You can say the price of your mat without blinking. The room hire for the church hall on Mondays, too. It all comes out level. Then someone asks what you charge, and it catches in your throat.
You know that catch from the inside. A small apology turns up ahead of the number, or a discount nobody asked for. Sometimes it’s just a rate that hasn’t moved since before the pandemic, sitting there, held in place by nothing you could name.
Your fee started life as a sentence, though. You wrote it years ago, under beliefs about yoga and worth you’d never hand to one of your students. And a sentence can be redrafted.
When to use this
- Before you set a rate for a new term or a new venue
- When you hear yourself apologise before you say the number
- When your fee has outlived the beliefs it was written under
Where the catch comes from
Most of us met yoga as a kind of service, and somewhere in training a quiet rule went in alongside the anatomy: a good teacher doesn’t make it about money. Ask for little, and your conscience stays clean.
Money beliefs sit under all of it. They form early, and then they run under years of your decisions without ever getting examined. They stop being opinions and start being rules. You don’t weigh a rule every time you quote a rate. You follow it, and never notice there was anything there to decide.
So your first fee wasn’t you reading a market. It was you finishing a sentence. Something like: a teacher at my stage, in a town like mine, charges about this much and shouldn’t want more. The number came out of the sentence. It usually still does.
What the sentence quietly decides
It would be tidier if an undercharged class only cost the teacher. It doesn’t.
A fee that never quite covers your training and the unseen hours around each class is really a decision about how long this career gets to last, made without ever feeling like one. Teaching becomes something you subsidise out of the rest of your life, and that runs out. The teachers who leave in year five are often the ones whose fee was never reviewed, not once. Their students lost a teacher they trusted, which is the part the modest version never mentions.
Then there’s what your fee teaches the room. A rate you say plainly, without a flinch, tells people how you hold the work. You trained years for this. Your students take their cue from you.
Rewriting it
This is paper work. Twenty minutes at the kitchen table does it.
First, catch the sentence you’ve got. Finish this line honestly: I charge what I charge because… Keep going past the first tidy answer. The real one usually surfaces around the third line, and it’s rarely about the number.
Then test it. Read it back as though a teacher you respect had written it about their own work. Someone whose training you know, whose classes you’d happily send people to. You’ll feel yourself wanting to argue with them, gently, the way you would with a friend underselling their work. It rarely takes more than a line. You hold rules over yourself you’d never let a colleague keep.
Then write the new one. The sentence you’d want that teacher to charge by, and try it on for size. There’s less nerve in it than there looks. It just names what the fee holds up: the training behind every class, and a livelihood that keeps you teaching. That last part is the point. The fee is part of the craft, because it’s what keeps you in the room.
Action steps
- Today, write your current sentence. One line, starting I charge what I charge because… Honest beats tidy.
- Read it back as though a colleague you respect wrote it about their own teaching. Mark every phrase you’d challenge on their behalf.
- Draft the revised sentence, naming what the fee holds up rather than what it apologises for.
- Pick the next natural review moment, a new term or a new venue, and test one fee against the revised sentence. One is enough to start.
Related resources
- “There’s no money in yoga” — the cost of the sentence
- One page that holds your year
Across the profession, the careers that last tend to be the ones where the fee gets looked at on a calendar and left at that. No drama, just part of the job. Yours is allowed to be one of them.