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Teaching yoga is commonly thought to be about yoga. It’s not.

10 Easy Steps to becoming a Famous Yoga Teacher!

Thanks to social media, it’s easy! Now you can do something you love, or at least that’s relatively easy—and make really, really good money doing so. You can get flown around and put up in hotels and get pricey plastic clothes for free and be of benefit to others.

Read on!

1. Focus. If you study for 1,000s of hours with a yoga legend and tame your ego, and no one’s around to “like” your posts about studying for thousands of hours with a yoga legend while taming your ego, did it even happen?

Yoga, of course, isn’t about asana or meditation or becoming a kinder, more present human being. Asana is hard. All that stuff is hard.

Yoga is about playlists, and yoga pants, and talking about things while holding a book by Yogananda or Desikachar, standing around before and after class with your mat while looking good in fitted plastic pants made with toxic dyes in warehouses without windows overseas made for pennies by women and sometimes children that you buy for hundreds of dollars because they make your butt look great. Correction: your butt already looks great, and these don’t get in the way of that. Or, if you’re a guy…you show up in random old poly gym shorts and go shirtless as you sweat on your toxic yoga mat, also made overseas by different women and children in a different factory without windows. It’s totally unfair.

Bonus: once you’re an instafamous yoga teacher, you don’t gotta pay for your pants or mat.

So start small. Rename you socials. Don’t title them anything creative like “Yoga Flow with Joanna Westby”…just title it your name. Consider that you’ll want to use it for the rest of your life, or until Facebook/Instagram gets Myspaced by the next TikTok.

2. Change your name to something Eastern sounding. Joanna Westby? You sound Western. Change it to something Sanskrit. Doesn’t matter what. A buddy of mine changed his name to something that means “heap.” You know, like pile of poo. But no one knows! Or cares. “Skandha” just sounded cool. But Joanna Westby? No one’s paying $500/hour for a private with her. Joanna Westby don’t fly for free. So what do you change it to? Just google “sanskrit” words and choose something pretty.

Choose something ike Mandala—and don’t worry about how to pronounce it or what it means. Worry is bad for you, like empathy or reading journalism.

But first! Read on…

3. Go to India. Duh. Doesn’t matter what you do there, go to the beach, whatever. Just make sure to get some photos of yourself doing yoga in Mysore, or someplace that looks like Mysore, and post those on your new Facebook Page/IG/whatever. Find a guru, or just anyone who looks like a guru, stare in her or his face until you have a spiritual moment, then talk about that to your best friend (your phone), in hushed, humble, broken tones while walking down a sidewalk in Mysore or someplace that looks like Mysore, like Abbott-Kinney or Park Slope. Now, you’re ready to name your Custom Yoga School after something-or-other inspired by that guru, even if they’re just an ordinary layman you willfully mistook for a guru.

4. Are you hot? If so, congratulations.

If not, that’s okay, just accentuate your lack of hotness. If you’re an aging middle-aged guy, for example, just wear awkward tight yoga shorts and let your paunch bulge. Be proud of yourself, whatever you look like, and it’ll work out. Wear scarves.

5. Own five or six iPhone charging cords and leave them dangling from random outlets all over your white on white apartment or house. Why?

There’s nothing worse for your yoga career than having a dead phone. Do you even care about yoga? Fall to sleep in the enlightening blue glow of your phone.

But! Don’t post often, or folks will think you have nothing to do. Unless—and this is a higher bhumi—you talk about how sharing your life is part of the immense responsibility you shoulder, then you can get away with posting all the time. Publicize your accounts before and after yoga class. Online, post wise things daily (someone else’s quotes will do), along with a hot photo of your sweet self, then offer discounts and links.

If you’re approached by a mid hotel chain you’d never condescend to stay at, take their money and recommend it to your sangha. If you’re approached by a plastic water bottle company spewing carbon and microplastics, take their money and save up for that house on the lake.

Social media is good for yelling at people about your politics, but yogis don’t care about politics: we care about ourselves. So focus on your deep thoughts. Frankly, these are key to this getting rich. So save yourself time ’cause time is money and that’s what yoga is about: money. And skip most of this list, because reading takes time.

Sample social posts for your little followers to get excited about:

What do I like to wear to bed? What beauty products do I endorse? How do I sculpt my body? What factory farmed animals do I like to eat in my perfect kitchen? Why is my best friend a Vitamix? How do I drive while streaming? What are the monetized secrets to my divine presence? Do my lips look better than yours? Is this gent or lady in the background of my Live my significant other?

Why am I so lonely?

6. Get a publicist. Tell them you’re sponsored by ___________ (pick a few smaller sponsors of your fave yoga conference). Get the publicist to get you teaching at Omega, Esalen, Kripalu, your friendly local municipal park event, but mostly corporate retreats for Big Tech little men wearing fleece vests and destroying the fabric of our society. Once you’re teaching at a few gigs, tell all those sponsors that aren’t sponsoring you to sponsor you. Or rather have your publicist do so. Make sure you’re pictured in their ads, looking beautiful and humble. Close your eyes, put your hands in anjali, that sort of thing. Anjali might make a great name, btw, I don’t think it’s taken.

7. Time to write your bio, if you haven’t yet. Mention that you’ve been studying for 15 years, no matter how long it’s been, and get your local Jasper Johal to take some naked photos of you if you’re hot, and if not do it anyways. Yoga people love the idea of imperfect bodies being beautiful—it’s almost better if you’re out of shape. Also mention your guru in India or Costa Rica who gave you your name (but don’t define it), and if they were corrupt, talk about how your traumatic journey got you here and how the cracks are where the lights [sic] get in and mention these terms: Empath, hold space, resonate, chakra and/or self-care.

8. Oh, right: learn how to teach yoga.

Start off with a few easy ones: a teacher training at a hodunk studio that will give you the tools and a certificate. Then, do Corepower or something corporate–Equinox, something like that. Take the easiest possible, unless you’re fit, then really go for it so you can learn some awesome poses to reluctantly show off in your new ads. Once you’ve done that, do a third teacher training. This shit is expensive, but don’t worry, you’ll make it back, and daddy and mommy will pay, anyways, just assure them you’re gonna be huge. The third training should take place in India, or Costa Rica.

Study with someone hardcore, like Richard Freeman or Ana Forrest. Someone serious and well-respected will give you bragging rights that will shut up the haters and give you street cred. Uplevel: join a yoga cult, wear some outfits, profit for years as a senior teacher saying wise things at exclusive retreats, go through some ups and downs, then write an expose on IG or Elephant Journal or anonymously on Reddit until you identify yourself finally and come out as a hero or victim.

Now that you know how to teach, teach at a studio when you’re home. Most of the time, you’ll be traveling.

9. Okay: you’ve got a publicist, teaching gigs, spiritual retreats and conferences publicizing you, a booming social following and burgeoning yoga account. You’ve paid back your parents or your credit card bills. Time to hire a type A nepo assistant who doesn’t need money to refer everyone to. And get a yoga mat deal. Brand that shit. Talk with Gaiam about recording a yoga series. Do people still buy DVDs? Don’t worry about the money. It’s all about having yoga DVDs—no one will use them, but some people will buy them…it’s analogous to being a professor, where you have to publish an academic book that no one reads. Move to LA, or at least talk about moving to LA. Finally, get on yogaglo or GaiamTV or one of those yoga subscription services. Post a ton of videos to youtube. Every 10th one shouldn’t be about yoga, but about how you’re no longer drinking or a break up or how your dog died or whatever, where people can really connect with you in a special way. In addition to your sponsorships, get some commercials and iPhone apps going. Your publicist and agent will nail that down. Make sure they do.

10. Finally, in a hotel in Costa Rica/the Maldives/Ibi-tha where you’re leading a yoga retreat that’s paying you too much and flying you there and putting you up, have a nervous breakdown. Realize all this means nothing. That it’s not evil, it’s just a lot of hot air, and the planet’s hot enough. That beneath is all you’re fundamentally aok, a softy, a sweetie who cares about others and animals and…just sit with yourself. Enjoy the clouds slowly changing shape as they move across the sky. Learn to meditate. Make friends with yourself. Practice maitri. Practice tonglen. Take a break and go on retreat at a Buddhist center. Make friends with boredom. Don’t join any more cults or accept any more sponsors you don’t wholeheartedly believe are working to be of benefit to all.

Start your own little yoga studio or retreat center. Hire a competent manager. Don’t sleep with any students. Just practice, and teach out of that.

Now, you have a choice.

A: And here’s where it gets good: for the ultimate in Spiritual Success, use this breakdown and newfound loneliness and love for oneself as a story in your seminars and classes and videos. Become the famous teacher who was heroically victimized by a cult but escaped to finally become one with simplicity or zen or whatever. Profit.

B: Or, learn from the burn out, stick with your loneliness, and realize that celebrity is all noise and bullshit. But don’t quit it…transform it. Use it as a bullhorn to spread the good news about waking up from ourselves, just as you have done. Smile, sadly, and just be yourself and work in service of others.

Of course, our ego’s too smart for all that, so keep meditating—described in Buddhist as a self-cutting sword—and allow your mind to reawaken itself, again and again, to the present moment.