Spice

Spice traders

A marshal shot trying to defend his lands against Spice trade

A very warm welcome on this grey February morning in 2022, where after three storms (Dudley, Eunice, and today we’re in the tail of Franklin), I am feeling kind of cheeky writing you this.
Thoughts in my head are:
“Can I really do this? Can I just like that, decide to start a free online studio?”
And it goes even further than that, because there’s a WE! 
Can WE, just do that?

We, YouTube lovers, music lovers, perhaps occasional yogis or aspiring yogis but truth be told, we are usually too easily occupied by things far more interesting and enticing to make it to the mat.
Can WE, already in the red when it comes to being civic-minded, take this whole thing about doing things our way and in this case, the whole bit about how yoga is supposed to work, upside down and basically, just wing it?

Ignore we are supposed to neatly organize around a yoga-teacher who has their class schedule all figured out, and who has a proper website where you can see how much it would cost to join in-person classes, or private yoga, and how much to get an online membership-
Can we just bypass that and say: “No thanks! We’re good here.”

I m going to bring it home what’s going to make us unique, but before I do that I have to warn you: 
No one has ever done this.
Not THIS.

So before you start yelling “YES!”, “I’m in Suzanne!” “Let’s do this!”, you have to realize that you have no idea what you’re up against.
And, perhaps more disturbingly, neither do I.
I have no idea what we’re going to encounter, and how our Rock Star Yoga Studio is going to pan out.

What I’m inviting you to do with yoga, if you join me, will not so much change the yoga you are doing, or that we are doing, compared to how others have been doing it for decades;
But it has the potential to change your entire life.

Because it isn’t just yoga, that has been on a slippery slope down from capitalist hill, with the occasional entrepreneurial Wunderkind climbing back up, marketing and packaging up their services and absolutely thriving!
It’s not just yoga where we can see this pattern;
It’s every profession that is based on what we call the service industry, which I would label as professions based on work women have done for free for thousands of years.

There is equally much to be said about the role of art, artists, teachers, and philosophers within a capitalist society, but in general they have been more aware or awake that they were not included in capitalism.
That they had to look for patrons, they had to establish their own school of thought if they wanted to get paid. Or they had to in some other way work with the fact that the world did not have a place for their work.

And there is also equally much to be said about the makers, the craftsmen, the people who build everything it is we need as well as the things we desire.
Late 20th century The Netherlands placed all their cards on creating a meritocracy, meaning that professions based on knowledge, or in support of some sort of paper reality, were deemed high-paying jobs that offered security and had status;
And all work based on real skill, was downplayed as being, basically “not what you wanted for your child”.
This was of course a terrible choice, and next to traumatizing and insulting, also unwise and unpractical.
A society where pushing paper is rewarded over real skill, is one where the collapse of civilization has begun. And this was decades ago.

Then, in theory, I could also include how the liberalization of the financial markets in the 80s, as well as the globalization with regard to raw materials and polluting chemical processes needed for our (often luxury) products, as well as the globalization of those same financial markets, has allowed for capitalism to absolutely spin out of control.
By now there is little to no connection between the one who earns money (investment companies, and others operating solely on the financial market such as bitcoin traders) and the ones who add value, or the places in the world that are being used, polluted, and politically destabilized because of traders looting their lands.

I remember being in a discussion which franchise invented the term “Spice” and “Spice trading” first: The Dune books in the 80s or the Star Wars movies which started in the late 70s?
Spice, in these stories, is a highly valuable sand-like dust, traded across the galaxy like drugs, gold, or weapons on earth. Spice trading featured recently in the Star Wars Boba Fett series.
The discussion revolved around whoever was second, Dune or Star Wars, and had stolen the term. But in hindsight, I believe that the story of faraway territories being looted for their Spice, and the trail of violence and corruption that the transport and distribution of it, the whole criminal network surrounding it, leave behind, cannot be told too often.
So what if one franchise was first, and one second. Do tell.

But despite these stories, it’s like we didn’t fully understand, what the consequences of a Spice driven world meant then, in the 80s.
And we still seem to not fully understand what it means now.

What does it mean for a society, and thereby for you as a person deciding how you want to make your money, when value has been dumbed down to being a monetary success?
When real value has no place in our economic system, and you re allowed to exploit, pollute, and make money on the financial markets that are highly energy intensive because of how computer/ server-intensive that trade works – without any costs?

Why would anyone want to become a doctor, a teacher, a cobbler or open a yoga studio; When they could become a bitcoin trader instead, and be a financially thriving member of society?
And as someone with money they are able to help out those around them, and build stable homes from what they make as financial investors.
Far more appealing than having a traditional occupation or being a traditional entrepreneur with a brick and mortar business, for multiple reasons but just recall how during the pandemic real businesses were closed or restricted.
Yet, financial markets thrived.

People working in what we would call high-level professions, have to invest up to 15 years in training, years of hardly making any money, and they have to stay up to date with their industry, and engage in life-long education.
Yet their work is financially less rewarding and far less autonomous, than that of those operating on the financial markets.

Entrepreneurs, brick and mortar businesses, are submitted to government regulation, fees, liabilities, loans, all the hardware and software costs they have to make, in particular if they work on the consumer market; Plus they have monthly costs in rent, inventory, and copious amounts of time and money spent on aspects of the business that do not make any money.
Again:
Why would anyone do that, now that we’re living in a world, where you can make the money online?

All good things to know and think about when you think of your local bookshop, your physical therapist, and your local yoga teacher and yoga studio.
Appreciate them, praise them, and if you can, pay them and pay them well, I say.
Be grateful that they showed up to being our boots on the ground and are here to make our communities and our world a better place. 

But I really am, getting ahead of myself.

Because these are all relatively recent developments. And although I think it is important to understand these financial market and internet-driven dynamics, if only to understand how  determined you must be if you insist on having a traditional business or occupation;
What I want to explain, and I touched on this at the beginning of this post, is why teaching yoga and other professions in the service industry, have not been part of the economic system way before the internet or Reaganomics even began.
The problem the service industry faces, is I would not say “of all times”; But it has been around since ancient Greece.

Ancient Greece was already capitalistic because the money was for the few, and the whole system was driven by the larger part of society being excluded from access to the money.
The economy was based on slaves and women doing unpaid labor and and craftsmen worked for modest pay.

In the 60s, women in the Netherlands were fired once they married.
And nurses, to this day, have the lowest higher education salary out of all of them, because their work is so interwoven with women’s work being taken for granted, that even in 2022 they do not have a competitive salary. 

Also at the beginning of this piece, I briefly mentioned that some people in the service industry were savvy enough to ask high prices for their services, and managed to become successful despite being in an industry where people worked for low rates.
I described it as: “the occasional entrepreneurial Wunderkind climbing back up, marketing and packaging up their services and absolutely thriving!”
This is often talked badly about.

An example are the rise of coaches here in The Netherlands, but it’s a worldwide phenomenon. As is the occurrence of people talking badly about these coaches charging high sums of money for their packages, and many coaches not displaying any interest in getting formal education or joining a professional association.

Yet in my opinion, trends like this are merely people stepping out of their unpaid or low paid women’s work narrative, and charging their worth in the same way men have charged theirs.
It’s just that the society at large has been built on the majority of people being underpaid, or not being paid at all.
That s why it stings when, usually online, service providers, who had less or an unknown education make more money, than those who bend over backwards to be trustworthy and registered professionals.

In the battle of the underpaid nurse, as well as the over-qualified, in all probability overly- responsible, professional, versus the rogue entrepreneurs of the (usually) online service industry; 
The first one is bound to their heart, their ethics, their “in what type of world do we want to live in”.
But at the same time they are often bound to “delivering” their work in identifiable units. Doctors are being paid per patient, and the amount of money they get is determined based on one identifiable big medical procedure, or a pre-set course of tests or interventions. To talk, pay attention, look for diy solutions: In The Netherlands it’s usually not what they get paid for.

So back to the coaching industry, or any industry that has their origins in the service industry; Here the identifiable units, traditionally, are also weird and dare I say arbitrary aspects, of ALL that they offer and have to do.
For example: An hour’s work. One yoga class. A 30 minute massage.
All just random outtakes of what used to be something WHOLE and what was traditionally given for free, usually by women.

The big trick capitalism has played on us, is that it has given us the idea that our work, that we want to GIVE from our hearts, first of all NEEDS to be chopped up into identifiable and sellable units; which is a heartless, soulless, criminal act to begin with for sure.
But it gets worse: Because it has also convinced us that it is normal to do that, AND that we, as professionals, working from one “neatly cut-out and paid- for” unit to the next, will become valued and fully functional members of society, by being independent health care workers, independent coaches, independent yoga teachers.
When we’re not.

Not unless you are willing to fall in love with marketing, move away from the humble majority of your industry and at the risk of being cast from it, and start selling high-end packages and solutions instead.
If you re ready to tear the idea of the identifiable, sellable unit of your industry to shreds, make your own rules instead and charge whatever the hell you please?
Then yes.
You have beat capitalism, and you have done it, in my opinion, in the most gracious, serving, and inspiring way imaginable.
You have cast the yoke of your industry.

If I had known this, 20 years ago when I started my yoga business;
I would have chosen differently than to “just do” what was common for a yoga teacher to do. Right then most yoga was taught in community centers and yoga teachers earned very little money. It also didn’t have a great amount of energy behind it. 

If I had understood the background of “women’s work” within capitalism, and the possibilities of marketing for our industry, I would have gone what was then in The Netherlands, absolute the rogue, entrepreneurial route.

I would have been excited to build a modern, colorful studio with back to back classes and a vibrant community!
We’d have international guests, teacher trainings, and so on, but more than that our common ground would be a feeling of belonging and identity.

And it is this vision…did you feel it? 
Did you feel it coming to live when I wrote it out for you?
Did you feel the excitement of such a thing?

Because it is this vision, that has inspired me today, to commit to the 2022 equivalent of what would have been a turn-of-the-century modern yoga studio.

I want the community.
I want the comradery.
But I am choosing to say No to the idea of “me” being the entrepreneur, and “you” the one who is a consumer. Object, subject, service provider, client;
We’re not going to base our relationship on money or capitalism because that has a history of thousands of years of keeping people small and trapped in a system that was never built to let them thrive.

You and me; We both live under the threat of our version of Spice trade destroying the world we live in. We both have to choose how we are going to deal with that, and I think you and me starting off with some identifiable, sellable unit from me to you, should not be the start AND should not be an endgame either.

I think we should just be together, on my YouTube channels, on my blogs. And you pay me when you want to, and if you don’t that’s fine too.
But if we start off as having some kind of business arrangement, we’re going to fall in the same traps as all the generations who came before us.
So let’s not do that.

Let’s start simple, let’s start small.
And most importantly:
Let’s start in freedom.

.
Suzanne L. Beenackers

NEW: Rock Star Yoga Studio

I will start making yoga videos this week.
New videos + new channel trailers soon! 

Subscribe to:

English channel:
Rock Star Yoga (yoga) + Life lessons in Bon Jovi songs (talk)
And you can follow my Yoga Blog: Daily Bon Jovi Yoga

Nederlands YouTube: 
Klassieke Yoga, Maan Yoga en Yoga voor Generatie X
nieuwe trailer en de eerste lessen volgen deze week

I would love to know which parts spoke to you!
You can share in the comments, or include a note with your donation on Paypalme 

Subscribe to this blog World Between Worlds and receive these in your Inbox.
The button is on this page, probably somewhere on the right.

YouTube Rock Your Business
YouTube Life lessons in Bon Jovi songs 

NEW: Books!

You can find my books The Little Mistress Who Turned Into A Baby Koala
A Boyfriend Like Jon Bongiovi and The White Tigress Yoga Workbook
at the bottom of this page: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rockstarwriter

If you live in The Netherlands, Belgium or Germany, you can also order these books from me – just go to the bottom of this page:
https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rockstarwriter
to check out which ones you want, and write me an email at s_beenackers@hotmail.com.
Payment is via PayPal or bank transfer.

Also by me:
my personal Twitter account
Rock Star Writer
Rock Star Writer on Facebook
Art & Popular Culture: World Between Worlds (current site)
Yoga Blog: Daily Bon Jovi Yoga

Liefdeseend en vintage yoga (Nederlands/ Dutch)

beertje Puux op Facebook (Nederlands/ Dutch)

a broche as old as I am – which I immediately bought. It turns out the shop is in San Francisco: The city I have an absolute professional obsession with

It wasn’t until I started Googling for my bird, that I recognized that of course, the large beak is a direct reference to the pandemic

decoration: https://www.bol.com/nl/nl/p/fabryk-design-fbrk-wanddecoratie-hummingbird-m-33-x-53-cm-black/9300000021782383/

The images I could find, of real birds, did not come close to what I saw in my dream. Even the word “raven”, must be seen as a perhaps too eager attempt, to determine what the dream was about.
Ravens are spirit animals, they have a meaning in all nature based religions. They are also biblical animals as they refused to come back to Noah’s arc and chose to feed on the carcasses the flood had left.

Ravens are high in symbolism, and when you dream about them, you can find a thousand videos on YouTube about what they mean.
Except:
It wasn’t a raven.

It was a slender looking bird, and if it had not been for the fact that its beak was made of silver, I don’t think we would have been watching it.
“We” were the residents on a square, dome, or mall. It most closely resembled an indoor living community, with a lot of light. If you looked up you would see a few stories of balconies or hallways of the upper floors. But it was so large you would not be able to distinguish anything.

But towering way overhead, was a roof.
Like a dome that could hold an entire habitat or artificial climate underneath.
But that wasn’t the case: Aside from rain the glass roof was not holding anything out, and birds were not supposed to be there.
It wasn’t the ideal environment for birds, and although I m sure pigeons were common there, this bird was a special one. A true bird of paradise.
No one knew what it was, but looking up, the first people started to say things like:
“Look!”
“It’s silver!”
And then I saw.

It was a black bird, with long silver beak. Sometimes I thought it was elegant, a long bill curved downwards. At other times I thought it was sturdier, with a strong base on its face.
The bird was making hummingbird like movements, and possessed the long thin end on its beak, that I know only from hummingbirds. When landing it was clapping its wings swiftly, until it could hold on to something. Maybe a pole?
It was still too far up for any of us to reach, and other birds too, were flying around it.
Making it hard to think of ways to catch it or reach it.

The bird was black but there were white feathers on its chest.
Not spotted, like a sparrow. But like a few white feathers on its chest, just like most black cats have a few white hairs on their chest. We realized its white chest markings too, were most likely silver. But because we were so taken by its beak, and wondering how we would get him out, we were not particularly concerned with the chest.
But it was a beautiful bird, that much was certain.

A middle-aged woman in a long blue dress and curly brown hair, had joined us. She connected to the bird, who immediately understood she would take him outside.
He landed on her head, so she could walk outside.

We were all very worried that going through a corridor or tunnel, the bird would suddenly fly up and hurt itself.
But of course it didn’t.
It understood the purpose of letting the woman carry him, and sat down comfortable on her head.
It pulled its neck in, looking around with one friendly looking eye.

When I later looked for what bird looked most like this bird, it was this eye, at the side of the head not at the front close to the beak, that convinced me it had been a singing bird or non-violent bird.

The dream ended and I wondered what it had meant. The only thing I understood immediately, was that it had been positive. The people on the square had all been compassionate, and the bird had been beautiful. And everybody had trusted each other.
And a bird with a silver beak was of course a sign of prosperity.

When I later Googled for birds, I found a silver bird brooch that had the unique combination of a strong beak at the basis, but a long curled bill at the end.
I decided to buy the brooch, so that I would never forget the dream.
When I later Googled where the store or online platform was located I saw it was in the city of my dreams: San Francisco.
That is the city where Basic Instinct is situated.
Catherine Tramell has been my “writer persona” for ever. And it is my dream to once go on holiday or even write there for a month or a few months. In the town where Catherine Tramell has her beach house, in Stinson. 

The brooch, a Google search result when I was searching for the meaning behind the dream, came from there, my personal holy ground when it comes to what I consider to be success in writing.

But there was more. Because another picture came up. That of the medieval plague masks. These masks have a story of their own, because there are signs they were never used as such. And that it was actually a Venice masked ball invention, which was incorrectly classified as something plague doctors wear. 

But wether the medieval plague beaks were really used by doctors, or not, is besides the point I think. Because it gave me the clue, I had managed to miss.
That the beak in my dream was of course, a reference to the pandemic.

And it had a silver lining.
The people were working together.
They were all in awe of beauty, and there were those among us, who knew what to do.
They had a deep wordless understanding of nature, of animals, and the bird of paradise who had visited us under our dome, where we were keeping the world out, that bird understood she would take him out.

The time has come, to leave our dome.
The time has come, to live.

.
Suzanne L. Beenackers

I would love to know which parts spoke to you. You can share in the comments,
or include a note with your donation on Paypalme 

Subscribe to this blog World Between Worlds and receive these in your Inbox.
The button is on this page, probably somewhere on the right.

YouTube Rock Your Business
YouTube Life lessons in Bon Jovi songs 

You can find my books The Little Mistress Who Turned Into A Baby Koala
A Boyfriend Like Jon Bongiovi and The White Tigress Yoga Workbook
at the bottom of this page: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rockstarwriter

Also by me:
my personal Twitter account
Rock Star Writer
Rock Star Writer on Facebook
Art & Popular Culture: World Between Worlds (current site)
Yoga Blog: Daily Bon Jovi Yoga

Liefdeseend en vintage yoga (Nederlands/ Dutch)

beertje Puux op Facebook (Nederlands/ Dutch)

Just as I was considering writing out the pretty lengthy description box of my Rock Your Business video, into a blog post for this World Between World blog;
YouTube stepped in before I could even weigh the pros and the cons on making cross-over content, reposting a video as a blogpost (a practice I support in theory yet usually end up not caring for at all, when other YouTubers do it);
Before any of those conscious decisions could be made, YouTube already started flashing red lines in my face that my description was WAY too lengthy!
It wasn’t having any of it!

If I wanted to post that video, I had to cut corners with my description, and my model of the three different types of businesses, and the fourth one, the Rock Star Business, would just have to be crunched into bullet points or something.

Naturally, I could not allow for that. 
So here it is! The description slash blog post YouTube refused to post.

And the official launch of my new business channel.
From now on my new business channel, Rock Your Business, will focus exclusively on the Rock Star Business.
Subscribe to Rock Your Business here.

There’s no business like Rock Star Business: channel introduction 2022

The past 3 years – or perhaps the past 30! depending on how you count – I ve been knee deep both in studying business models, as well as in having a business because I was a professional yoga teacher.
And trust me when I say, it was a messy journey!

And a preventable one, ultimately, had I known then what I know now.

Which is that there are THREE types of businesses, which I did not fully understand to be entirely different things.

The three types are:

1. the service provider

makes money from selling their services (hours) but their time investment/ non-monetized hours could be as much as double that.

Focus of the service provider is on the well-being of their client or customer (helping), and they position themselves as an expert in their industry including taking regular extra training, diplomas, and professional specialization.

2. the entrepreneur

Makes money from selling a package, or a clearly defined experience.
Not only does an entrepreneur have a clear vision about which hours are connected to cash flow, and which are non-money making activities (minimizing the latter);
But the entrepreneur can even make money without selling hours, which is called passive income. This means they sell automatically, with payment and delivery handled digitally, and they do not have to do something nor do they have to invest time later.

Focus of the entrepreneur is on the well-being of their business, which is a separate entity that can ultimately be ran and sold independently.
A good book to read how to get from 1 to 2 (how to stop seeing yourself as a service or goods provider, and uplevel to being a business) is
The E-Myth Revisited
Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It
by Michael E. Gerber

3. The Artist

Instead of designing their work around their clients or business, an artist builds their work around their art.
Some artists make work they can sell, but the focus of an artist is to work on their art. Not their client, nor their business or income are a priority, but the quality of their work.

Artists who want to monetize their skills in the form of a professional side career or side-hustle should focus on how to become entrepreneurs, and how to package up what it is they can do in a way that is guaranteed to make money.
For example as a photographer, have a fixed fee on your website for photographing a wedding or a studio photo shoot, and avoid terms like “tailored to your needs”.
Artists who want to provide for their creative projects by making money from their craft, must avoid the trap of becoming a service provider. There are too many unpaid hours there.

And here is my fourth, and new, business model: The Rock Star Business model.

4. The Rock Star

If you are a rock star, you re in an equal, non-monetary relationship with your fans or audience. You probably don’t even know who paid you and who didn’t.

The audience knows what the Rock Star has on sale (albums, concert tickets) but their bond is defined by being in a relationship with each other.
The Rock Star with the audience or fans, and the fans or audience with their Rock Star.

Their relationship is one of great freedom, and without any promise of continuity. Each party can leave, whenever they want to.

– The freedom;
– the equality between parties;
– and a relationship that is not defined by monetary exchange;
Are all unique traits of the Rock Star Business, that are not found in any other business model.

My business channel will all be about the latter from now:
How can YOU change your business into a Rock Star one?

And if you do choose to monetize your skills for extra cash flow, how can you make sure you focus on the money making activities, and avoid the traps of doing a lot of work for free?
Doing the majority of your work for free, not being paid in advance, and other practices that are (in my opinion) a disservice to everybody, including your clients, are so common in a lot of industries.
How can we avoid them? One of the many things we’re going to find out in our work together.

Watch this first video about the bare bones of what it means to have a Rock Star Business.
Or watch it at the bottom of this post.

And rock on!

Suzanne L. Beenackers

I would love to know which parts spoke to you. You can share in the comments,
or include a note with your donation on Paypalme 

Subscribe to this blog World Between Worlds and receive these in your Inbox.
The button is on this page, probably somewhere on the right.

YouTube Rock Your Business
YouTube Life lessons in Bon Jovi songs 

You can find my books The Little Mistress Who Turned Into A Baby Koala
A Boyfriend Like Jon Bongiovi and The White Tigress Yoga Workbook
at the bottom of this page: https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rockstarwriter

Also by me:
my personal Twitter account
Rock Star Writer
Rock Star Writer on Facebook
Art & Popular Culture: World Between Worlds (current site)
Yoga Blog: Daily Bon Jovi Yoga

Liefdeseend en vintage yoga (Nederlands/ Dutch)

beertje Puux op Facebook (Nederlands/ Dutch)

insence and a shiva statue. Yoga studio opening shot for The Next Best Thing, where Madonna plays a yoga teacher

a reception of a yoga studio, a photo that’s been in my database from appr. 2008

empty yoga studio space

workshop or class with international yoga teacher Shiva Rea

picture of a yoga class appr 2012

picture of a yoga class appr. 2010

Today I received my first debriefing on the current status of yogaland, since I m looking for ways to start teaching locally again.
Ironically, I only intended to teach to friends, since I gave up being a business owner slash yoga teacher, in 2020. Covid had taken away my last classes, I stopped two weeks before the official decree came, when the time I spent disinfecting the studio after class had become the same length as the time it took me to teach it.
But there had been more.

Two years earlier I had downsized, only teaching at my own small studio and no longer renting extra space. And when I ultimately ended the lease of my unused studio, late 2020, I still did not fully grasp why being a yoga teacher had not worked for me. Why there had been something not working, way before Covid.

Why I had always felt there was something inherently “off” with being a yoga teacher, without any concept of what that was or how to improve on it.

I was empty handed and could not offer any consolation or alternatives, to my fellow yoga teachers, not to my yoga students, not to myself.
Which was less dramatic than in sounds because aside from my own yoga students – who were of course affected by me not finding my way around being what they wanted or perhaps even needed me to be- aside from those directly involved, everybody else seemed to be fine with the dominant business model of students paying a yoga studio, a gym, a community center, or an independent yoga teacher, in order to attend a real life class. 
I seemed to be the only one who felt something was not going the way it should be.
And even I did not know what it was.

The history of yoga as a business, or teaching yoga providing a full income, is a relatively new one.
In the 70s and 80s yoga had been the domain of alternative communities and women, in particular in The Netherlands where we have a high percentage of home-deliveries. For decades prenatal yoga was the most dominant recognizable “type” of yoga.

But yoga changed with the arrival of Ashtanga yoga in America.
Ashtanga yoga is a very athletic form of yoga. It was already in America but it really propelled yoga into a whole new universe, as the go-to exercise, when Madonna revealed it was her yoga, in 1998 when promoting her album Ray of Light.
The more athletic forms of yoga were embraced by the fitness industry, and in their slipstream all other forms of yoga and meditation followed.

At the beginning of the 21st century, yoga studios were still an absolute rarity in The Netherlands, but in America they had been on the rise since the 1990s. As had the intensive teacher trainings  and rise of teacher trainings at large, that were needed to accommodate these studios, and meet the high demand.

Around the turn of the century I began reading the American Yoga Journal. To this day, this blossoming yoga culture with its rich and colorful studios, remains one of my biggest inspirations.
Drop-in classes, unlimited class passes; It was all unheard of in The Netherlands, with the exception of a few yoga studios located in the largest cities of The Netherlands such as The Hague, Amsterdam, and Utrecht.

I soaked up the concept of how these professional yoga studios were ran, what message they presented, and how amazing they made me feel.

Around 2015 online business coaching had started to take a leap, and I worked with a Canadian business coach.
But to my deep frustration, it did not have any effect.
It inspired me, but I felt it did not inspire my students at all, nor did I get any new ones other than from Google advertising which did not require any marketing skills just spending money.

I also studied marketing for yoga studios with two other teachers, although not one-on-one, and I learned about marketing for health coaches and therapists, which was already more general than a focus on how to make a living teaching yoga.
Then I went on to studying marketing of how to run an online businesses. These coaches were also very mindset-focused.

From 2017 and up, my study was no longer of diversifying yoga classes, knowing my audience, target group, niche, elevator pitch, and instead I learned how to create multiple online income streams.
For example: 1-on-1 coaching, group programs, home-study courses (pre-recorded material), selling books and membershipsprograms.   

But I only dipped my toes in the water, execution wise.
Online marketing or having an online business has never been my thing.

It was 15 years later, and all I wanted (still) was a colorful, rich, local yoga studio with drop-in classes, unlimited class passes, visiting international yoga teachers, and yet I was the furthest away from realizing my dream as I had ever been.
I felt like I had actually gone back, in going for my dreams. And was frustrated that I had been unsuccessful creating what I had wanted.

Yet, do you know what I did have?
I had the most amazing group of people in my classes, who by now had known each other for years, and who wanted fixed class times and a reliable yoga teacher. Every time I tried something new, or got new students, I realized I was unable to melt it all together and let the group grow.

I was not so much incapable of teaching classes within a tight community, because I adored my students and they are the reason I m currently looking into ways to start teaching to friends. They will all, one way or another, receive a notification or see a blog post. When I have my new intimate classes up an running (also Covid regulation wise) I will invite them back, and will be the yoga teacher they always wanted me to be.

But it wasn’t because I was unhappy with what I had created, that I failed to appreciate it.
It was because I did not know how to grow it. I didn’t know how to make a healthy business, out of it.

Sure! I had been originally inspired by the dynamic, early 20th century, American yoga business.
And the only marketing I understood – in hindsight – had been for those.

But I basically pulled out of my business not because the dream did not match reality but because it wasn’t growing. I quit before my classes or business would fall apart from natural decline in numbers, of people moving away, etcetera

I quit reluctantly.
And very angry with myself that although I had a Masters in business, had studied marketing both in the 90s as well as picked it up around 2010, specializing in 2015, and absolutely binging on it from 2017 and onward;
It had not made any, any difference.
My yoga business failed.

It took me until 2020 to figure out WHY even the best, most modern, marketing, tailored to my industry, had failed to work in the most spectacular way;

Because the marketing of local yoga studios cannot be compared to those of the biggest cities of America.

And if it had been available, I doubt I would have been inspired by marketing for yoga studios in small towns where maybe they had one or two yoga studios.
Because I was inspired by the buzzing streets of New York city where on the rainy dark streets you could see the foggy windows of a brightly lit yoga space, on the first floor above the shops.  
Or where you had to take elevators to the 10th floor, and the doors opened in the middle of a tranquil yoga shop where bamboo flute music was playing, staff spoke in hushed voices and students in colorful leggings walked around with a yoga mat under their arm.

The big difference between an inner-city, with an abundance of yoga studios, and a suburb or small town where there are only very few studios, is that if there are only few studios, it will be picked for its location and its convenience in class time.
All other aspects, even price, are of little importance.

In a small town or suburb, you can niche and market all you want, but even a class Badass Yoga for Badass Motherfuckers, will only attract an audience if it’s at 8 PM on a Tuesday. 
And it will be people who would have preferred the thing to be called just “yoga”.

Yet after solving this riddle, after understanding that in a smaller town you let go of the New York dream, and go for generic, community focused, weekly classes, for a broad audience, and absolutely ignore everything anybody has ever told you about marketing?
I was on absolute fire!

Not only was I relieved that I had finally answered the riddle and knew why I had failed;
But I was excited!

So excited, that if it had not been for Covid, I would never have ended the lease of my yoga studio, and would have rebooted my group programs, with so much enthusiasm!
I would have STEPPED ON IT in 2020, and be reborn the happiest yoga teacher in the history of  the world. 

Except: there was Covid.
And instead of stepping on anything, I had paused my classes for friends when Covid started and ultimately ended the yoga studio and my business December 2020.

Because of Covid, 2020 was the worst time to be a yoga teacher, topped only by 2021. Which has beaten 2020 as worst year of being a yoga teacher. At least where I live.

But you know what?
This post is absolutely not a story about feeling sorry for me, nor for the yoga industry. We have the option of transferring our work, which is teaching yoga, online.
The thing we get PAID for? With a few modifications, we can keep doing it.

Sure, there are challenges to teaching online, and different rules to making it commercially successful. And some teachers will stop, but then others will take their place.
But as a whole, the survival of teaching yoga as a business model is definitely not at stake here.

What is at stake are our local communities.

What becomes clear now that yoga teachers are going online and the burden of taking care of real-estate and the costs of brick and mortar studios, when those studios can no longer be used (currently the Netherlands is on a 5PM lockdown and all evening classes are cancelled) or when your students cannot come because they are in quarantaine, or are not vaccinated (in The Netherlands you have to be vaccinated to enter);
That burden and those costs have become evident, now.

All those years, we’ve gotten used to the yoga community being there as a bonus, a side-effect, as not being the thing it’s really about, because we said we “did yoga” or “taught yoga”, and it was about breath, health, meditation, mindfulness, philosophy.

Well, what if we were wrong?

What if I wasn’t the only one who, in pursuit of a dream, failed to notice that the most valuable thing was right there in front of me?

What if we all failed to see, that the most valuable aspect of yoga in particular in smaller towns and suburbs, is not yoga;
It’s community.

It cost me my yoga studio.

Whether you have a studio, or are attending one, trust me when I say;
Save it.

Now that you still can.

Suzanne L. Beenackers
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