Ep. 2: Yoga teacher training (with Alanna Kaivalya)

We’ll answer…

• Too start off, since yoga is a very physical practice, is teaching online really as impactful as teaching in person?
• Furthermore, what are the biggest benefits (for students) Alanna has seen in her yoga teacher training program now that she’s moved it online? Likewise, what about for her business?
• Similarly, how does Alanna create an experience that feels personalized for her students, even if they’re not physically present (and at times, if they’re international?)
• Also, how has Alanna’s personal life changed since going online has given her “the gift I didn’t know I needed?”

Where to find Alanna

Website: alannak.com
Higher Education Yoga Membership: highereducation.yoga
Kaivalya Yoga Academy: onlineteachertraining.yoga
Facebook (including her live broadcasts every Thursday!): facebook.com/alannakyoga

Read the full transcript below.

Alanna Kaivalya: Being able to put the work that you do in the passion that you have into online courses or membership is such a gift, not just for your community, but for you. And so I hope those listening get brave and get ready to do it, cause it’s gonna change you and it’s going to help you change the world.

Melissa Guller: What would you do if you had a chronic illness that prevented you from showing up to work every day? How would you earn an income and what would you have to change about your life to make it work? Would you believe me if I told you that a woman in exactly this situation has turned her struggle into a multiple six figure online course business? Well, it’s true. And today we’re going to find out exactly how Atlanta made that happen and how you can do it to all this and more in this episode of everything is Teachable.

Announcer: Welcome to everything is Teachable. The podcast that takes you behind the scenes to learn how everyday creators have transformed their skills and passions into online courses in businesses. To introduce this week’s episode. Here’s your host, Melissa Gueler.

Melissa Guller: Hi everyone. I’m Melissa from teen Teachable and I cannot wait to introduce this week’s guest. Often referred to as the “Yoga Doctor,” Alanna Kaivalya, Ph.D., helps yoga teachers embody their knowledge, up-level their skills and create more impact in the world…all online. Alanna has over 1,000 hours in online course content, including the world’s first 500 hour online yoga teacher certification program, and 500 hours of higher education in yoga + business across a dozen additional courses.

At the heart of her work, Alanna is inspired to elevate the yoga profession to the level of spiritual leadership, and has been teaching yoga for nearly two decades. She has authored numerous articles and three books, including “Yoga Beyond the Mat,” which teaches modern day people how to build a personal spiritual practice through yoga.

Now, whether or not you’re personally interested in Yoga, I know you’re going to get a ton out of hearing a lot of story today. So Alanna, welcome to the podcast!

Alanna Kaivalya: I’m so grateful to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Melissa Guller: Yes, I can’t wait to share your story with so many more people and to just get started at the very beginning. When did you personally start practicing yoga?

Alanna Kaivalya: I started in college actually, and there were a couple of things happening at the time that came together to essentially fuel and propel my yoga practice. I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, which is a thyroid disorder. Technically it’s an auto immune disorder, but long story short, I wasn’t feeling great. I was very lethargic, I was gaining weight. And as a young 18, 19, 20 year old, you can imagine that was very devastating and difficult me to use energy to not be able to think clearly. And one of my friends suggested that I try yoga, which I thought was an outrageous proposal because I was a physics major at the time and definitely didn’t have any time for any thing, woo woo or mystical. But he finally wore me down and convince me to sign up for a six week course that was happening at my college at the time, which honestly back in the late nineties, early two thousands for college to have a yoke class was pretty, pretty forward.

Alanna Kaivalya: So good on them for doing that. But um, I signed up for the six week yoga class and it made me feel better. By that point, I had been doing a lot of working out in the gym and I was just feeling tired and sore and the yoga classes were the first thing that actually made me feel happy and comfortable in my body. And at the same time I was taking a core class, which for those who have been to a four year degree type program, you know that they make you take these required courses that you may or may not love, but you have to take them. And so I was taking a course on South Asian religions and it just happened to fit in with all my studies in physics. I didn’t want to take it. It just was the most convenient time slot to get this core requirement checked off.

Alanna Kaivalya: I didn’t even know where South Asia was. And it turns out South Asia is where they practice Hinduism and Buddhism. And so I was learning the mythology behind yoga at the same time that I was taking this six week course. So I immediately fell in love with the mythology. As soon as I was learning about Kadesh and Shiva and about some of the strong female deities within the practice, something within me really ignited. I was raised in Colorado and I wasn’t raised really with any kind of religious practice or spirituality and so it felt like a very big hole in my life that I, to be honest at that point, didn’t even know existed. But suddenly I was being exposed to these myths and just being fed stories that described things that I was going through made life challenges a little bit easier. It gave me context for some of the things that were happening in my world at the time.

Alanna Kaivalya: And then, you know, through the physical yoga practice I was also feeling better. So I got this double whammy of the myth and the Asana and that was where my yoga practice started. And then also like my, my most beloved astronomy and physics professor happened to also be quite spiritual and she was the one who first introduced me to things like astrology and the Chakras. So it just seemed like all the right things at exactly the right time. And, and I fell in love and never looked back. It’s funny how some things like that just appears like at the right time. And you weren’t necessarily seeking a practice like this. [inaudible] not at all. And honestly, if had told me a few years prior that I would fall in love with yoga and end up being a yoga teacher, I would’ve, I would’ve laughed at you. I’m not even sure I knew what yoga was, you know, so it, it’s, it was a really cosmic, um, conflagration of occurrences that, that conspired to bring me to where I am now.

Melissa Guller: Hm. Well, it seems like your open-mindedness to trying it out really paid off and your, I know your own practice developed and then you hinted at this, but you did eventually move into teaching yoga as well, right?

Alanna Kaivalya: Yeah, I did. So when I graduated college, it was right around September 11th and even though I’m from Colorado, you know, that particular world event hit that area. What hit everybody really hard and I, I didn’t, I couldn’t find a job. It’s a short version. Um, you know, my, my dreams and goals upon graduating started to just crumble when the job market was just nowhere to be found. And I ended up, finally, I did get a job in a private school for gifted children as a teacher, but it was just to bide my time. And of course, being a teacher doesn’t pay very much, so I couldn’t afford my yoga classes and I figured the easiest way to overcome that actually was to get certified as a yoga teacher. And that way, not only could I teach yoga, but I could then take classes at the studio that I was teaching at for free.

Alanna Kaivalya: So it seemed like a good exchange. But interestingly, when school let out for the summer, I started teaching more classes, I picked up more classes and the initial thinking was actually that being a yoga teacher would give me enough flexibility to go on job interviews. But a year and a half later with no job interviews panning out and my yoga career starting to actually do fairly well, I decided that maybe I should buckle down and take yoga a little more seriously. I still never thought I would make a lifelong career of it. But I ended up getting some more in depth training. I went all the way to New York from Colorado to train with some teachers out in New York and ended up getting a really great training and coming back to Colorado where yoga was still very much brand new and very early on in its, in its heyday and got some great opportunities. I ended up becoming a lead teacher trainer and helping to uh, found and developed the teacher training at core power yoga, which of course is a really big, really big studio, a network now. And that was a really great jumping off point for me for all the rest of the things that I did since then. And I just really, like I said, I just, I never thought this would be a career and it actually turns out to now be the only career I’ve ever had as an adult.

Melissa Guller: So at that point, when you were working with core power and you were in New York and the lead teacher trainer, how well was that supporting your lifestyle?

Alanna Kaivalya: Um, it wasn’t, it’s not, yeah, there was no supporting of any lifestyle whatsoever really. I actually, I came to New York for a short time to do my training and then I was back in Colorado so I lived in Colorado for many more years and did a lot of teaching out there. You know, was working with core power out in Colorado. Wrote and developed a couple of other teacher trainings out there that sort of became my, for lack of a better word, my niche in Yoga. I was doing a lot of work with teacher trainings. Guest teaching on teacher training is helping people, right? Teacher training is writing and teacher trainings for studios, leading them along with still teaching many weekly classes, leading weekend workshops, heading up national and international retreats, teaching at big conferences across the country. The magazine, Yoga Journal. I used to hold conferences and so I would teach at those and so I was doing really well for all intents and purposes as a yoga teacher.

Alanna Kaivalya: I mean according to, you know, most everybody’s notion of success when it comes to being a yoga teacher. I definitely had cultivated that and I loved it and I loved what I did, you know? But even with all of those things that I was doing, I actually oddly looked back at my 2007 tax return recently and it said that I made $12,000 that year. Wow. I mean I was exhausting just listing off everything that you said. Yeah. You know, the yoga industry now in the way that we know it and understand it, it has probably been around for a few decades and it’s, so it’s, it’s fairly new really. And the way in which it has evolved is not necessarily to honor and support and value the actual yoga teacher. And I was really kind of evidence of this, you know, as are all my colleagues. I’m not alone.

Alanna Kaivalya: You know, I was very educated as yoga teacher. I was very successful for what it’s worth as a yoga teacher. I was, it was not for lack of drive or ambition or passion or education or even capability. It’s just that this industry doesn’t really have a way to support and value the yoga teacher. And I was definitely struggling with that. You know, I even wrote, I’ve written a few books. Uh, I wrote a book that came out in 2010 called the myths of the Asanas, which is significant kids. Those are my roots, right? I started learning about the mythology at the same time I was learning about yoga and all of the books I’ve written since then have to do with the mythology behind yoga. And even as an author, even as a a national conference leader, even as a retreat leader, even as a teacher trainer and teacher training director, like I still was not really able to, to make a great amount of money.

Alanna Kaivalya: I moved to New York and that 2007 tax return I mentioned, that was actually the first year that I moved to New York and I was living in New York on that kind of income. It’s pretty terrible. So yeah, things were rough. I filed for bankruptcy. I often overdrew my bank accounts. I would end up, you know, teaching international retreats or workshops and not actually making enough money to get home. So there were a couple of times that I called my mom and said, mom, I’m stuck in x, Y, or z country and I don’t, I don’t have any money to get home and she’d have to buy my plane ticket. And you know, this was deeply embarrassing. And it was, it was a long time before I realized that it wasn’t indicative of my own worth or value as a yoga teacher. And it took a long time for me to realize that it didn’t mean that I was a failure as a yoga teacher.

Alanna Kaivalya: It took a long time for me to realize that this was just the way the industry is set up. And so, you know, eventually I had to kind of go in and figure out how to change all that. Was there a particular moment where you realized that you needed to make a change? Well, I think the moments were meant many and often and plentiful. And the problem was that I didn’t know how to make the change. You know, there were inklings and there were hints like it back in 2005 I was the very first yoga teacher ever to have a podcast. So I love this medium. I think podcasting is amazing and one of the things that I realized and discovered through podcasting was that the world is flat as they say now. And I was suddenly being connected with Yogis all over the world who I would not otherwise have the chance to connect to and they were receiving education from me that they would not otherwise have the chance to receive.

Alanna Kaivalya: And so I had eventually about 2 million people listen to that podcast. And to me that just a light bulb really went off for me at that time. And ever since then, there’s been a deep passion and drive for going online and for making accessible the teachings of yoga in such a way that I wished had been made accessible to me in my early years, but also to give me more freedom in making a bigger impact in reaching more students, in finding the students and locations who would otherwise not be able to find me, who really resonated with what I had to say. So you know, podcasting, it was a super early days back then and so was anything like online learning, so I didn’t really know how to move into that direction though. I knew I wanted to do something there. I think in about 2010 ish or so, it was when I started putting my first yoga classes online.

Alanna Kaivalya: That’s when that technology became available and they were just audio classes at the time and I didn’t do it myself. I partnered with a bigger company, so there wasn’t a lot of money in it. But again, I was seeing how putting my work and putting my teachings online was giving me more exposure and allowing people who would otherwise not have access to this work. They were getting access to it. So I really tried as much as possible to push forward on that technology to push forward on those possibilities. I’ve known and seen these possibilities for a long time and, and honestly it just took awhile for technology to catch up.

Melissa Guller: [inaudible] it does sound like you are right at the forefront. You mentioned that you had the first yoga podcast and I’m sure early on you mentioned like that freedom of a bigger impact. Yes. Yoga is often thought of as being very physical. You have to be in a room with a teacher and other people and so expanding literally beyond that classroom must have been an open field when you were first getting started, not something people were doing.

Alanna Kaivalya: Yeah, it really was. It an open field is a good way to put it. It was interestingly for me, it felt deeply connecting. You know, I, I’ve known for a long time and you know, I hope that other people listening to this who are teachers and whatever craft they might teach, you have a gift and you have something special to offer and it’s just a matter of you being able to find your people and sometimes your people don’t live in your immediate vicinity, you know, and sometimes you find all the people in your immediate vicinity, but what about the people in the next state over or the next country over or those who you know, live in a place where they can’t drive to where you are or have to take care of a family member or have other commitments on nights or weekends or you know, whenever it might be like people have busy lives and they are often, you know, prevented from showing up at the same exact time and place that you are. And I don’t think that that should prevent them from learning. I think that’s well said. I don’t think that should prevent them from having access. So that’s what really inspired me about going on the right and about learning online. I thought that that was so important and such a thing to lean into. And it was really, you know, just me trying to continue to figure out how and who and where I could do more of this. Um, and it wasn’t easy.

Melissa Guller: Sure. Let’s talk more about that. So how did you learn how to start moving different things online and just start reaching different audiences?

Alanna Kaivalya: Well, I’ve always been a bit technologically oriented. I mean, you know, don’t get me wrong, I’m, I can’t code and I don’t know how to do a lot of things. But I remember actually when I, when I very first became a yoga teacher, I still wanted, I still craved giving people accessibility. I wanted them to have easy access. So, you know, back then there were CD roms and I had my boyfriend at the time take some photos of me while we were camping, doing poses and I figured out how to make little audio clips to guide people through those poses. And I put it all on a CD Rom and like explained to people, okay, you have to be on a PC and you have to have Adobe and you have to have this in order for it to work. And there was always this desire within me to create easy accessibility to what I had to offer.

Alanna Kaivalya: So I just always kept my kind of my ear or to the floor to listen for who was doing what, what was happening. And I was very fortunate of course, to also be contacted by some people or to be friends with some people. So for example, a woman who had gone through one of the teacher trainings that I had led, she started an online yoga class company. So she was having some of her favorite teachers record their classes via audio and put them online. And so I immediately contacted her and she was excited to work with me and put my classes online. So that was one way. Another way was I was contacted early on by an online course company called you to me, um, to get some light courses on there. And that was my first foray into online courses and I always though I’d been a bit technologically oriented for some reason I didn’t ever think that I could just do it myself.

Alanna Kaivalya: I did always think that I needed some other bigger technology company to help me and it was only a few years ago, uh, in finding Teachable that I realized that not only could I do it myself, but it’s actually better to do it myself because even when working with some of these other companies, I was running into the same issues and I was running into when working with studios and teaching with studios as a yoga teacher, obviously when you walk into a studio, you don’t make all of the money of all the students who come in to take your class and you may pack that class. You may have a super full class, you may be really popular, but it’s very likely that you’re getting paid on average between 35 and $50 an hour for your class, which to some people may sound like a lot, but if your class is 16 minutes long, you have to show up 20 minutes early.

Alanna Kaivalya: It takes you 30 minutes to get there. You stay late answering students’ questions, it takes you another 30 minutes to commute at home. I mean, you’re working three hours for every 60 minute class you teach and at that rate it’s pretty low and you couldn’t possibly teach enough classes to really earn the living that you want. So you know, in working with other companies who were taking a large portion of the con, the cut of the content that I was providing to them, I wasn’t really escaping from the same issues that I was having as a yoga teacher in terms of, you know, the industry and finances. And it was only when I really learned to do it myself that I was able to reap the rewards fully and value myself appropriately. How did you start doing that? Start working for yourself instead of these other companies or online course sites?

Alanna Kaivalya: Well, I had to get brave and I had to realize, you know, that I could do it and there is a bit of a leap of faith there. You know, I had to really convince myself that I didn’t need the clout or popularity of a bigger company and that I could actually just rely on myself and my core tribe of people to help me through this process and get the word out. So there was a, you know, an emotional kind of psychological leap of faith that needed to occur for me to do it. But then, you know, it was also looking at the financial revenue. I mean just from a pure revenue standpoint and realizing that you’re only getting a fraction of what’s actually coming in. And I was dealing with the same thing as yoga teacher and I just didn’t want to do that anymore.

Alanna Kaivalya: I thought, you know, God, in order to level this playing field here and to actually elevate my value as a yoga teacher and to teach others to do it as well, I have to be able to price my work accordingly and make sure that I reap all the benefit. Because when you get a big portion of that away, oh, you’re working for somebody else. And that just, it became, it got to the point where the discomfort was greater than the desire to stay the same. Right? So it became too uncomfortable to see that money go out the door every cause I was working too hard for it. So that’s really where it changed. And then having the, the ability to use a platform like Teachable to, to put this on where I can create, I have artistic license, it is my content, it stays my content, you know, to be able to really, um, effortless, not effortlessly because there’s definitely some effort and getting a course created, but to seamlessly put it out there for folks to access with.

Alanna Kaivalya: So important. So you know, I’ve started actually with um, is very ambitious and my online course creation and started not just big but huge. I, I began with a 500 hour online teacher training. Wow. Yeah. And I don’t recommend this for anybody listening like that is not where you start, you know, Duh, I did the wrong thing but nobody told me otherwise. And you know, I’ve had big dreams and visions of elevating education and educational standards for Yoga and the yoga industry for a long time. And I went through graduate school where I was taking a lot of online courses and thought, my God, if I can earn a phd and take courses online, I can certainly teach people yoga and certify them to teach online. That’s a really interesting thought to have come up. Like if I could learn all of this online and earn this massively respected degree, I couldn’t, I teach yoga.

Alanna Kaivalya: Exactly. That’s really where I made that transition because there, there is such a, at least for me in my industry with Yogis, like they’re still very much a deep rooted belief of Oh, you can’t learn this online. You have to be seated in front of a teacher. And honestly that’s not true first of all. But to those who believe that, I would just say, why? Why can’t you learn it online? Why do you believe you have to be in front of a teacher? Because one of the greatest things I wanted to make sure that I did is maintain extreme integrity and authenticity in all of my work. I mean I have a 15 year history of writing, leading, executing, directing, teacher trainings for some of the biggest companies in the country. I know how to do this and if I could actually do this and do it better by going online, you know I have to, I have to because I can give people more access.

Alanna Kaivalya: I can give them more quality, I can give them more time to complete the training. I can give them consistent, constant access to the materials. They never have to miss anything. Like I witnessed so many problems within studio learning that I now no longer have because I teach online. So it was a, you know, propelled by both necessity and purpose to go online. But it was finally just the ability to do it myself. That made me so grateful and able to do it. I bet that’s a perspective many listeners haven’t considered where not just yoga, but there are a lot of things where I feel like we’ve often said, oh, you can’t learn that online, but the ability to watch them on your own time or to make it more accessible or to bring into your own home. There’s so many benefits that I don’t think we talk about as much when we just say, oh no, you can’t do that.

Alanna Kaivalya: Absolutely. I mean I would witness all the time, like for example, that the standard way in which yoga teacher trainings are delivered, at least here in America, is that there they happen over the course of 10 weekends. Now I don’t know anybody really who has 10 straight weekends that they can just give up. That’s a lot of weekends, especially if you’re working full time during the week. If you have a family or any kind of life at all, should you have an emergency? Should you have a vacation? Should you have a wedding to go to? Should you have literally anything come up and have to miss any one of those 10 weekends? You just miss the training. And that used to really bother me because you’re trying to pack in so much over a weekend that it’s not like they’re just missing a little bit. They’re missing critical pieces of information that they will just never get because there’s no way to make up that time or that education.

Alanna Kaivalya: And that was, oh, that was so just, it made me deeply sad, honestly, because that person deserved to have everything. They deserve to have all of the knowledge and when they can’t make it up, that’s really, it’s going to thwart them. You know? I would watch people who really struggled in trainings and people to like, it’s a difficult learning style. Honestly. These teacher trainings, they stick you in a room and it’s often just seated lecture for say 10 straight hours. And I don’t really know anybody who is prepared to sit and listen and basically memorize whatever it is that they’re being thrown for 10 straight hours. Like that’s a, that’s a difficult learning style. So I would witness people really struggle and maybe not quite absorb or understand. And then at the end of 10 weeks just be thrown out to the wolves and say, okay, here’s your certificate.

Alanna Kaivalya: You’re ready to teach, when in fact they’re not. I really wanted to put in accountability measures so people could be tested so we could see if they’re understanding and if they’re not understanding and be able to give them personalized attention, personalized feedback one on one to see where they’re stuck, what they need and and allow them the learning that they needed in order to then move on at their own pace. And you can’t do that in a studio setting. You really can’t. I mean, I had studio trainings where I would have 65 people in a teacher training and over the course of 10 weeks, I wouldn’t even know everybody’s names. Well, you know that it’s actually really impersonal. And in a studio setting like that, there’s no way possible that me alone as the lead trainer can see everyone teach. And it’s important to me.

Alanna Kaivalya: I really care about yoga. And I want the teachers to be stellar on impeccable and if I can’t actually see you teach and make sure you know what you’re doing, like Oh, it’s a bummer. That’s interesting to hear you talk about the fact that online could be more personal. Yes. Knowing nothing about this, I would have made what sounds like a false assumption that being there in person with a teacher would provide me with a more personalized experience. But what you’re saying is that your online courses, I would love to hear more. So how do you make it feel personal even though you might not even be as this in the same country as some of your students, I assume? Yeah. Well, you know, we, like I said, I really was clear in the creation of this teacher training program and all of my online courses.

Alanna Kaivalya: I mean I now have over a thousand hours worth of online courses, but I started with my teacher training program and that’s really the heart and soul of, of where am I work in lay offering this weekend. And I thought to myself, Gosh, if I’m going to do this, I need to do better than what’s happening now. I need to show people that we can elevate the standards that we set for our yoga teachers, that we can train them better. And one of the ways is to give more personalized attention because I knew I was missing people in these, in these in-studio trainings. I knew it and there was just no way to rectify that. But online, basically what we do with our students in the Chi Valley Yoga Method Academy, which is my online yoga school, is we have every student, no matter where they’re at, right? And they, they go through the course at their own pace, which again, you know, no, no need to give up 10 weekends, but they have, we have tests and we ask people to actually show us their skills.

Alanna Kaivalya: So they record themselves teaching every step of the way. You know, when they learn how to teach this pose, they record themselves teaching that pose. And we watched them. And I have a team of mentors who work directly with the students and who watch every single video that comes in and then delivers individualized feedback directly to that person. So that person gets the feedback specifically that he or she needs on that specific element of yoga teaching. And it’s every step of the way. And if for some reason the student really doesn’t have an understanding of an element or a part, we have them new one over because we’ve got the time to do it and we have the resources to do it and that person can send us three or four videos of the same thing. And so everybody feels comfortable with teaching that part of Yoga.

Alanna Kaivalya: And we have the ability of course do Skype conversations one on one so we can have an actual individual conference with people, we can hop on the phone with them, they have email access to us 24 hours of the day. Of course we have a private Facebook group where students can work with each other where we work with them. I do um, live broadcasts for the students on different topics. Q and A’s. So these students can actually get all of their questions answered, which again is something I was never able to do in a studio studio setting. Let’s say you’re a teacher training is from two to five on a Saturday afternoon and there’s a class in that studio at five 15 you have to end at five there’s a class coming in, so I may not have the time to go through everything I wanted to about a topic.

Alanna Kaivalya: I may get cut short, I may not have time to answer all students’ questions and that happened to me constantly and that never happens to me anymore. I can answer every student’s question I can take all the time that I need and in fact on, my intention was to put a 200 hour teacher training online that sort of like the industry standard for basic teacher training is 200 hours and I was like, fine, I’ll do it to a hundred hour. Well, I just knew that I didn’t have any time constraints. I knew that I could say everything I needed to. I knew I could throw in this lecture because it’s important. I could put in this information because it’s important and in the end, once I had actually put into my teacher training course, everything that I truly believed a yoga teacher absolutely needs to know to be an extraordinary yoga teacher, to be the best yoga teacher possible. I ended up making a 500 hours training and I realized that my God, for the last 15 years, not only have I been a short changing people, you know, I haven’t been giving them the best quality education possible because of studio constraints, because of what, you know, the companies I was working for wanting me to do. I just wasn’t able to fix these problems. But now that I’m online, I can,

Melissa Guller: well you mentioned too like keeping the integrity of what you do and what you’re presenting and it’s incredible to hear you talk about how moving online, it didn’t just give you your own channel, but it allowed you to explore like what would I do if I had no boundaries? And it was all my perspective on this. Yeah,

Alanna Kaivalya: yeah. It was really freeing. It was really fraying and it, and it’s much easier to evolve a program when it’s online. When I have a lecture that I want to add, I simply add it. I don’t have to wait for the next round of teacher training. I don’t have to run it by my employers. I just added, I just provide it when students say, hey, we need more of this, or we would like this, we can just give it to them, you know? So it’s a really supportive environment and our, they truly thrive. And at this place, that online program has been running for four years. It started in 2015 we’ve had hundreds of graduates and all over the world. My graduates are working in teaching as yoga teachers and showing people what it really means to raise the bar, raise the standards of yoga education.

Melissa Guller: It’s pretty cool. That is pretty cool. It’s amazing. Yes, of course. I think it’s worth, you know, commemorating, this is such an incredible thing that you’ve built. And I’m curious too, like how has your own life changed since you’ve shifted from in-person to this kind of online yoga empire?

Alanna Kaivalya: Well, I mean, you know, so many things. It’s, you know, it makes me emotional honestly because going online has been the gift that I didn’t know that I needed. I mean it was something that I wanted for a long time and I think I’ve explained that, you know, I’ve always wanted to create accessibility to break down boundaries for people, you know, to truly make accessible the education that they desire and yoga. And I mentioned at the beginning of the podcast that one of the things that brought me to yoga was actually a thyroid disorder. And it turns out that that thyroid disorder got really bad and I was having some pretty major effects from it. I was incredibly tired. I was sleeping 1314 hours a night. I had no energy, I had massive brain fog, I was gaining weight, I was really, really sick. And as a lead teacher trainer for, you know, Yoga teacher trainings, you have to show up.

Alanna Kaivalya: And of course you do, right? You got to teach, but you have to show up in these very long intensive formats. So I, for example, would have a week long immersion where from Monday to Friday I would have to teach from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM and nine and understand that’s a normal work day, but when you’re teaching, you are on, you’re giving 100% of yourself, you’re not taking a break, you’re not checking Facebook, you’re in front of people delivering information the entire time. And it’s a tremendous amount of energetic output. And at the worst of my sickness, when I just had no energy to give, I would stand in the shower and cry in the mornings because I was so sapped. And I was so sad that I didn’t have to give what I absolutely needed to and I would show up and I would give it anyway and I would suffer for it.

Alanna Kaivalya: So it would take me weeks and weeks to recover from these in-studio trainings. So you know, now we have the one side where I knew that I could do better with training. I knew that I could deliver something that was far more accountable, thorough, compassionate, comprehensive, individualized to my students. And on the other hand, as a teacher, I was really suffering with this trading time for money gain. You know, I couldn’t call in sick. I can’t post polling the training. I don’t get paid time off as a yoga teacher and I still had to work as hard as I always was, but my illness was getting the best of me. So, you know, luckily it was right around this time at the worst of my illness that I was also doing the recordings to get my yoga teacher training online. So once I went online, I realized the liberation of this trading time for money game and now, you know, luckily I’ve regained my health. I had the time finally, so regained my health to, I had the money coming in to be able to see appropriate doctors to help me recover my health and I couldn’t have afforded either financially or timeline wise to do that before. So yeah, that was, that was a big impetus. Uh, and it was a big gift that I received, like going online and my work

Melissa Guller: that, that word freedom feels like it has kept coming up in this conversation where it’s the freedom for you to, I mean, yoga is so physical and you mentioned that eight to 6:00 PM day, I can’t imagine that’s you on your feet. That’s you teaching and it’s so exhausting to the body and five days in a row, four weeks in a row. Yeah. I can’t imagine, I mean I feel exhausted sometimes after just to work then in meetings or doing anything, but to give yourself the option to have something online that doesn’t require you to be there physically every second. I can’t imagine how that must have lifted a weight, I imagine off of your day to day life.

Alanna Kaivalya: It’s, yeah, it’s been incredible. I mean, just the ramifications of all of this are so huge for me and I don’t want listeners to think that I’m overstating, you know, or overplaying it. I’m not this, these are real, like my life completely transformed when I started to put all my work online, the transformed for my students. It transformed the way I deliver my quality, my content. It allowed me to maintain integrity and authenticity in a way that I’d never done before. And it changed my life because as a yoga teacher again, you know, like the industry is not set up to value the yoga teacher. So as a yoga teacher, I did not have paid time off. I had to take what was given to me. I was never able to ask for a raise. Nobody gave me health insurance. Like these things are just not available as a yoga teacher.

Alanna Kaivalya: So I had to solve that problem. And it turns out the solving of that problem was done by going on lion. And it seems like a simple transition, but the effect of it were not simple at all. They’ve been truly, truly life changing, you know, and going from, I mean, I remember one week in New York, I had, I had exactly a dollar 47 to my name, a dollar and 47 cents for seven days before I knew I was going to go and teach and get paid again. And so I went to the store and I bought a potato, carrot and an onion. I had a boolean cube at home, so I made a pot of soup that I then rationed for the entire days. Luckily I had a metro card, so I was able to get around and then I went through timeout New York and circled all the free things I could do that week.

Alanna Kaivalya: And that’s how I got through that week. And you know, I look back on times like that, which were not rare. They were frequent. I look back on all of the Times I struggled and I, and I remember and feel the weight of never having enough money. And I don’t even mean just psychologically, I never have any like actually never having enough money and working so hard and being so passionate. And I don’t wish that on anybody. You know, the freedom that you have by having the money that you need to make great choices for yourself is, is a gift. It’s unparalleled, you know? And I wish that for everybody listening and it’s something that I wish for my fellow yoga teachers as well. I mean, that’s why I have my upward facing business academy because I want to liberate that and I want to teach them how to do this because you know, I’m not, I’m not unique or special. I put my work online so can everybody else if I did it. So can ne and I love showing people how to do that.

Melissa Guller: I love that. I’m so, I’m so impressed too that I think faced with challenges like this where you had, you know, financial issues but also that your body was resisting. I think a lot of people could have given up on a passion like yoga. And it’s so impressive to me that you kind of found that the root of the problem wasn’t your passion. It was the outlet for the passion and you wondered, surely there must be a better way, a different way.

Alanna Kaivalya: No girl, trust me, I tried to give up. I definitely blamed yoga for a long time and every time I tried to give up yoga, drug me back in, you know, it, it, it’s got its hooks in me deep and I love it. I love the practice. And you know, as you correctly point out, knee blaming yoga wasn’t, it wasn’t, and that was just a projection. It was never yogas fault. You know, Yoga has given me extraordinary gifts throughout the decades that I’ve been practicing. I mean from the mental health that it’s given me to the spiritual health to, you know, the physical freedom it’s given me too. Just the connections, the relationships, the ability to shift my perceptions in life, everything, you know, Yoga is my heart and soul. Of course I couldn’t give it up. It was folly to think that that was ever possible or the case.

Alanna Kaivalya: But I mean, you know, I also want to move to Manhattan and I didn’t have any money and I wasn’t getting enough studio gigs. I tried temping in midtown for a few weeks and it went terribly. You know, and every time I tried to do something different, my heart just wasn’t in it. And I bet a lot of our listeners are going to resonate with that. You know, they have a passion, they want to follow it. It feels impossible. They don’t know how to do it. And to them, I would just say get ready and go online. Like do it because then it’s, and then you can make anything that you want out of it.

Melissa Guller: Amazing. So before we go, what’s next for you? What are you curious about or what are you leaning into next?

Alanna Kaivalya: Well, I mean obviously I’m very passionate about going online, building community and so what’s next for me? I was, so far everything I do are within online courses. So I have my kind of value yoga method academy, which is my online yoga teacher training. I have the upward facing business academy, which is where I teach yoga teachers primarily to go online and make money and impact with their career. And then I have the modern mystics academy, which houses a bunch of other courses in spirituality and higher education for yoga. But you know, courses are one thing and I love them and they’ve been such a resource for my community. But I’ve wanted to build community. I’ve really wanted a place for yoga teachers who are going through the struggles that I once went through to have support. Because during those times, my God, it was lonely.

Alanna Kaivalya: I didn’t feel like I could talk about my struggles because as yoga teachers, of course we’re supposed to be happy and shiny all the time and you know, God forbid we should have a problem because then who are we to talk about it? And obviously our yoga has failed us if we have issues. So it can be very isolating. I want to have a safe space, a safe community for Yoga teachers who are passionate about what they do, who love what they do, and who know that they could do it better, who know that they need support in doing it. Who would like to avoid the burnout of racing around a different studios? So what’s next for me is actually a membership. I’m launching a membership. Again, that’s very accessible to my yoga teachers to give them, so the support, not just in education, but in actual mentorship every single month.

Alanna Kaivalya: So there’s a place for them to learn more about how to deepen their own practice. Cause as yoga teachers we often leave our own practice behind. I’m going to have all of our teachers in the membership focus on a specific topic every month to teach about so that there’s a community of people that they can go to with what are you teaching and how are you teaching this? Which is something that I always wanted and I’m going to provide more education for how to elevate your craft as a yoga teacher. Again, just support that. I really wished that I’d had in those early years of my career. Um, I want to provide it to my fellow teachers and make it a really accessible membership format for them to come in and join us and be part of the crew.

Melissa Guller: I was going to say, it really sounds like after working at this personally and then as a teacher for so many years, you must have a really thoughtful approach to what others in your shoes or your former shoes must be looking for. So yeah,

Alanna Kaivalya: I hope so. I, you know, I want to alleviate their suffering. And in doing so, make them better at what they do, help them step into their role as a spiritual leader and create a really, truly fruitful community of hearts. So yeah, it’s the higher education.yoga and membership.

Melissa Guller: And if people want to connect you and learn more about your upcoming community or even the courses that you have now, where should they go?

Alanna Kaivalya: Well, hey, there’s a bunch of places they can go. Easiest and best places. Probably my main website, which is Alanna k.com. So that’s my first name and last initial, a l a n n a k.com. You can check out the higher education yoga membership@highereducation.yoga, the online teacher training, is it online teacher training.yoga. And then of course you can find me on Facebook where I do live broadcasts every Thursday to teach you more about how to step into your role as a spiritual leader.

Melissa Guller: Perfect. And we’ll throw links to everything you just listed in the show notes for easy reference. Awesome. But before we go, any final words of wisdom or inspiration for our listeners?

Alanna Kaivalya: No, I, I’m just so grateful for the opportunity to be here and to share this story. I hope that it resonates with some listeners and I do definitely want to say thanks to Teachable because this is not prompted at all. It has been such a game changer for me and my life and I know that being able to put the work that you do in the passion that you have into online courses or membership is such a gift, not just for your community but for you. And so I hope those listening get brave and get ready to do it cause it’s gonna change you and it’s going to help you change the world.

Melissa Guller: Thanks so much for joining us this week. You can see links to all the resources we mentioned in today’s episode in the show notes app, Teachable.com/EIT2. And before you go, make sure you subscribe to our podcasts so you can receive new episodes right when they’re released. And if you’re enjoying the show, we hope you’ll leave us a five star review. We really appreciate the feedback, especially since great reviews help us region, even larger audience of great listeners like you. So thank you.

On behalf of Team Teachable, we hope you enjoyed this episode about Yoga Teacher Training with Alanna Kaivalya. We’ll see you in the next episode of Everything is Teachable.