anyone, and still teach yoga if you believe that you have something to offer the world. There is a space for you. So thank you for joining us today on the podcast. We're glad that you're here, and thank you for joining me, Justine. Um, really excited to have this discussion. Um, okay, my screen just went away for a second because of the Zoom that we just recorded, like, went down, and I was like, uh-oh. Um, but we're good. I'm still here. It's fine. We're good. We're good. So let's talk a little bit about Yoga Alliance and, um, what they are, what they are not, and what people think that they are. So Yoga Alliance is an agency that, um, we as yoga teachers, we can, um, we can register with them and we say that we're following their guidelines. Right? And that it's a, it's a group of people that all believe kind of that yoga should be this certain ethical guideline that Yoga Alliance has put forth, okay? And Yoga Alliance doesn't have any legal standing. They're not recognized by any government. It's completely voluntary. And it is— has not traditionally been important. In fact, Ashtanga doesn't recognize Yoga Alliance at all. And you go to a lot of parts of the world and people are like, what's Yoga Alliance? It's kind of a very American-Canadian thing. Uh, the UK, they also have Yoga Alliance. But otherwise, for most of us in the world, Yoga Alliance is, uh, you know, it started in Washington, DC. In the 1990s. And I don't know if you can hear that, there's a helicopter outside. But no, my microphone must be so good. I have this one and this one. But they're not— it's completely voluntary. And I like to liken registering for Yoga Alliance to being like the alumni association in college. You know, like, when you graduate from college, you don't have to register with Yoga Alliance. You know, like, you don't have to register with the Alumni Association. Once you get certified to teach yoga, you're certified to teach yoga for life. You don't need another certification. You never have to register with Yoga Alliance if you don't want to, just like with the Alumni Association of your college. Now, that being said, even— you don't even have to have a certificate to teach yoga in the United States. It's not required. Um, I don't know what it is in other countries. I think it's pretty much the same pretty much everywhere. I know in India there's something called the Yoga Certification Board, which is different. Um, and I don't know if that's a required thing to teach or not. Like, honestly, I don't— I'm only an expert in my country and where I teach. I'm not an expert everywhere, and I don't pretend to be. But I'm curious to know, Justine, before you became a certified yoga teacher, before you signed up for yoga teacher training, what did you, what did you think about Yoga Alliance, or did you think anything about them?

Yeah, so I, before I became a registered teacher, I've had a lot of friends get their yoga teacher certification, and honestly, Yoga Alliance has always been pretty mysterious to people, and I internalized it as like Yoga Alliance is yoga law. Like if you're not registered with Yoga Alliance, who are you? What are you doing? And you're never going to get hired anywhere. And so it came as a shock to me when I took my yoga teacher training and my teachers who are, their school is registered with Yoga Alliance. They were talking on a call and they were saying, you don't have to. You could go your whole career without ever getting certified through Yoga Alliance. And that was mind-blowing to me because my whole experience was, you have to do this, you have to do this, you have to do it. It's what all of my friends experienced. And so I didn't actually register immediately after getting my 200-hour. I waited to register until I got my first in-person teaching job, um, because I was looking at their insurance offerings and I was looking at some other insurance offerings and figured since I'm 1099, I could write off my membership.

You definitely can. I write it off. Uh, but it's interesting what you said, like a couple of things that you said that I hear a lot is Yoga Alliance certifies— Yoga Alliance actually certifies no one. Yoga Alliance is a voluntary organization that yoga teachers can join and that they can have their teacher trainings approved by. So Yoga Alliance owns the trademarks 200-hour yoga teacher training, 300-hour yoga teacher training, and 500-hour yoga teacher training. Those are trademarks of Yoga Alliance. So if anyone is doing a 200-hour yoga teacher training, for instance, technically it needs to be approved by Yoga Alliance. That approval isn't certifying. So the person who's certifying you is the instructor, like me. I'm certifying people. Yoga Alliance is approving my school and saying Angelica decided that she is going to follow these rules that we set forward. So some of the, the rules that Yoga Alliance has set forward for 200-hour schools are these standards, right? And they're tech— teaching techniques and practice Anatomy and Physiology, Yoga Humanities, and Professional Essentials. And schools are required to do a certain number of hours of each one of these different areas that they've said are standards if they want to be approved by Yoga Alliance. Now, You don't have to do that to run a teacher training, but legally and technically you can't call it a 200-hour yoga teacher training if it's not following the rules. And the reason why it's 200-hour yoga teachers, because, because it's literally 200 hours. Okay, so I'm trying to look here for the breakdown, um, because I have this pulled up. And they changed their site a little bit to make it a little bit more difficult. Of course they would. Um, yeah, right. So a Yoga Alliance approved 200-hour yoga teacher training has to have 75 hours of teaching techniques— teaching techniques and practice. Okay, it has to have 30 hours of anatomy and physiology. It has to have 30 hours of yoga humanities. This is like the philosophies of yoga, right? And it has to have 50 hours of professional essentials. Excuse me. Professional essentials are sequencing, pacing, environment, cueing, class management. Um, and then ethics in general, professionalism, marketing and promotion, liability insurance, things like that. Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Each school that submits to them, so that's 75 plus 50, that's 125 plus 30, 30, that's 60, 185. And the last 15 hours are elective. So this individual school would choose what they want those hours to be. Sorry, I don't know why my throat is like so itchy. Because I'm talking and it's important for me. And so my throat is like, it did this last episode too.

I'm pretty sure.

Constantly. Nothing can be perfect. That's how you just do it. You just do it because done is always more profitable than perfect.

Yes.

So anyhow, um, so when we're talking a 200-hour school, a lot of people don't know that there are these specific things that schools have to do, and we can include a link in the description below to the Yoga Alliance standards for the 200-hour school. Okay, so these standards are not the standards of the U.S. government. They're not the standards of the government of the great state of Nevada. They are not the standards of Brazil. They are the standards that this group of people who got together in Yoga Alliance and decided to make. Now, those standards have changed over time. When I first started teaching yoga over 20 years ago, their standards were a little bit different, and now they have changed. They had like a big update that they did, and, um, not everyone— I'm sorry, I just had to collect my thought there. And I wanted to say this, not everyone that's in Yoga Alliance was involved in that decision. And what has happened over time is that I think that the original people who put Yoga Alliance together— I don't know them, I was still in college at that time— but I feel like maybe they were yoga people. But now what has happened is the majority of Yoga Alliance is business people, and the people— the CEO, as I understand it, does not even practice yoga. Um, and Yoga Alliance is run by non-yoga people, and that is fascinating, right? So it's done a really great job of being a marketing organization. So when you say like, I thought that Yoga Alliance was the end-all be-all and that I had to be certified by them, that is marketing. Yeah.

That is so, that's so interesting. And I know that your 200-hour and your 300-hour align with the Yoga Alliance standards. And I'm curious, I was looking, um, doing some research for this podcast. And one of the things that was asked was, uh, to be Yoga Alliance or not to be Yoga Alliance. Uh, and that's the exact phrasing. I wrote it down. Um, I'm curious what your thoughts are. Like, is—

what do you think? Well, you know, at the end of the day, I like money and money likes me, and I like to make money because the more money I make, the more people I can help, the more people I can reach. This podcast wouldn't be available if I wasn't making a good living. I would have to have a job, I would have to work for a company, and I would not be able to be here right now recording this podcast with you on a Tuesday afternoon, right? So I would not be able to pay you or any of the other people who work for me. So I, I have to make money in order to do those things. That's just part of the world that we live in. And I think it's naive to not, not think that, you know, like to be like, oh, it's all hugs and ohms, you know.

It's pay your landlord in avocados.

Pay your landlord in avocados. Um, so I register with Yoga Alliance because I know that most people think what you think. And while I know that Yoga Alliance is absolutely meaningless, it has no indication whatsoever on whether or not someone is a good teacher. It has no indication whether whatsoever on whether or not you're going to get a good training either. And that's what's really disappointing. But I also understand that people believe that Yoga Alliance has authority, and because that, that thought is ingrained in people, then I have to have that little sticker on my schools in order for them— in order for people to want to take my, my teacher trainings, my online yoga teacher trainings. Now my standards are higher than theirs. So while Yoga Alliance requires, you know, these certain things, I actually do private one-on-one yoga teacher training. It's not on my online teacher trainings, it's not group Zooms, it's one-on-one training where you train with me or someone on my staff one-on-one in your Zoom call every week for an hour. And then everything else that you learn is pre-recorded, but also I require, require people to teach every single week. So you will have to create a video of your own, and it's not like you're creating a high-quality video that's going out to the world, you know. And you, I mean, you could do that if you wanted to, but most people are just creating a video that conveys that they've learned the lesson that was provided for that week. Um, but I require more teaching time. I I require more time than 200 hours in my course, and I require— I offer a higher quality of one-on-one attention focused on an individual's goals, dreams, their lifestyle, and the things that are important to them. And my course is very, very comprehensive, much more so than what would be on Yoga Alliance. However, I am the statistical outlier. Most yoga schools are doing less. A lot of times you'll see things, they're called a 200-hour yoga teacher training, Yoga Alliance approved, and they're not even 200 hours. And wow, people say to me before that they didn't know that that meant 200 hours. I mean, it literally says 200-hour yoga teacher training. I don't know how you're not getting that, but I have had people say to me that they, they didn't know it was 200 hours. So if you see one that's like 2 weeks, that's not 200 hours. That's—

you're not getting—

you need to be getting 200 hours worth of training. And if you're doing an online, that's including like training with the Zoom call, training with the videos, anything that you're doing. Any videos you're creating, books that you're reading, all of that is part of it, right? So, um, another thing that you heard— I heard you say was that you, um, register— you, when you became a registered yoga teacher. Okay, so there's a difference, and a lot of people don't understand the difference between certified yoga teacher and registered yoga teacher. Okay, so when I say I am a 200-hour RYT, that means registered yoga teacher. That's what RYT means. It means registered. It means I have paid Yoga Alliance money to be registered with them. If I had not paid them money, I would be a CYT, technically a 200-hour CYT, which is Certified Yoga Teacher. Okay, so that's the difference, and I think a lot of people don't understand that difference and they just call themselves an RYT. Right, right. And they're, they're not.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of confusion with the different acronyms, and as you highlighted, like, people not knowing that 200-hour means 200-hour. And then on top of it, Yoga Alliance adds in their continuing education hours. Um, and I know that you have a current client who was chatting with you this last week asking about your Empowered course because it is continuing education. It's 100 hours of continuing education. And she asked if it would bump her up to being a 300-hour certified yoga teacher. Which is not the case, and I'm curious if you could explain that a little bit more.

Yeah, thanks for asking that question because people are super confused about that all the time, right? They think that, um, they can become a 300-hour RYT. That's not a thing. You're a 200 or you're a 500. So if you get your 200, you you can take an additional 300 hours and become a 500, but taking an extra 100 hours doesn't make you a 300. There's no such thing as a 300. There's a 200 and a 500. Now, if we're talking Yoga Alliance, if you're talking whatever you want to be, sure, you can be 300, whatever. I'm 10,000, you know, like, like, whatever. How much continuing education have I gotten? I'm an RYT 10,000, you know, like Call me Hal. But the thing is, that is such an obscure reference. Like, anybody that got that just now, they have to leave a comment, right?

Tell Angelica if you get it. I don't get it.

Are you a Stanley Kubrick fan or no? Anyhow, So you could take a, just a 500-hour and be a 500-hour, or a 500 CYT and then register, be a 500 RYT, right? You don't have to do a 200 and a 300. That's kind of the route that most people take. Most people take a 200 and then a 300 because it's more affordable than just taking your 500. But what I actually did was I took a 200 and then I took a 500. So I got my 200 from, um, 305 Yoga in Miami, Florida with Terry Cooper. And then I took a 500 with Doug Swenson, who is the brother of David Swenson, who wrote the Ashtanga book. And they're big— like, Doug studied with Pattabhi Jois. They're like big Ashtanga people. So my 500 was with Doug. Now, I could have just taken a 300, but he offered it as a 500. And so that's what I took because I really wanted to work with Doug specifically. Um, which is a whole nother interesting story that we don't really have time for today. But, um, you know, like the idea of like, we want to take our teacher training with somebody— like, I went through this whole battle of, do I want to take my teacher training with somebody that's famous or somebody that's not famous? And I will say, no shade to anyone, but what I learned from Terry at 305 Yoga, who— she's like a virtual unknown. You know, she's very well known in Miami now. At that time, she was not well known. I was in her very first teacher training ever that she'd ever done. Um, I didn't know that at the time. I didn't know anything about Yoga Alliance. I didn't even know that was a thing. I just wanted to open a yoga studio. I didn't, you know, I wanted to teach yoga. It was like something I wanted to do. Um, I didn't know any of this stuff, but Terry gave me an incredible education. And she taught me so much, and she was an amazing mentor. Um, and she's gone on to do really incredible things as a yoga teacher. She's not as famous as Doug or David or any of them, or Kino McGregor, who's also in Miami, but she in Miami is very well known in the yoga community. Um, but she wasn't when I first started working with her. However, Doug's training was not the training that I wanted. His training was very focused. He didn't— Terry focused on how I can be a profitable yoga teacher and make money as a teacher, which is what my trainings focus on too. Like, my trainings, my both my 200-hour and my 300-hour online yoga teacher trainings focus on actually making you able to teach yoga and profitable at that so that you can keep doing it. Like it's teaching you how to have a career in the yoga industry. I thought that's what I was going to get out of my 300, and that's another good thing to think about when you're deciding on a course or when you're thinking about Yoga Alliance approved, right? Doug's training was all about Ashtanga, so all we did was really practice. Like, primarily, yeah, practiced. I did so much Ashtanga. We would just practice every day, all day, and there was a lot of lifestyle stuff into it. And like, honestly, I've never really gotten along very well with most of the yoga community. Like, I'm not airy fairy. I'm not like— not that there's anything wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being that way. It's just that, you know, I get, I get a lot of pushback. You know, I just had a reel that went viral, and I thought it was funny because I was making— I was like poking fun at people breathing really loud, which I think that is hilarious. Like, I just got back from a class and there was a lady in there and she was like, and I'm all like, that is not ujjayi, okay? Like, and it was annoying. And I think we can all admit that there has been times But I don't put on airs, right? Like, I will say that's funny, and I, you know, that's— we shouldn't be doing that in yoga class. Like, I'll say that, that's— I'll laugh at stuff like that. I don't try to put on the air. I'm not, I'm not ultra spiritual. I'm not your guru. Please don't follow me. I'm teaching yoga, which in a lot of ways is a glorified exercise program in the United States. Do I believe in the yoga philosophies? Yes. Do I truly live the yoga philosophies? Yes, I do. But a lot of these teachers that are talking about how high and mighty they are and how great they are and how they would never make fun of anyone, they're also eating meat. Okay, and that's number one, step number one, ahimsa, which is non-violence, which is translated in every major text to not eating animals and not killing animals. And the Dharma Mitra will say Do not make a graveyard out of your body. I love him so much. But anyhow, leaving back in, the thing is that it wasn't the training that I wanted, right? That's what you're going to find, is that even though things are Yoga Alliance approved, they are wildly different. There is not, there is not one way of teaching yoga teacher training, right? Even if it's Yoga Alliance approved. So you may be getting a high quality training, or you may be getting a really shitty training. We don't know what's going to happen because Yoga Alliance doesn't follow up with anybody, right? So once you're approved by them, as long as you're paying them money, That's it. There's no repercussion, repercussion for not doing the work, which is a big thing that a lot of senior yoga teachers have a problem with, with Yoga Alliance. And a lot of us don't want to have anything to do with them, but the problem is, is they have convinced the market that they're important, and so we all feel like we have to stick with them. I'm sorry, I keep putting my sweater on and off. I am having hot flashes.

It's no worries, it's part of what you need to do.

It's part of being an old lady. Um, so the next thing is, is that after you get your 200-hour, your 500, or you become a 500— you're either a 200 or you become a 500— then the next thing you do is continuing education. And certain people can be YACEPs, Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Providers. I am a YACEP, which is why if you take my Empowered Yoga Teachers course, you get 100 hours of continuing education with Yoga Alliance, right? If you take my Adjustments and Assists course, there's, I think it's 25 hours of Yoga Alliance continuing education. I have a sequencing course about to come out. That's going to be Yoga Alliance continuing education. I believe— let me look up and see what the— what it is that you have to keep doing, um, after you become a teacher. Their website's so hilarious, like it's just like, here's how you pay money to us.

Yeah, right. So once you become a registered yoga teacher, so you've taken your 200 or your 500, um, you have to continue to get Yoga Alliance approved continuing education hours in order to keep your registration with them.

Yes, you do. Um, and I was trying to look and see, I want to say it's between 10 and 30 hours every 3 years. Um, it's not a lot, and it can, it can literally be Reading a book.

Perfect.

Reading a book counts as continuing education. It doesn't have to be from a YACEP. So I'm going to put that I went to for a week with Joe Dispenza, who is a meditation teacher. That's yoga. It's one of the limbs. So that counts as continuing education, like legitimately.

Um, yeah.

And so, you know, and there's no one that, that's looking over that. Like you just enter it. No, it's all on an honor system. You don't have to turn anything in. Alliance is a joke. Like Yoga Alliance is a joke, but we still keep paying them. Yeah, because they've done such a great job marketing.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, it really, it does seem like it comes down to how are they balancing treating yoga like a business and upholding the reason they started, right? Which is people came together because they wanted yoga, specifically yoga in the West, to have standards. Which is more important to them now? That is a question that we can talk about, and hopefully Yoga Alliance also talks about in an honest way.

But they don't. They don't. And, you know, actually, something that really bothered me is that, um, the emails that they've been sitting— you know, we've talked a few times, you and I, like on record and off record in our own, like, just conversations, that we're both just really tired of the political stuff, or just like everybody's just exhausted of it. But since 2020, March of 2020, there's just— but it's just been non-stop Even before that, since 2018, when, or 2016, whenever Trump was elected, it was 2016, I think. It's just been like the media dividing all of us. And yoga community was incredibly polarized during 2020. And I'm just sitting here like, what happened to your doTERRA? Like, you guys, What? I thought that $80 essential oil was going to cure you of all your ailments. I don't understand.

It turns out that doTERRA does not solve political conflict.

Well, who would have thought? Who would have thought? It doesn't cure your illnesses. It doesn't boost your immunity.

But they do make a delicious smelling hand sanitizer.

Okay, that's great. I don't use hand sanitizer.

Okay, I work in, I work in a preschool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we have to do different things. I am. Yeah, I think that it's really fascinating how split the yoga community is, but Yoga Alliance took sides. And I don't think That's right, because Yoga Alliance is a group of people who— some of them are independents, some of them are Democrats, some of them are Republicans, some are Libertarians. Everybody is different. And you know, you're on my staff, you know that my staff is diverse. Yeah, it's so different. Like, my people— you should have been there. You just missed the last staff meeting, but we were all like talking about— I was asking Francesca, I was like, hey, um, could you take this meeting on the 5th? But she's all, oh, that's Election Day, I gotta go in and vote in person, you know. And I was like, okay, but you can early vote, you know. And she's like, no, I gotta go on Election Day. And then Amber's all like, well, I mailed my ballot in, you know. So we just— yeah, it's just like, can we just stop talking about this? You know, and I'm like, as long as you vote, whatever, it don't— you know, like, we're all like in a different place. And it, you know, so I like embrace everybody. And I, and I realize I like really live by the ideology that Miguel Ruiz talks about in his book The Four Agreements, where like we all come from a different background because of how we were raised, because of the life that we've lived, because of the things that have happened to us. Like, definitely all the, the number of like close deaths in my family has really shaped and changed me in recent years. Um, yeah, in a very pivotal way, you know. And that makes my perspective on things very different than someone who hasn't necessarily had that experience, you know. Or if someone lost their parents when they were very young, their experience is going to be very different. Or if someone grew up with money and someone grew up without the funds that they needed. These— all these things are going to change the way we look at the world. And I've also noticed from having traveled all over, uh, because I lived in the camper, then we lived on the sailboat, and we've traveled all over and seen people. One of the things we noticed, because we were traveling during all of the shutdowns, um, is that it really mattered where you lived what your political bias was. Yeah, people in Colorado felt a very different way from people in Texas, from people in Florida, from people in Boston, from people in San Francisco, from people in, um, Western Washington and Eastern Washington. Like, they felt different from each other. People in South Dakota felt different, you know, and even within there, there were micro communities that felt different. And so I just have always been like, it— I don't take sides on that because honestly, all of our opinions are formed and shaped by what's around us. And if we had been around something different, we would think differently. If Paul and I hadn't lived on the boat during all of that crazy shutdown stuff and we'd been living here in Vegas, we would probably think very differently than we do today, you know. So I recognize that, and I think that that's something that we're not giving each other credit for.

Yes. Yeah, I, I think that was really well said, and I completely agree with that. And something that I'm just like tying together right now is there has been really efficient marketing of our politics of othering, right? Like we are forgetting to see people on a human-to-human interaction. And, you know, my, my, my boyfriend, he works at a restaurant in town and he was telling me a story about one of his coworkers, I can't remember her name, but she is a server and she's had a few different people be like, well, who are you voting for? Who are you voting for? At a restaurant? Like, she's like, yeah, at a restaurant. And she'll try to be like, let's not talk about it. But if they're really persistent, she'll share her opinion. And she's had people not tip her because of it. And we all know that servers do not like— that is just a well-known thing. Servers do not get paid well. They rely on tips. And people are not tipping her because they don't agree with her political opinions in a small, wealthy mountain town. Like, come on, you can—

wow—

pay a 20% tip on a bill because you had good service to someone and not let this—

like, don't even ask in the first place whether you had good service or not. I was a waitress for most of my younger career. So even if I get bad service, I tip 20% because I know that's how they feed their families. Because I know that the inequity of the system of tipping is a lot like Yoga Alliance. Like, it's not— it's not actually— like, it's not actually based on their merit, you know? Like, the tipping isn't that's how their salary is paid. You're paying their salary. Like, it's my— in my mind, it's obligatory if you're gonna go out to eat and you're sitting down somewhere where tips are a part of their salary. Now, I'm not behind like you gotta tip everybody at every Starbucks you go to. No, you know, like, if you're not getting service, if you're going to a desk and ordering and you're going and picking up your food and you're cleaning up after yourself you know, like, that's a totally different thing. But when I worked in Texas, when we owned the boat, I had to wait tables again for a while. It was exhausting to do in your late 40s, by the way. And, um, people would just not tip me because that was just like the part of the place, of the country I was living in, and like people wouldn't tip sometimes. I made $2.13 an hour. So if you're not tipping me, I'm going home with almost no money. And there was no reason for these people not to tip me. It's just that they just weren't tippers. Like, you know, as a waiter, like, you know, there's certain people that just aren't tippers, you know?

Yeah.

And we're all like, uh, you know, people— you don't want to like judge people pre ahead of time, right? You know, after you've been doing it a while, you know, when I owned— one of the things like I've done is I really try to keep most of my social media politics-free because I think that there should be a free zone for that, and I think that there's no place for it. And I want everyone to feel welcome in my sphere because I want everyone to know how to give good cues and to know how to do adjustments and assists and to know how to sequence a class and to like understand the 8 limbs of yoga. Those things have nothing to do with Biden and Trump and Kamala and all, you know, like none of that.

Yeah.

None of that.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Anyone remember him?

He was just in there. Bless his heart. You're, are you related? No.

No, we're not related, but I did watch a video of him skiing once and he's a really good skier.

He seems like a pretty decent human being. But, um, anyhow, um, I try to not like talk too much about politics because I don't— I don't believe that we should be taking a stand. I believe, because I read in the Yoga Sutras that— it's so funny because we said we weren't going to have this conversation, and now here we are having this conversation. Um, I read in the Yoga Sutras, and by the time this comes out, it's going to be like Election Day. Like, this is coming out on Election Day.

We did it! It was meant to be. We were out here being like, no, no.

But the Yoga Sutra says that we should not become involved in outside worldly affairs, that we should not involve ourselves in worldly affairs. And I think this is like sutra, like 3 or 4. It's like very early on in book 1. It's in the interpretation by Sri Swami Satchidananda. You can read it. And because of that, I think that yoga organizations should not take a stand on politics. I think that there's been a number of misleading things happening about all the candidates. You know, my sister, my sister and I are not on the same end of the political spectrum, and she works for a candidate. I'm not going to name names because I don't want to— I don't, I don't want to be talking about that. But what I think isn't important— what each individual thinks to themselves is important. Don't believe what I believe, believe what you believe based on the opinions that you've put together. Yes, you've thought through the life that you live, the things that are true to your heart. It doesn't matter what I believe. But anyhow, my sister and I, who are very close, we believe differently. And she was— she works, she campaigns, she works for the campaign office. And she was even like, man, I don't feel good about the ads that we're putting out. Yeah, she's diehard for her candidate. So I just think that it's gotten to a point now where it's really causing chitta vrittis, the modification of the mind, which is what the Yoga Sutras say that we want to avoid. And so that's why the Yoga Sutra says do not get involved in worldly affairs, which was why, tying it all back, I was so disappointed in Yoga Alliance sending out emails, taking a stand about politics.

Yeah, I find this— I, I mean, I know we said we weren't going to have this conversation, but I find it so fascinating. And I think like something that I appreciate so much about you is that you create space to have these conversations and you create space to disagree. And I'm, I'm not disagreeing with you in full because I like— yeah, I love what you're saying and I, I'm currently getting a master's in social work right now. And one of the core ethics of social work is that to be a social worker, you must engage in social justice. It doesn't tell you how, it just tells you that you must be engaging in social justice. You have social workers who are voting for Trump. You have social workers who are voting for terrorists. You have social workers who are not voting, but in some way in all of their jobs, they, they must engage in social justice work. And I had recently read one of, um, and they always say his name wrong, so please correct me, Thích Nhất Hạnh. Is that right?

I don't know that person.

So he's a Buddhist monk. He was, um, living— he was friends with Martin Luther King Jr. Um, so that, that time zone or timeline. Um, so he has a book, it's something called like Creating True Peace. Um, I'll link the name of it. And in his book, he talks about how the monks from his Buddhist monastery were the original social workers of his— I think he was in, I want to say he was in Vietnam, and I'll fact-check myself, during the Vietnam War. And so his monastery, a big part of his life was going and doing restorative justice work in communities and bringing meditation and mindfulness. And so I, I'm with you. I don't think that yoga should, like, I don't think Yoga Alliance, well, Yoga Alliance can do whatever they want. I'm not going to tell them what to do. I don't think we should be isolating people. But I do think that we should be recognizing suffering and putting a foot forward to bring restorative justice to as many people as we can by bringing yoga to as many people as we can, which means not telling them how to think, not telling them what to do. I know as a social worker, I'm going to be working with people with very different backgrounds and opinions than me. And if I don't see them as just as valid of a human as me, as just as worthy of their independent thoughts as me, I'm going to be really bad at my job. And I think that's true for me as a yoga teacher too.

Yeah. Well said. Well said. I totally agree. The only thing I would disagree on is that I do think that we have a say in what Yoga Alliance does and says because we are Yoga Alliance. We pay their dues and they need to represent us. As a collective, which means not taking sides. That was so eloquently said, and I don't mean to be funny, but does your mom and dad— do they listen to the podcast?

Um, I— well, I actually— so my dad actually passed away when I was young, so I was raised by a single mom for most of my life. And I thought—

yeah, I thought they were still alive. Wow.

No.

Yeah, because she was just visiting you, but I didn't know. Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. Thank you.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think that the reason I am the way I am, same thing, The Four Agreements, is because of everything that I experienced. And I am so lucky to have the mom that I had. Um, and she is an English major, so I think that's a lot of why, like, she, you know, I told you she did all of her turtle science and stuff like that and started her business that way, but her root is with language. Um, which she always got so mad at me for failing spelling tests. Um, but I'm definitely going to share the podcast with her. I'm waiting for the first episode and to surprise her with it.

Well, it came out this morning at 3 AM. Um, the, uh, the first episode with you on it, but the 101th episode. Yeah, it's interesting that you say all that because, um, I also have a degree in English literature. I have degrees in English literature and women's studies. So, um, that's funny that your mom does too. But the other thing I wanted to say is that, you know, that people with a higher IQ are bad spellers. It's something wired in the way that our brains work. And I found this out because my IQ is like 149, and so I— and I've always just been a really bad speller. And I'm like, why is this a thing? And I guess like that's statistically like, that's just a thing.

Who makes me feel so much better about myself?

You're super smart. You're smart. And gosh darn it, people like you. It's true.

It's true.

It's true. So, um, you know, bringing it back to Yoga Alliance, you get the continuing education. So they only have a 200 300 or 500. 200 plus 300 equals 500. So you can either go the route of getting a 200 and then getting a 300 and becoming a 500, or you can go to the route of getting a 500. These are specific curriculums that you must create. So I can't just like, I couldn't just give that person another 100 hours and now they're a 300-hour. Like, it has to be a very specific curriculum in order to fit in. To what Yoga Alliance requires if you're being ethical about it, which not everyone is. Right, right. It's the—

it's just so— I— of course any industry can be unethical, but it is just such a contradiction in my mind to think of yogis being unethical. And I know it happens, and I know it has happened for all the time.

The ego gets in the way, but it begs the question of what is ethics, right? Right. We're in a really— we're in a time period right now where more than ever we are divided on what is ethical and who is ethical, you know? Yeah. And I think— and I, and I don't have the answers to that. Um, and I don't have an ego that's big enough to think that I ever will. I'm a pretty big ego, but I don't think that, um, that I know the answers to everyone else's problems, you know, or to everyone else's ethics. And I think anybody that tells you that they know what's right and what's wrong, and especially in this political sphere That's ego, 100%, because you don't know. The media has given us a certain view. TikTok has given us a certain view. Instagram gives us a certain view. We don't know. I don't spend my days with Kamala Harris. I don't spend my days with Bernie Sanders. I have not spent any days with Donald Trump. I do know someone who worked for him. Very closely, but I don't know, you know, I don't know him. I never met him. I don't know John McCain. I don't know Nancy Pelosi. I'm not going to have lunch with her. We're not getting our nails done together. That's never happening. So I don't really know these people. And I think a lot of times when you meet people, your perspective of them changes and understanding where they come from changes by actually like taking the time to sit down and talk to them, which is something that we're really missing out on in the technological world. And I'm really sad for the future. Like, I'm sad for the future because I don't know that people have the skill sets to really communicate with each other. You know?

Yeah. Okay, so this just made me think of a question. Um, since Yoga Alliance is not setting our ethical standards, we all are. Would you share your ethics or like your guiding compass for your yoga business?

Thank you for that question and for putting me on the spotlight.

Mm-hmm.

So I recently started doing a course called The Empowered Yoga Teacher, and, um, I offer free master classes on Wednesday nights and Thursday mornings Pacific time. Uh, we'll link that in the, the description below. You can come to either Wednesday or Thursday, uh, where I share how I became, um, how I made money online. You know, I've made almost a quarter of a million now as the filming of this. I I think I might have actually hit that, actually, now that I think about it, um, online teaching yoga. And so in that video, or in that masterclass, I share— it's a live masterclass, I'm actually there, Justine is there on Wednesday nights. On Thursdays I'm shooting solo because she's working at her other job, um, but I share how I got to where I'm at online and what I, what I did and who I hired and how that worked out. And I didn't used to do that. I just used to offer online yoga teacher training, which I still offer. But, um, so many people asked me to, to share like, how did I do the online thing? Because really I was in my late 40s when I started and I'm not super thin and I don't have the typical yogi body. I'm not a typical yoga person. I, And honestly, none of us are a typical yoga person. What is that really, you know? Um, I'm just thinking about when I went to India and what like yoga people really look like there. None of us are like that. So that led to creating the Empowered Yoga Teachers course, and in that course I really believe that my destiny on this planet is to help shape social media and yoga for the future. And I believe that I'm building a group of virabhadras, if you will, a group of warriors who are creating content online for the future because I might pass away, but this podcast will still be available.

Mm-hmm.

And the people who listen to this will then affect other people who will then make content and do changes. And I think that the way that we present yoga online is inauthentic to what yoga really is, to what the traditions of yoga are. I think that the majority of people do not apply themselves. Yoga is disciplined. It's not meant to be easy. And that's a great topic. Like, I would love us to have like a whole episode on that, honestly, because people will get mad at me. And, you know, Keenan McGregor just posted about this the other day, that people don't want to do the, the hard things. They want to do the easy things, and they think that yoga should be easy. And, you know, people have really appropriated yin yoga and really made it into restorative yoga. And that's not what Paul Grilly intended. Yin yoga was meant to be hard. It was meant to be difficult. It was meant to stress the bones and the ligaments and the connective tissues. Um, and we've taken that and changed it into chill and calm. And there's this whole thing about, well, that's, you know, you can't say that's not yoga, or people aren't yoga enough, right? You know, or or they're not doing it in alignment with yoga. Like, you either are doing it in alignment with the traditions of yoga or you're not, you know. And it's okay to do other things, but they're not yoga. It's okay to move your body in whatever way you want, you know. It's okay that that lady came to class right before this and did the you know, that's okay. It was annoying to me because I was trying to do my class, but that's not yogic breathing. That's not pranayama. What you're supposed to be doing in an asana class is ujjayi. So it's okay that she did that. It's not— she's not a bad person, but don't call it yoga because they're like, shh, that's Pilates. That's a different kind of breathing. That's not pranayama. So what I think— I feel like the reason why I created the Empowered Yoga Course is because— the Empowered Yoga Teacher Course is because I want to help create a group of people who are creating content that is true to what yoga really is, that are helping people in the way that you spoke about earlier, that we're going out and doing the work of bringing yoga to the people regardless of all the chaos and the chitta vrittis that are going on. We're taking true authentic yoga and we're going out and we're putting it out there into the world. And so if, if that's something that you resonate with, I invite you to join the Empowered Yoga Teachers Course, to come to my free masterclass where I talk about the course, where I talk about what I did to get here, um, and how I made this happen so that you can have that too, because I want you to have more than me. I want— if you're listening to this right now, I want you to be more successful than I am. I want you to learn from my mistakes, from the things that I've done. I want you to take all that information. I want you to, to do even more. And somebody on a call this morning— we, we have group calls for the Empowered Yoga Teacher Course. We have 3 group calls a week, sometimes 4. And somebody, uh, this morning, Danny, he was saying you know, do you mind if I steal that idea from you? Because I was talking about my different offers and I was like, it's not stealing, I'm giving it to you. Take whatever I'm doing. If you want to model it and do it exactly like that, please do. Because that's actually what yoga is. That's what Pattabhi Jois did. That's what Krishnamacharya did. That's what Iyengar did, is that you would learn from them and then you would model your teaching after their teaching. You don't have to create a whole new kind of yoga. That's what Bikram did, and that's why he fell. And he's not— he's not a yoga teacher. Well, I guess he is actually, but he's not registered with Yoga Alliance. Probably— probably Yoga Alliance was like, Bikram, it's cool, you just traffic some humans, it's all right, we don't mind. You're completely unethical and doing SA on women. It's fine. Go ahead and join. He's truly an awful human. His attorney sued him.

I didn't even know that was possible.

Yeah, we'll just have to leave that at that. But my— My goal is really to help people so that we can transform this world into a better place. Because ultimately, like, yoga or not yoga, or what we're defining it as, or Yoga Alliance or registered or not registered, like, none of that really matters when we die. In 100 years, no one's going to give a poo whether or not I was registered with Yoga Alliance. But the ripple effect of what I created and how I have helped people create things that help other people, and the messages that I made and the messages that people were able to make because of the messages I made— those are the things that will still be around in 100 years. No one will remember my name or their name, but the feelings are the ripple effect that we create. And so that's really my legacy, and that's why I really do this And that's why I really create my content, because this is what my offering is to the world, you know. This is my life's work. And I think anybody that's, that's creating content should think that way too. And I think that's truly in alignment with the 8 limbs of yoga.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Um, thank you.

Those are all the questions I have for you, and that seems like Well, it's good.

Beautiful. 9 minutes now, so it's perfect, perfect, perfect amount of time. Well, let's just give a shout out to Justine's mom for being a great mom that created a wonderful human being that is, um, really a great co-host. Thank you for being on the podcast with me, um, and we look forward to seeing you in the next podcast. So thank you for listening. If you want to join the, um, Blueprint Yoga Teacher's Blueprint, how to build your online yoga empire, definitely check out the link in the description below. If you have any questions for us, please feel free to DM me on Instagram or to send us an email at hello@onlineyogacertification.com. My website is angelicagover.com. All of the links for everything will be in the description. And we'll see you next time.

Amazing. Thank you, Angelica.