Teaching yoga in beautiful locations looks ideal from the outside. Calm settings. Considered movement. A sense of purpose that travels well.

And in many ways, it is.

But behind that image is a reality less often discussed.

It’s a hustle.

Recently, I reached out to a 5 star spa overseas to offer my services. The process is familiar. You begin with a gatekeeper — a spa manager filtering a steady stream of enquiries. At that stage, yoga is one modality among many: interchangeable, broadly defined, difficult to differentiate.

If your approach resonates, the conversation moves upward. A wellness director reviews your background and decides whether you warrant a discussion — or a polite refusal.

That is stage one.

If you move past it, the dynamic changes.

You are no longer speaking as a teacher. You are presenting yourself as a proposition.

The conversation shifts from how you work to why you should be chosen. Experience has to be articulated. Method explained. Value framed.

From practice to positioning.

I’ve navigated that before. But on this occasion, something unfamiliar surfaced.

“What’s your handle?”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure I had heard correctly.

“Your social media. Your following.”

The question itself was simple.

What it represented was not.

To be clear, I have social media accounts. But I’ve never approached my work as something to be curated for an audience.

That was never the point.

And yet, increasingly, it is becoming part of the point.

The influence question is only the beginning.

What isn’t mentioned before you accept the booking is everything that sits around it.

The travel is covered, but it’s economy. Nine to twelve hours folded into a seat that doesn’t quite allow the body to rest. Flights at awkward hours. Interrupted sleep. Dry air.

You arrive not restored, but depleted.

And within hours, you are expected to be the opposite.

You meet the team. You smile. You are composed, present — the version of you that suggests ease, not effort.

Your body clock is out of sync. Your energy is uneven.

But none of that is visible.

Serenity is expected to sit on the surface.

Once the work begins, the structure reveals itself.

Group classes are set up — often free or discounted — designed to bring people in. From there, the expectation is simple: convert interest into private sessions.

Each session feeds the business. A percentage is taken. Performance is quietly measured.

You are no longer just a teacher.

Conversations by the pool.
Smiles at breakfast.
A casual question about someone’s practice.

They all carry a different weight.

You came for the setting. The work. The chance to teach well.

Instead, you find yourself operating inside a system that rewards something else.

For many senior practitioners, this creates a quiet tension.

Years have been spent refining something internal — breath, alignment, awareness. Work that is felt rather than displayed.

Now, that same work is being assessed through external measures.

Visibility. Conversion. Output.

It raises a broader question.

Not just about yoga, but about what now holds value within it.

Because yoga was never designed to be visible.

It was designed to hold up.