Explore every episode of the podcast Yoga Teacher Confidential: Secrets of Becoming a Great Yoga Teacher
| Title | Pub. Date | Duration | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 110. How to Become Your Students’ Favorite Yoga Teacher (Favorite Teacher, Part 1) | 03 nov. 2026 | 00:15:27 | |
You are never going to be everyone’s favorite yoga teacher, and I put the word almost into this series title on purpose. The chase for universal approval is precisely what keeps good teachers from becoming anyone’s favorite at all: the harder you contort yourself to please every person on every mat, the more generic your teaching becomes, and generic teaching is nobody’s favorite teaching. This episode opens a four-part series on the four audiences that shape a yoga teacher’s career, starting with the people who matter most, your students. When teachers imagine the beloved teacher, we picture credentials and charisma: the advanced practice, the poetic theme, the effortless demo. Ask students why they adore a particular teacher and you hear an entirely different vocabulary. She remembers my name. He noticed my shoulder before I said anything. I always know what I’m getting. Students aren’t grading your performance. They’re answering one question, how do I feel in this teacher’s room, which is why performing for them is the surest way to lose them. I learned that in my second public class, subbing for a beloved teacher named Bryan and apologizing my way through the whole class for not being him, until two women told me afterward, “Honey, we could see you weren’t Bryan.” From there I walk through the five behaviors students reward with devotion: learn names and one personal thing, teach the room rather than the plan, keep a reliable container, make every option honorable, and reflect their progress back to them. None of them requires another certification. I also explain the word almost: some students want something you don’t offer, and releasing them with warmth to the teacher down the hall protects the distinctive teaching that makes you the favorite of the students who are yours. You’ll leave with three moves for the week (the name experiment, one question for one regular, and the recording you don’t want to watch) plus a permission slip to trade performance for presence. If you want to work on this in the company of yoga teachers doing the same, come join the Zone, my free community of more than 3,500 yoga teachers. And if you know someone who’s been dreaming about becoming a yoga teacher, the free Comfort Zone Yoga 200-hour yoga teacher training open house is right there in the Zone too, on Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. Episodes mentioned:
Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 109. What Most Yoga Teachers Get Wrong About Core: Five Misunderstandings and the Objections Underneath | 27 oct. 2026 | 00:12:08 | |
When most yoga teachers hear the word core, the picture that flashes up has nothing to do with yoga: a gym floor, a timer, somebody counting crunches, an ad promising a flat stomach by summer. That picture is exactly why so many thoughtful, skilled teachers have decided core work is somebody else’s department. I understand the instinct completely, and I want to challenge it, because the picture is wrong. In this episode I’m walking through five misunderstandings about core in a yoga context. Core means abs (it doesn’t; your core is a 360-degree cylinder with the diaphragm as the roof and the pelvic floor as the floor). Teaching core means importing crunches (it doesn’t; the work is already latent in the lunges and transitions you teach). Core is the intensity garnish, a boat-pose minute wedged in before the wind-down. Students with sensitive backs should sit it out. And the big one: you need a personal-training credential or a physio degree before you’re allowed to teach strength. Then I answer the objections out loud: “my students come to relax,” “I can piece this together from free videos,” “I don’t have time this fall,” and “it’s an investment.” Knowledge was never the bottleneck. What free content can’t give you is a method: the sequence to learn things in, progressions and regressions side by side so you can serve the 70-year-old and the triathlete in the same room, and cueing language tested on real classes. By the end you’ll know why breath belongs at the center of any honest core conversation, why the transitions are the curriculum, and what a sensitive back actually needs (a smarter on-ramp, not an exemption). And a heads-up: the Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength course is on sale now, 20% off through Saturday, October 31, at comfortzoneyoga.com/core. Whether or not you take it, the homework from episode 107 still stands: audit your class plans for the two core actions and slow one transition down on purpose. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 108. The Two Arrows: Yoga Philosophy for When Life Hurts | 20 oct. 2026 | 00:21:19 | |
It’s Sunday night. You have three classes to teach this week and you’re staring at a blank notebook, 45 minutes into scrolling for sequence ideas, five browser tabs open, nothing right for the actual students who’ll show up tomorrow. That’s the first arrow: the real challenge of building a class. Somewhere around minute 30, a voice crept in. Everyone else just walks in and teaches. What’s wrong with me? That’s the second arrow, and it hurts a lot more than the blank page ever did. In this episode I’m sharing one of the most useful concepts in all of yoga philosophy: the two arrows of suffering, which comes from the Buddhist tradition and which Alexandra DeSiato and I explore through the Sanskrit word dukha in Yoga Off the Mat. Dukha literally means “bad axle space,” the off-center wheel that grinds on every rotation. For yoga teachers it isn’t the class that went badly. It’s the low-grade friction that accumulates: the hours spent planning, the confidence that never quite arrives, the comparison to every other teacher on your feed. The first arrow is the thing that happens: the student who leaves early, the workshop that doesn’t fill, the feedback that stings. The second arrow is what you do after: the story, the rumination, the verdict on your entire worth as a teacher. I walk through the three flavors that second arrow takes (the story of meaning, the projection forward, and the retrospective edit) and how the five kleshas load the bow. And I’m careful about the line between this teaching and “get over it,” because the first arrow is real and pretending otherwise is spiritual bypassing. You’ll leave with one question to ask the next time it hurts (“Is this the first arrow or the second?”), a handful of practices from the book’s ACTIONS box, and a single cue you can use in class this week without a word of Sanskrit: “Notice if you’re adding a story to the sensation.” The book is at https://sagerountree.com/yoga-off-the-mat/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=yoga-off-the-mat&utm_content=e108. And if weaving philosophy into classes so it actually lands is the work you want to go deeper in, that’s what we do together in Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing, my six-month mentorship: https://sagerountree.com/mentorship/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=mentorship&utm_content=e108 To practice with a community of yoga teachers doing this same work, join more than 3,300 of us in The Zone, my free community: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=the-zone&utm_content=e108 Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 107. How Learning to Teach Core Makes You a More Useful Yoga Teacher | 13 oct. 2026 | 00:17:02 | |
Sooner or later, a student stops you on the way out the door with three words: “More core, please.” For a long time I answered that request badly, tacking three rounds of bicycles into the middle of an otherwise unrelated class and calling it giving the people what they wanted. This episode is the case I wish someone had made to me early on: learning to teach core well makes you a more useful yoga teacher, in the room, in your students’ actual lives, and in your own career. I start with the word underneath the word. When a student asks for more core, they’re almost never asking for crunches. They’re asking to feel capable: strong through the middle, able to trust their body, able to get through the day without the low back or the neck picking up slack it would rather not carry. The strength-coaching line that reorganized my thinking says it in eight words: you can’t fire a cannon from a canoe. One of the endurance athletes I coached, Ruffin Powell, gave me the best image I’ve ever heard for what happens when the platform gives out: shrimping. Then the sorting tool, small enough to fit on a napkin and the 2 in my 6–4–2 formula. Everything the core does falls into two jobs: stabilization (the trunk holds the spine and pelvis steady while the limbs move) and articulation (the muscles work in turn to move the spine one segment after another). Once you can see those two jobs, a pile of unrelated exercises turns into craft, and you can look at any core exercise ever invented and know in a breath what it’s doing. I also walk through the four places core already lives in a standard 60-minute flow, plus the one almost nobody teaches on purpose: the transition from the floor to standing and back. You’ll leave with three pieces of homework for this week’s lesson plan: mark every core-relevant moment S or A, slow one floor-to-standing transition down to four or five breaths, and ask the next student who requests more core what exactly they’re hoping for. The full Teaching Core Strength call of the month I taught on October 8 is waiting as a free replay in the Zone, my free community for yoga teachers, and on YouTube. The bird-dog ladder from that call is a free one-page printable: get the ladder. My new 20-CEU course, Fundamentals of Teaching Core Strength, opens to everyone at 20% off on Monday, October 26, for the last week of October. If this episode was useful to you, a rating or review wherever you listen is the simplest way to help another yoga teacher find the show. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 106. The Shadow Self in Autumn: The Five Kleshas in the Teacher’s Seat | 06 oct. 2026 | 00:19:57 | |
Autumn is my favorite season for a slightly embarrassing reason: as the light gets lower, everything casts a longer shadow, and I find that weirdly reassuring. The shadows were there all summer. You just couldn’t see them at high noon. That’s the whole premise of this episode, which goes somewhere more specific and more uncomfortable than the survey I gave you back in episode 91: what the five kleshas, yoga’s five obstacles, look like when they follow you into the teacher’s seat. Because they do follow you in. Avidya, wrong-seeing, is counting 11 students in a room that used to hold 20 and deciding, in one exhale, that you’re a bad teacher. Asmita, ego, is the toddler who can only say “me,” checking who showed up before deciding how much to give. Raga and dvesha, craving and aversion, are the full room you chase and the 6:00 a.m. Monday class you dread. And abhinivesha, the fear of the unknown, shows up as clinging and over-planning, the compulsion to script every transition because the unknown feels unsafe. Then I turn to the shadow itself. Most of us somehow picked up a job description along the way that nobody ever wrote: permanently calm, endlessly generous, beyond craving and aversion. So we perform serenity, and the performance wears a groove into a rut. What gets shoved out of view doesn’t disappear. It leaks, as the snarky aside about another studio, the relentless positivity, the burnout that seems to arrive from nowhere. Your believability as a teacher doesn’t come from having transcended anything. It comes from being a whole person who practices anyway. You’ll leave with five small practices, one per klesha, most adapted from the actions Alexandra DeSiato and I offer in Yoga Off the Mat: Byron Katie’s two questions for avidya, a loving self-callout for asmita, a three-breath pause for craving and aversion, a memento mori for the fear of the unknown, and a 10-minute weekly journal for the compulsions underneath it all. Plus two boundaries that make the work safer, and an invitation to let one performance fall this season, the way the trees are demonstrating. If Yoga Off the Mat has been useful to you, Alexandra and I would be so grateful for a five-star rating and review on your favorite bookseller site. If you don’t have it yet, you can find it here: https://sagerountree.com/yoga-off-the-mat/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=yoga-off-the-mat&utm_content=e106 Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 105. Introduction to Teaching Yoga Nidra: What Do I Actually Say for 20 Minutes? | 29 sept. 2026 | 00:17:16 | |
Twenty minutes of continuous talking to a room full of people lying still with their eyes closed has scared off more experienced yoga teachers than any arm-balance workshop ever has. I hear the same question from teachers who can sequence a 90-minute class in their sleep: what do I actually say for 20 minutes? If that question has stopped you from offering yoga nidra, this episode is your orientation session. I’m walking through what yoga nidra actually is, why it’s a distinct practice rather than a very long savasana, and how it differs from meditation in one specific way: in nidra, your voice carries the student’s attention for them. That’s exactly what makes it intimidating from the teacher’s seat, and exactly what makes it learnable. Continuous narration sounds like improv. It isn’t. It follows a map that has been in the tradition for a very long time: the koshas, the five layers of the self that Alexandra DeSiato and I describe in Yoga Off the Mat as a set of nested lampshades. You’ll also hear why your students need this more than almost anything else on the schedule. Nearly every class asks students for more output, and skilled, structured, permission-granting rest is the one thing most of them get nowhere. Nidra is also radically accessible: the student rehabbing a shoulder, the pregnant student, the 75-year-old newcomer, and the student who “can’t meditate” can all do this practice completely on the first try. By the end, you’ll have three things to do this week: practice nidra yourself as a student, play the which-you-is-which game with the kosha map, and draft two minutes of body-scan language and listen back to yourself. Then come build the rest with me on Thursday, October 15, at this month’s Comfort Zone Conversation on teaching yoga nidra, free in the Zone. If you want the complete training with full scripts and continuing education credit, that’s the Fundamentals of Teaching Yoga Nidra course: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/nidra Start this week with the free 5-Minute Yoga Nidra Script: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/nidrascript?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=nidrascript&utm_content=e105 Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 104. Revisiting Atha—The Yoga Sutras' First Word | 22 sept. 2026 | 00:16:30 | |
Every September I promise myself this will be the year I stay on top of my class planning. By week four, the notebook holds four lesson plans and a grocery list, and the fall shine has worn off—for me and for my students. In this episode, I'm revisiting atha, the very first word of the Yoga Sutras and one my coauthor Alexandra DeSiato and I return to throughout our new book, Yoga Off the Mat. Atha means now, and it turns out to be exactly the word a mid-season teacher needs. I walk through what atha actually means (it's not just an auspicious opener—it assumes the student arriving has already lived some life before showing up), why week four is when the syllabus meets reality, and three ways to teach with atha this month: building it into your opening minutes, using it as a mid-class reset, and giving your own fall schedule a midterm look without overhauling everything. If the season's early shine has started to wear thin, in your own teaching or your students' attendance, this episode meets you exactly where you are. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 103. Back-to-School Energy in Yoga Class and What to Do When Your September Motivation Fades | 15 sept. 2026 | 00:16:52 | |
Every September I watch teachers, myself included, sign up for something new: a fresh planning system, a training, a whole approach to class we’re sure will finally stick. By October, most of it has quietly stalled out. In this episode, I’m talking about the difference between motivation and discipline, and why the surge you’re feeling right now is weather, not climate. I dig into tapas, yoga’s teaching on disciplined effort, and why the structure that looks like it limits your teaching is actually what sets it free. You’ll hear how a restaurant kitchen’s mise en place explains why prep work is what makes spontaneous, responsive teaching possible, and why a small, repeatable habit beats an ambitious overhaul every time. By the end, you’ll have a concrete way to build a planning structure that holds up long after the fall motivation fades, and a better way to talk with your own students about discipline, so it lands as relief instead of a report card. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 102. The Real Reason Your Yoga Teacher Instagram Isn't Finished | 08 sept. 2026 | 00:14:54 | |
For years, I refused to build an Instagram account for Comfort Zone Yoga. I could see exactly how the treadmill goes: post the same thing twice with a different caption, fall behind on both accounts, and eventually one goes dark. So I built @comfortzoneyoga to be finished in one afternoon instead. It still is. In this episode, I'm previewing the September Comfort Zone Conversation, where we're spending an hour finishing your Instagram so you can stop opening the app and closing it forty minutes later having dealt with nothing. I walk through the three wrong assumptions that keep a yoga teacher's profile permanently unbuilt: that you have a content problem, that the profile is about you, and that it can never be finished. I also lay out what a finished profile actually answers—three questions a stranger is silently asking when she lands on your page—and a three-second self-audit you can run on your own account tonight. If you've opened Instagram meaning to deal with this once and for all, and closed it having dealt with nothing, this one's for you. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 101. Smells in Yoga Class: The Room, the Oils, and the Hard Conversation | 01 sept. 2026 | 00:19:04 | |
Every yoga room has a smell before you say a word of your opening—the space itself, the scent you add on purpose, and the students who walk through the door. In this episode, I’m working through all three: how to get a room ready before class, what to do with your own products and oils, and the real difference between a student who arrives already smelling strong and one who gets that way forty minutes into a good workout. Strong smells in a classroom tend to fall into one of three buckets—perfume, smoke, and body odor—and they are not equally hard. Perfume is a room-level fix. Smoke calls for patience, since a movement practice is often part of how someone eventually quits smoking. And body odor is where teachers most often collapse two very different situations into one uncomfortable moment. I’ll also walk through how to actually have the conversation when one is warranted: which channel to pick, how to keep it brief, and how to end with a question that hands the problem to the student to solve alongside you, instead of handing her a verdict. And yes, we get to gas. Bodies do what bodies do when you fold people in half and ask them to breathe deeply on purpose for an hour. I’ll tell you exactly what to do about it (nothing, on purpose) and why that’s the kindest response you have. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 100. What 100 Episodes Taught Me About Repetition and Teaching Yoga | 25 août 2026 | 00:15:48 | |
One hundred Tuesdays, and I have opened every single episode with the same five words. I never planned it that way, and I never mentioned it out loud until now, which is a little funny given that I have spent two years telling yoga teachers that repeating yourself is a professional skill rather than a failure of imagination. In this episode I look back at what actually changed over ninety-nine weeks. I got the register of the show wrong at the start: I thought you wanted confessional, and what you wanted was useful. I sold my yoga studio, which gave the thinking room it never had while I was running a brick and mortar studio. And I started writing the episodes out in full sentences instead of teaching from bullet points, which made them shorter rather than stiffer. I also went back through two years of comments and found two yoga teachers whose stories I had been following without meaning t—one planning her very first class, one teaching her last—along with the three things you keep telling me: consistency beats variety, the worry about being good enough does not care how experienced you are, and service beats performance every time. If you have ever felt guilty about repeating a lesson plan for the students in front of you, this one is for you. Ninety-nine episodes of the same structure with one topic swapped each week, and nobody got bored: that is the argument, and the show itself is the evidence. I also tell you where the next stretch of episodes is headed, and what I would like from you—specific topic requests from your own classroom. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 99. What to Do When Your Yoga Class Goes Off the Rails | 18 août 2026 | 00:19:45 | |
The second class I ever taught went off the rails before I said a word—and then I spent an hour making it worse by apologizing for not being the regular teacher. Two students set me straight the next day, and I still teach from that lesson two decades later. In this episode, I’m separating the two things yoga teachers mean when they say a class went off the rails: the logistics problem that happens in the room, and the private disaster that happens entirely inside your own head. Only one of those is visible to your students. I’ve covered the logistics side elsewhere on the show: medical issues (Episodes 34, 40, and 52), challenging behavior (Episode 33), rooms that are too small or too big (Episodes 39 and 49), phones and watches and timers (Episode 96), covering someone else’s class (Episode 38), and the class nobody shows up for (Episode 24). This episode is about the other kind. I draw on a few earlier conversations along the way: why the student who walks out mid-class almost never has anything to do with you (Episode 3), why a bored-looking face is usually a sign of concentration (Episode 8), why silence is a tool rather than a failure (Episode 19), and why one honest debrief beats replaying the tape a fourteenth time (Episode 59). You’ll walk away with language for changing course mid-class, a way to triage what’s actually an emergency versus what’s just embarrassing, and permission to let a mistake pass without comment at all. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 98. What Most Yoga Teachers Get Wrong About Teaching Yin | 11 août 2026 | 00:21:44 | |
My husband took his first yin class with me at Kripalu and told me afterward that I should rename the practice. He wasn’t entirely wrong: a room built on stillness produced an enormous reaction in his body, and that’s yin working exactly as designed. In this episode, I break down the three mistakes I see yoga teachers make most often when they teach yin: treating it as a slower version of a flow class instead of its own physiology, cueing “find your edge” as though it’s a complete instruction, and building a class from five favorite poses instead of a real sequence. Yin looks like the easiest class on the schedule to teach, and it’s the one most likely to leave a teacher at the front of the room wondering what her job is right now. Getting the physiology, the cueing, and the sequencing right is what turns a yin class into one students come back for. You’ll walk away knowing what tension and compression actually explain about why every body looks different in the same shape, how to cue an entry so a first-time student understands what you mean, and how to adapt the 6–4–2 framework you already use for flow into a structured yin arc. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 97. All Yoga Pants Are See-Through: What to Wear and Where to Look as a Yoga Teacher | 04 août 2026 | 00:10:25 | |
All yoga pants are see-through. Your expensive pair, the clearance-bin pair, all of them—under the right light, in a deep enough fold, the fabric gives away a little more than you bargained for. That isn't a flaw in you or your students. It's fabric and physics, plain and simple. In this lighthearted episode, I walk through the 2013 Lululemon recall that erased roughly two billion dollars in market value, then tell the story of my student Andrea, who landed a job teaching the New York Jets and got handed an XL t-shirt as her dress code. The lesson lands without anyone having to lecture: you read the room, and you dress for it. From there I get practical. There are two sides to this for teachers—what we wear and where we look. I share wardrobe advice you can use this week (including the dressing-room test that tells you the truth), when a private word to a student is genuinely a gift, and why looking away with kindness is its own form of hospitality. Underneath the jokes is something every teacher recognizes: the very human feeling of being seen before you feel ready. Dressing with care and looking away with grace is one small way we take care of the room—for our students and for ourselves. Curious about teaching athletes, dress code and all? That world is what I get into in my Teaching Yoga to Athletes training. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 96. Technology in the Yoga Room: Phones, Presence, and Consent | 28 juil. 2026 | 00:12:18 | |
For years, I was the phone police. I taught with a sensitive wireless mic that glitched every time a phone buzzed, so I asked everyone to power down—and told myself I was protecting the practice. Then I watched a student at a workshop keep fidgeting with a little device. I caught myself judging her for it, until I realized it was her insulin monitor. That moment changed how I think about technology in class, and I want to share where I've landed. In this episode I walk through the small stuff I've learned to relax about and the two things I'll never bend on, both rooted in consent: staying present for the people in front of me, and never photographing a resting body without a clear yes. You'll also get six practical moves—meeting students in the middle with Do Not Disturb, recognizing when a phone is actually an accommodation, narrating your own tech use, teaching a class you know well enough to look up from, recording yourself to sharpen your craft, and honoring a studio's house rules. Stay relaxed about the phones, stay firm about presence and consent, and you'll run a warmer, more welcoming room. Listen now. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 95. When and How to Demo Poses in Your Yoga Class | 21 juil. 2026 | 00:22:45 | |
Most yoga teachers have heard some version of don't demo. Get off your mat. Cue with your words. Be a real teacher. The advice is reaching for something true—but the rule, as it usually gets delivered, hurts newer teachers and doesn't actually capture what experienced teachers are doing differently. In this episode, Sage walks through when demonstration genuinely serves your students (and when it doesn't), why studios that ban demo entirely are missing the point, and the truth that flips the whole conversation: the more you demo, the less you see. You'll hear the four ways to present a pose, the teacher-trainee habit that proves the teacher isn't really in the room, and the six rules for demoing in a way that keeps your eyes—and your attention—on the students who came to practice. Repetition is what makes all of this easier. Teach the same sequence over four weeks and your students learn the shapes; your demo load drops on its own. The Prep Station ($39/month) is built exactly for that—a 6–4–2 sequence each month, a Movement Library with 180+ follow-along practice videos so you've already had your practice, and a community of 2,400+ teachers refining their craft alongside you. Pull up a stool at comfortzoneyoga.com/prep. Join the conversation in The Zone, Sage's free community for yoga teachers, at comfortzoneyoga.com. And if this episode helped you think differently about your time on the mat in front of the room, please rate and review—it helps other teachers find the show. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 94. Readings from Yoga Off the Mat: Joy, Comparison, and the Fear of the Unknown | 14 juil. 2026 | 00:25:53 | |
This week is a little different. Sage is joined by her co-author and friend Alexandra DeSiato to read from their new book, Yoga Off the Mat—the book that takes what yoga builds on the mat and lets it shape the rest of your life. Alexandra reads from the chapter on abhinivesha, the fear of the unknown: why we grip so hard for control, what a Stephen Colbert bit has to do with death, and a few practical ways to loosen our hold on what we can’t predict. Sage reads from the chapter on joy, centered on maitri—the practice of delighting in someone else’s delight instead of sliding into comparison. From there they riff: why social media is the perfect place to practice maitri, the Lucille Bluth “good for her” reframe, the daily walk where Sage and her husband hope a stranger will say hello, and the Monday-night class joke that still lands fifteen years later. Underneath it all is one idea—connection, with others and with yourself, is where the joy lives. If these ideas resonate, Yoga Off the Mat is available now. A five-star review on Amazon or your favorite bookstore site, a few words about what the book meant to you, or a quick request that your local library order a copy all help these ideas reach more people. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 93. Yoga Off the Mat—Philosophy for the Rest of Your Life (with Alexandra DeSiato) | 07 juil. 2026 | 00:27:47 | |
In this episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential, I sit down with my dear friend and longtime writing partner, Alexandra DeSiato, for a conversation about our new book, Yoga Off the Mat, out July 14. It is the fourth book Alexandra and I have written together, and it grew from a simple question: what happens when you take the attention you practice on the mat and let it shape the rest of your life? We start where Alexandra likes to start, with death. She walks through what yoga philosophy says about the fear of letting go (abhinivesha, one of the kleshas), and why making peace with impermanence helps you live with more joy right now. From there we get into presence as the whole practice, why a one-minute practice can still change your day, and how the Yoga Sutras open a door the book then walks well beyond. Yoga Off the Mat is written for anyone, not only for people who teach or practice. It takes the breath, the noticing, and the practice of coming back, and applies them to work, relationships, and the inside of your own head on a hard afternoon. If you do teach, you will hear how living the philosophy shows up in your classes on its own, without forcing it as a theme. We also pull back the curtain on co-writing: the shared outline, passing the baton when one of us gets stuck, and how two voices become one on the page. Consider this your invitation to the live book talk on July 16 inside the Zone, our free community. We will read from the book, tell the stories behind it, and answer your questions. Next week’s episode continues the conversation as a book reading. Resources:
Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 92. When and How to Use Sanskrit in Your Yoga Class | 30 juin 2026 | 00:13:01 | |
A few weeks ago, I posted a simple carousel on Instagram in my “Here’s the Tea” series for yoga teachers: not every pose needs you to call out a Sanskrit name. The comments rolled in—some grateful, some furious, most somewhere in the thoughtful middle. This episode is the longer answer that didn’t fit on eight slides. I walk through what I was actually trying to say in the post, where the conversation sharpened my thinking, and why this was never really an English-versus-Sanskrit question. To a brand-new student, “Triangle” is no clearer than “Trikonasana,” so the real skill is describing the shape so well that the name—in any language—has something to land on. Along the way, I steelman the smartest pushbacks from teachers who love this language—the lineage argument, the repetition argument, and the case for using both—and offer three rules for using Sanskrit well: learn to pronounce it (with teachers from inside the tradition like Dr. Anuradha Choudry and Dr. M. A. Jayashree), pair it with English so the meaning travels, and tell the stories the names came from (with a nod to Dr. Raj Balkaran’s lovely book The Stories Behind the Poses). I close with a simple way to decide what to say in any given room. The question was never “Sanskrit or English.” It’s who am I serving, and what helps them feel at home in their body and their breath while also respecting the tradition of yoga. This isn’t a hot take. It’s a call to center. If you’ve ever felt squeezed between honoring the tradition and meeting your students where they actually are, this one’s for you. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 91. The Five Things Keeping You Stuck: An Introduction to the Kleshas | 23 juin 2026 | 00:16:03 | |
Ninety seconds of Instagram scrolling. Five distinct forces firing inside you, so fast you experience them as a single feeling: “I’m not good enough.” But it’s not one feeling—it’s five. Yoga philosophy named them twenty-five hundred years ago. In this episode, I’m walking through the five kleshas from Book Two of the Yoga Sutras: avidya (wrong-seeing), asmita (ego), raga (craving), dvesha (aversion), and abhinivesha (clinging to the familiar). These five obstacles to clear seeing are the most undertaught framework in the Sutras—and I think they’re the most useful one for modern teaching life. I’ll show you exactly how each klesha operates—why the confidence gap, imposter syndrome, burnout cycles, and creative stagnation all trace back to specific combinations of these five forces. Then I’ll give you a five-question diagnostic checklist you can run on yourself this week, plus classroom cues you can use right away without ever naming the Sanskrit. This material comes from chapters 15–17 of Yoga Off the Mat, my new book with Alexandra DeSiato, available July 14 wherever books are sold. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 90. Restorative Yoga That Actually Restores | 16 juin 2026 | 00:17:41 | |
The first time I felt true parasympathetic rest, I was ten minutes into legs up the wall during a restorative workshop, and the entire outline for my book The Athlete’s Guide to Recovery dropped into my head, fully formed. I had no idea this state was even available to me for free—and once I felt it, I understood why so many well-meaning restorative classes miss the mark. Telling students to relax doesn’t make them relax. The nervous system doesn’t respond to verbal instructions—it responds to conditions. In this episode, I’m naming the most common ways teachers accidentally short-circuit a restorative practice, even when the props are perfect and the lights are dim. I walk through the difference between a class that looks restful and one that actually delivers rest, what parasympathetic activation requires, how to hold space during long holds without filling silence, and how to plan a restorative sequence using the 6–4–2 framework as your structural checklist rather than a Pinterest mood board. Get the free guide Best Savasana EVER, which shows you how to set up the Six Supports that inform every restorative pose: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/savasana?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=show_notes&utm_campaign=ytc_e90_czc This episode is a preview of the June Comfort Zone Conversation, Restorative Yoga That Actually Restores, on Thursday, June 25 from 2 to 3 p.m. Eastern—a free hour for members of the Zone, my community for yoga teachers. If you want the full framework with CEUs and a complete pose library, that’s inside the Fundamentals of Teaching Restorative Yoga course. Listen now and bring your next savasana, gentle class, or full restorative offering up a level. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 89. Effort and Ease—The Balancing Act You’re Already In | 09 juin 2026 | 00:18:25 | |
You’ve cued it a thousand times: “Find the balance between effort and ease.” In this episode I take Patanjali’s sthira sukham asanam (Yoga Sutra 2.46) off the mat and show you how it runs underneath every cue you give, every class you plan, and every decision you make about your teaching career. You’ll learn what sthira (steady, firm, structured) and sukha (literally “good axle space”—smooth, well-fitted, easeful) really mean, and how to spot when you’re gripping or collapsing on the mat, in your planning, and in your career as a yoga teacher. I name two common defaults—the teacher who over-plans and over-grips, and the teacher who under-plans and coasts—and offer a One-Degree Practice for moving toward the middle in whichever area needs it most this week. This episode is drawn from Chapter 32 of Yoga Off the Mat, my new book with Alexandra DeSiato. Yoga Off the Mat is a book about taking what yoga does to your attention on the mat and letting it shape the rest of your life—work, relationships, parenting, hard conversations, the inside of your own head on a Sunday afternoon. Pre-order links are below. If class planning is where your sthira-sukha ratio feels most out of balance, that’s the work of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing. The next cohort runs July through December, and enrollment opens Monday, June 22nd. The waitlist is open now—get on it before Monday and you’ll hear from me first. Resources mentioned
Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 88. The Three Gunas Explained—Yoga Philosophy You Can Actually Use | 02 juin 2026 | 00:16:49 | |
Right now, three tracks are playing inside you. One is heavy—the energy that makes you hit snooze. One is wired—the one drafting tomorrow's class at 2 AM. And one is clear—the energy that shows up when teaching just flows. Yoga philosophy has a name for this trio: the gunas. In this episode, I walk through one of the most practical frameworks in all of yoga philosophy. Your students will grasp it in thirty seconds, you can use it to theme an entire class, and it will change how you understand your own energy as a teacher. We dig into Chapter 28 of my new book with Alexandra DeSiato, Yoga Off the Mat. You'll learn how tamas, rajas, and sattva show up in your teaching, why "sattva begets sattva" is one of the most useful ideas in the tradition, and how to bring this language into your classroom without making it sound like a Sanskrit lecture. If you've been looking for a way to teach yoga philosophy that actually lands with your students, this is the framework to start with. Pre-order Yoga Off the Mat (out July 14), join The Zone (my free community for yoga teachers), and learn more about Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing—links below. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 87. Summer-Proof Your Yoga Teaching | 26 mai 2026 | 00:14:21 | |
If you teach in any climate with real seasons, summer attendance has its own logic. The first beautiful spring day empties the studio. A July heat wave fills it back up. By August you're juggling subs, outdoor classes, your own travel, and a schedule that no longer makes sense. After twenty-plus years of teaching and fifteen years of co-owning a studio in North Carolina, a state with four seasons including a warm summer, I no longer take this personally. Summer isn't a problem to solve. It's a season to work with. In this episode, I share four moves to summer-proof your teaching: build a small repertoire of go-to classes, sequence for the heat, lean into the gift of small classes, and take real time off without guilt. Mentioned in this episode:
A lighter summer is not a smaller career. It's the foundation for a steady fall. If this episode was useful, share it with a teacher friend who is staring down June with dread. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 86. The Two Arrows—Why Your Suffering About Suffering Is the Real Problem | 19 mai 2026 | 00:17:57 | |
You know the spiral. A student walks out of your class early, and by the time you reach your car, you've decided your classes are getting stale, the studio is about to replace you, and you should probably go back to your day job. The student leaving was the first arrow. The forty-minute story you built on top of it? That's the second arrow—and it hurts far more than the first one ever did. This week, I unpack one of the most useful teachings in yoga philosophy: the Buddhist concept of the two arrows of suffering. You'll learn what dukha actually means (spoiler: it's about a wagon wheel), how the kleshas load the second arrow, and the three flavors of second-arrow thinking that show up in every teacher's life—the story of meaning, the projection forward, and the retrospective edit. From there, we move from diagnosis to practice. I walk you through simple tools for your own life—the three-breath pause, the label, the journal prompt—and show you how to bring this teaching into your classroom without a lecture. One sentence can land the whole concept in your students' bodies: “Notice if you're adding a story to the sensation.” Chapter 22 of Yoga Off the Mat goes much deeper into dukha, with a full ACTIONS box of practices for the week ahead. Preorder here: https://amzn.to/3LB2JAv —preorders genuinely move the needle for a book, so thank you in advance. Whether you're planning this week's classes with a blank notebook on your lap or replaying last night's class at 2 a.m., this episode will help you notice which arrow you're actually carrying. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 85. How to Teach Balance for Every Body | 12 mai 2026 | 00:20:49 | |
Have you ever had a student freeze in tree pose and apologize for wobbling? In this episode, I'm rethinking how we teach balance so every body in the room—regardless of age, injury history, or experience—can work the skill without feeling like they're failing. I walk through the four systems that keep us upright (vestibular, proprioception, vision, and musculoskeletal), why the brain's plasticity means balance can improve at any age, and why fear has a mechanical effect on your students' ability to stabilize. Then I share five concrete shifts you can make in your very next class: weaving balance through every quarter of class, using the 6–4–2 to teach across all three planes, offering a sweeter-to-spicier spectrum instead of one "right" pose, cueing the system (not just the shape), and changing the language that surrounds wobbling so students stay with the practice. If you want to go deeper, I'm hosting a free Comfort Zone Conversation on Thursday, May 21, called Balance for Every Body. And the full self-paced course, Fundamentals of Teaching Balance, is open for enrollment now. Want a balance class you can teach this week? My free Balance Recipe—Dancer, Tree, Pigeon, Eagle, taught three ways—is here: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/balance-recipe Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 84. Why a Private Yoga Lesson Isn't a Smaller Group Class | 05 mai 2026 | 00:23:40 | |
For over a decade I taught private yoga to Hall of Fame coach Roy Williams, and somewhere along the way I realized I'd been teaching privates wrong. Not because I didn't know yoga. Because nobody had ever sat me down and said, A private is a different craft. Here's how. In this episode I walk through the three shifts that turn a group-class-with-one-student into an actual private lesson: sequencing for one body (not the whole room) by applying 6–4–2 as a checklist, slowing your pace about thirty percent so the quiet can land, and treating consent as an ongoing conversation rather than a one-time opt-in. I also cover the two pieces your training probably skipped: how to hold your scope so you don't drift into PT, psychotherapy, or yoga therapy, and how to price privates so your students take them seriously and you build a sustainable income. My starting-line recommendation is $75 an hour, scaling up five to ten dollars per year of experience. Two privates a week at a fair rate can out-earn four studio classes. This episode builds on three earlier ones, E23 (Confidence in Private Lessons), E35 (How to Prepare for a Private Lesson), and E36 (During a Private Lesson). Listen to those for the foundation. Today's conversation is the full craft in one place. If you want the complete kit, The Private Lesson Playbook has six lessons, seventeen templates, and three ways to consume it (video, private podcast feed, or written). Launch sale $57 through May 31st at comfortzoneyoga.com/private. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 83. Stop Reinventing Your Yoga Class Every Week: What Exercise Physiology Tells Us About Sequencing | 28 avr. 2026 | 00:20:48 | |
If you've ever spent hours creating a brand-new yoga sequence every week, only to wonder if your students even noticed the difference, this episode is for you. I spent over a decade coaching endurance athletes to age group world championships and podium finishes at ultramarathons. In all those years, I never once gave an athlete a completely different workout every single day. That's not how the body adapts. That's not how performance improves. And yet, that's exactly what many yoga teachers do in their classes—treating lesson plans like a Netflix queue of fresh content when what students actually need is a training plan. In this episode, I'm breaking down two foundational principles from exercise physiology—progressive overload and diminishing returns—and showing you exactly how to apply them to your yoga teaching. You'll learn about the FITT variables (Frequency, Intensity, Time, and Type) and how tweaking just one variable at a time creates the progressive challenge your students' bodies need to adapt and grow. I'll also explain why pouring hours into a fresh lesson plan every Sunday night is costing you more than it's benefiting your students. This episode builds on Episode 7—Consistency over Variety—with the exercise science to back up why your students need repetition with small, intentional increases over time. Your students' bodies are smarter than your boredom. Trust that. Trust the repetition. Trust the process. If you want to dive deeper into the sequencing frameworks I describe—the chunk model, the capsule wardrobe approach, the FITT variables, and week-to-week progression—all of it is in my book The Art of Yoga Sequencing: Contemporary Approaches and Inclusive Practices for Teachers and Practitioners. Check the show notes for a direct link. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 82. Studenthood Is the Bedrock of Your Teaching | 21 avr. 2026 | 00:16:54 | |
The best yoga teachers never stop being students—but the longer you teach, the harder that becomes. In this episode, Sage Rountree shares how selling her yoga studio after fifteen years unexpectedly gave her back something she'd been missing: the freedom to simply be a student again. Sage explores the difference between continuing education and true studenthood—the kind where you sit in the seat of not knowing and let someone else lead. She gets honest about why studio ownership, local reputation, and a teacher's analytical brain can all make genuine studenthood complicated, and how online classes and complementary modalities like Pilates helped her reconnect with beginner's mind. You'll hear practical strategies for protecting your studenthood: taking other yoga teachers' classes regularly (even with your camera off), exploring complementary movement practices, budgeting time and money for being a student, and learning to say "this is just for me" when the business brain kicks in. Whether you're a brand-new yoga teacher or you've been at the front of the room for decades, this episode is a reminder that your studenthood isn't a luxury—it's the foundation your teaching stands on. Mentioned in this episode: The Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook by Sage Rountree, the Prep Station Movement Library at https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/prep, and the free Zone community at https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com. And join my newsletter: https://sagerountree.com/newsletter Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 81. Inside the Comfort Zone Yoga 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training: A Guided Tour of Everything You Need to Know | 14 avr. 2026 | 00:15:22 | |
"Will I fit in?" In over a decade of personal conversations with prospective students, that question came up nearly every time. In this episode, I answer it honestly—along with everything else you'd want to know before enrolling in a 200-hour yoga teacher training. This is a full guided tour of the Comfort Zone Yoga 200-hour YTT: the teaching frameworks you'll learn (including 6–4–2 and the S.E.R.V.E. Method), how the fully online program is structured, what the live cohort experience looks like, and what post-graduation support is included. I also break down the cost in real terms—comparing it to in-person programs, destination trainings, and the $11 end of the spectrum. If you're wondering whether this training is right for you, I give a clear answer—including who it is and isn't for, and three concrete steps to take if you're curious but not yet ready to commit. Live open houses are scheduled for April 18 and May 16 at noon Eastern. Sign up at https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=e81-ytt-tour. To learn more about the program and register: https://sagerountree.com/200-hour-online-yoga-teacher-training/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=e81-ytt-tour Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 80. Why I Named It Comfort Zone Yoga | 07 avr. 2026 | 00:16:00 | |
"Get out of your comfort zone." It's practically a bumper sticker. But here's the definition I keep coming back to: the place where you can operate without fear of failure. That's not a limitation. That's a superpower. In this episode, I share the story behind the name Comfort Zone Yoga—what it actually means for your teaching, your confidence, and the kind of teacher you're becoming. We cover what happens in the room when you're teaching at the edge of your comfort zone, why most teacher trainings leave new teachers underprepared for real students, and how repetition (not novelty) builds the confidence that lasts. Your backstory isn't baggage—it's your curriculum. The obstacle you overcame gives you the authority to teach the very students who share that challenge. We unpack why this is true and what it means practically for how you show up. We also dig into the two sides of comfort: getting comfortable with discomfort (the growth edge most teachers know) and getting comfortable with comfort—the harder edge for athletes and high-achievers who already know how to push. Close out with the frameworks that make it all possible: the 6–4–2 checklist for balanced movement and the S.E.R.V.E. Method. Free live open houses April 18 & May 16, both at noon Eastern—sign up at comfortzoneyoga.com/c/comfort-zone-conversations. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 79. Theming Your Yoga Classes without Overthinking | 31 mars 2026 | 00:14:53 | |
Think about the last time you sat down to plan a themed yoga class. Did you freeze—staring at your notebook, wondering whether to use a Sanskrit concept, a seasonal metaphor, or a quote from a book you half-remember? You're not alone, and you're probably overthinking it. In this episode, Sage Rountree breaks down what a yoga class theme actually is—and what it isn't. A theme is simply a thread: one idea that gives your students something to hold onto from centering to closing. Sage shares practical methods for choosing a theme in five minutes or less and demonstrates how to weave it through your class naturally. Drawing from both volumes of Teaching Yoga Beyond the Poses—the books Sage co-authored with Alexandra DeSiato—this episode gives you access to 108 ready-made themes and a template you can use to create your own. Whether you use the observation method (demoed in full), inquiry, or borrowed wisdom, you'll walk away with a simple system that makes your classes feel cohesive and intentional. Sage also previews the free Comfort Zone Conversation on April 9th, where all three methods will be walked through live. Join the Zone at comfortzoneyoga.com to RSVP—it's free, and the recording will be available afterward. For the full class-arc framework and S.E.R.V.E. Method, visit sagerountree.com/mentorship. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 78. Yoga Nidra, the Koshas, and You | 24 mars 2026 | 00:20:33 | |
I was teaching my regular Monday night balance class when I realized something: the centering I've been guiding for years—body, breath, mind, intention—is a walkthrough of the koshas. I just never called it that. In this episode, I break down the five koshas (body, breath, brain, belly, bliss—the five B's) and show you how this ancient model from the Taittiriya Upanishad is already woven into every class you teach. From your opening centering to your final savasana, you've been guiding students through these layers all along. I also walk through how the koshas come alive in yoga nidra, why understanding them gives you a teaching tool no app or NSDR clip can replicate, and how to use the "specific to general" dial to guide deeper relaxation. Plus, the one thing you absolutely cannot do: force your students to relax. Whether you teach vinyasa, restorative, or anything in between, this episode will change the way you think about centering, savasana, and everything that happens between them. I share a personal practice example, a practical challenge you can try this week, and resources for going deeper—including my forthcoming book Yoga Off the Mat and my 20-CEU course Teaching Yoga Nidra at Comfort Zone Yoga. Want to guide all five layers tonight? Grab the free 5-Minute Yoga Nidra Script: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com/nidrascript?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=nidrascript&utm_content=e78 Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 77. Storytelling for Yoga Teachers with Sara Joelle | 17 mars 2026 | 00:35:17 | |
Website copywriter Sara Joelle joins me to talk about something every yoga teacher needs—storytelling. Whether you're theming a class, writing a newsletter, or trying to tell people about your workshop without cringing, Sara has practical methods to make it easier. We dig into the mindset around selling and why the voice in your head telling you you're annoying is one you made up. Sara shares her approach to breaking the fourth wall during a launch and why believing in what you're offering makes everything else click. Sara walks through two storytelling methods—starting with the point and working backward to a story, or starting with a story and connecting it to a message. Her Cards Against Humanity game night example is worth the listen on its own. We also talk about what actually belongs on a yoga teacher's website (hint: logistics first, credentials last) and why conversational copy beats esoteric language every time. Sara closes with a powerful reminder to stop blocking your own blessings. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 76. Why Every Yoga Teacher Needs a Newsletter (And How to Start One) | 10 mars 2026 | 00:14:56 | |
Have you ever noticed how even your most loyal yoga students eventually drift away? Life happens—schedules change, people move—and without a way to stay in touch between classes, those connections fade. In this episode of Yoga Teacher Confidential, Sage Rountree breaks down why a newsletter is one of the simplest, most ethical tools yoga teachers have for building lasting relationships with students. You'll learn what permission-based marketing actually means (and why it should make you feel good, not guilty), how often to send your newsletter, and what to offer as a lead magnet to grow your list—using things you're probably already creating. Sage also covers the ethics of collecting email addresses, including how to get explicit consent and why unsubscribes are a feature, not a failure. Plus, she tackles the often-overlooked topic of studio non-solicitation policies and how to navigate them professionally. Ready to get started? Join Sage on March 19 at 2 p.m. Eastern for the Newsletter Launch Pad—a free live call inside Comfort Zone Conversations where you'll walk through choosing a platform, collecting addresses, and planning content without the overwhelm. RSVP at the link in the episode, and if you can't make it live, you'll get the recording. Next week on Yoga Teacher Confidential: copywriter Sara Joelle joins Sage to talk about storytelling for yoga teachers—because once you have a newsletter, you need to know what to put in it. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 75. Why Teaching Yoga Is Not Like Teaching Other Subjects | 03 mars 2026 | 00:18:31 | |
A vivid dream about teaching Spinning brought me face to face with something I've known for years but never quite articulated: teaching yoga is fundamentally different from every other kind of teaching I've done. In this episode, I'm drawing on my background in Spinning instruction, university English literature, and public radio to show exactly where those skills help in the yoga room—and where they actively work against your students' experience. From the constant monologuing of radio to the performance energy of Spinning, I had to unlearn a lot to become an effective yoga teacher. I'm also sharing the surprising overlaps—like helping students find comfort in their setup, using breath as an anchor, and navigating students' desire for intensity. These are transferable skills that serve you beautifully when you know how to adapt them. If you've come to yoga teaching from fitness, academics, broadcasting, or any profession where you were trained to fill space and hold attention, this episode will help you identify the habits you're carrying and give you concrete steps to shift from performing to witnessing. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 74. When It's NOT Your Choice: Losing a Class You Didn't Choose to Leave | 24 févr. 2026 | 00:17:11 | |
Classes end in a variety of ways. Last episode, we talked about choosing to drop a class on your own terms. But what happens when the decision isn't yours? Maybe the studio cut your class. Maybe an illness or injury forced you to step away. Maybe life circumstances made it impossible to keep showing up. This is a different kind of loss—and it deserves its own conversation. I'm coming at this from both sides: over 20 years as a yoga teacher and 15 years as a yoga studio owner. I've had classes that didn't work out, and I've been on the other side of that conversation too. Studio ownership is hard, y'all. In this episode, I'm walking through the different scenarios, validating the emotions that come with each one, offering reframes that might help, and sharing practical steps for moving forward. I'm also getting honest about what studio ownership looks like from the inside—because understanding the other perspective can take some of the sting away. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 73. When to Drop a Class: How to Know It's Time to Walk Away | 17 févr. 2026 | 00:22:01 | |
I recently dropped a class I'd been teaching for nearly 23 years. Monday nights at 6 p.m.—since the literal day when the studio opened in 2004. Walking away from that class was one of the most bittersweet decisions I've ever made. In this episode, I'm sharing the full story of how I came to that decision, along with the signs that it might be time for you to let go of a class: declining numbers, a gut sense that the chapter is complete, burnout, the math not adding up, or a change in your life circumstances. I'm also sharing practical advice for walking away with grace—how to calculate your real hourly rate, how and when to tell your students (including the approach my friend Lisa recommended that worked beautifully), and what to do about the class after you leave. Whether you've been teaching a class for two months or two decades, the process is the same: pay attention to the signs, trust your gut, and give yourself permission to make a change. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 72. You Get Who You Get: Teaching Yoga to Unpredictable Audiences | 10 févr. 2026 | 00:10:02 | |
I was teaching a free yoga class at an outdoor gear store in Edmonton when a woman walked in with a toddler and an infant. Not a sleeping infant in a carrier: these children were alert, wandering, making noise. And if you've ever taught yoga, you know exactly what happens to your nervous system in that moment. In this episode, I'm sharing what I've learned about staying composed—and student-centered—when you truly don't know who's going to show up. From the student who took my breath cues so literally she thought she wasn't allowed to exhale, to people showing up in jeans because they wandered in from the hiking boot section, teaching in unpredictable environments tests everything you think you know about holding space. Here's what saved me in Edmonton: I teach in chunks. When you structure your classes with clear segments-warmup, standing, floor, finishing—you create natural transition points that give you flexibility to redirect, check in, or offer someone a graceful exit. You'll learn why structure is actually what gives you freedom, how to stay student-centered when everything goes sideways, and when to be more explicit with your cues than you think you need to be. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 71. What Yoga Teacher Sponsorships Really Look Like | 03 févr. 2026 | 00:09:10 | |
I once sat next to the drummer from Loverboy on a plane, and we realized our lives were almost identical: city to city, same performance, different crowd, trying to find a salad somewhere. Except he was an actual rock star, and I was coming back from teaching yoga at an REI store in Minneapolis. In this episode, I'm sharing what sponsorships and brand ambassador deals actually look like from the inside. I'll walk you through my journey from cold-pitching Athleta in 2008 to a multi-year, five-figure deal with prAna that sent me touring REI and MEC stores across North America. You'll hear about the wonderful moments—meeting colleagues' parents, visiting cities I never would have seen otherwise, even writing most of my book Racing Wisely during airport downtime. But I'm also honest about the reality: most of the time wasn't spent teaching. It was logistics, travel, and trying to find fiber. If sponsorships aren't on your horizon yet, I've got something practical for you. I'm breaking down the discount programs that major yoga apparel brands offer teachers right now, including 50% off at prAna, 25% off at Lululemon, and 25% off at Athleta. These aren't sponsorships; they're perks of being in this profession. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 70. The Planning-Confidence Cycle: Finding the Middle Path Between Overplanning and Winging It | 27 janv. 2026 | 00:21:43 | |
If you've ever spent three hours planning a sixty-minute yoga class—or shown up with nothing but vibes and hoped for the best—this episode is for you. I'm unpacking what I call the Planning-Confidence Cycle: the exhausting trap that keeps yoga teachers bouncing between meticulous overpreparation and chronic underpreparing. Here's the thing: neither extreme gives you what you actually want. Overplanning leaves you too in your head to see your students. Winging it leaves you uncertain whether your class is even balanced. And both feed the anxiety that keeps the cycle spinning. The ancient yoga teachers understood this tension deeply. In this episode, I'm exploring how sthira and sukha (steadiness and ease) and abhyasa and vairagya (practice and nonattachment) offer us a framework for finding the middle path—where preparation enables responsiveness instead of rigidity. You'll learn practical steps for breaking the cycle: recognizing your tendency, embracing the power of repetition, developing a framework you trust, and experiencing your sequences before you teach them. Plus, I'm inviting you to join the February Lesson Plan Challenge inside The Prep Station—four weeks, four complete lesson plans, practiced in your body and ready to teach. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 69. Applying the Service Mindset to Social Media (Minimalist Instagram for Yoga Teachers) | 20 janv. 2026 | 00:21:33 | |
Instagram can feel like a second job-especially when you became a yoga teacher to teach, not to perform online. In this episode, I share a simple reframe that takes the pressure down fast: your job on social media is not to entertain the algorithm. Your job is to help the right students find the next step into yoga with you. I walk through three struggles I hear from yoga teachers all the time: hating social media and feeling guilty, spending lots of time on Instagram without seeing fuller classes, and feeling confused about what Instagram is even for if you teach locally. You'll leave with a clear, minimalist way to treat Instagram like a calm little "foyer"-a reassuring business card for the nervous beginner who has already heard your name. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 68. Teaching at Gyms and YMCAs: The Best Training Ground for New Yoga Teachers | 13 janv. 2026 | 00:28:11 | |
When I started teaching yoga at the UNC Wellness Center, I had to complete hospital safety training about bloodborne pathogens and biohazard spills. I was teaching yoga in a gym. The odds of encountering a biohazard during downward-facing dog were essentially zero. But they paid me for that training time, and there were snacks at the meetings—so I wasn't complaining. Teaching at gyms and YMCAs isn't a consolation prize for yoga teachers who can't get hired at studios. It's one of the best possible training grounds for becoming a skilled, adaptable teacher. In this episode, I'm sharing why those six years at the UNC Wellness Center made me a dramatically better teacher than I would have been starting in a boutique studio. You'll learn why the straightforward application process, surprising benefits like free childcare and gym memberships, and exposure to large diverse classes build skills you can't get anywhere else. I'm also covering the real challenges—fluorescent lighting, multipurpose rooms, limited equipment—and how those constraints actually make you a more versatile teacher. Whether you're a new teacher looking for your first position or an experienced teacher considering a gym opportunity, this episode will help you see why teaching in less-than-perfect conditions creates the strongest foundation for your teaching career. LINKS: 🎙️ Listen to all episodes: https://sagerountree.com/podcast?utm_source=buzzsprout&utm_medium=show-notes&utm_campaign=e64_gyms 🧘 Join The Zone: https://www.comfortzoneyoga.com?utm_source=buzzsprout&utm_medium=show-notes&utm_campaign=e64_gyms 📚 The Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook: https://sagerountree.com/the-professional-yoga-teachers-handbook?utm_source=buzzsprout&utm_medium=show-notes&utm_campaign=e64_gyms Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 67. How to Approach a Yoga Studio for Your First Teaching Job | 06 janv. 2026 | 00:27:34 | |
Most new yoga teachers approach studios completely wrong. They send generic emails, mention how much they need the work, and haven't taken a single class at the studio they're asking to teach at. Some even copy-paste so carelessly that they mention the wrong studio's name. In this episode, I'm sharing the exact approach that gets yoga teachers hired—the one that makes you stand out from the hundreds of other applicants studio owners receive every year. This isn't about luck or connections. It's about professionalism and intentionality. I walk you through the seven-step process I teach in The Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook: from choosing your studio strategically, to becoming a student first, to writing an email that actually gets read, to following up professionally without being pushy. I also share what NOT to say in your initial approach—the red flags that get your email deleted immediately. Whether you're a newly certified teacher looking for your first gig or an experienced teacher relocating to a new area, this episode gives you the roadmap for approaching studios in a way that demonstrates you understand you're entering both a community and a business. Resources mentioned: The Professional Yoga Teacher's Handbook by Sage Rountree: https://amzn.to/3X7XknB Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 66. How We Can Work Together in 2026: Programs for Every Stage of Your Teaching Journey | 30 déc. 2025 | 00:18:49 | |
I've spent twenty years watching yoga teachers struggle with the same pattern. They finish their training, start teaching, and then something happens. They're standing in front of three students wondering what they're doing wrong. They're scrambling every Sunday night to plan Monday's class. Or they never start teaching at all because the imposter syndrome is too loud. Here's what most teacher trainings won't tell you: more knowledge doesn't cure imposter syndrome. Clear, confident teaching cures imposter syndrome. That comes from having practical systems you can actually use. In this episode, I'm walking through how we can work together in 2026—not what trainings you should collect, but how working together could actually transform your teaching. Whether you're the teacher staring at a blank page every Sunday night, ready to master core sequencing skills, drawn to specialization, or not even a teacher yet—there's a pathway designed for exactly where you are right now. You'll learn about the Yoga Class Prep Station for immediate help, Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing mentorship, specialization programs that build toward your 300-hour advanced training, and the 200-hour training I'm co-teaching with Amy Boerner in Dominica this May. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 65. Teaching Meditation with Confidence—Gabrielle Harris on Authenticity and Finding Your Voice | 23 déc. 2025 | 00:39:49 | |
Most yoga teachers feel secretly terrified about teaching meditation. You know how to cue a vinyasa, but when it comes to that moment where you ask students to sit still and turn inward, the panic sets in. Who am I to guide someone's meditation practice? In this conversation with Gabrielle Harris—author of Lessons in Meditation, The Language of Yin, and The Inspired Yoga Teacher—we unpack why teachers struggle with imposter syndrome and what to do about it. Gabrielle shares her evolution from hot power yoga to yin, how her daily writing practice informs her teaching, and why the simplest meditation techniques often go the deepest. We talk about the difference between mindfulness and meditation (yes, there is one), the Daoist principle of the middle way, and why your students came for the movement but are staying for the stillness. Gabrielle also shares the Navy Seals research on optimal meditation time—spoiler: it's only seven minutes. If you've ever wanted to bring more meditation into your classes but felt unsure where to start, this episode will give you permission to begin simply and trust what you already know. Resources: Gabrielle Harris: https://gabrielleharrisyoga.com Gabrielle on Instagram: @gabrielleharrisyoga Lessons in Meditation: https://amzn.to/4pJuo0V The Inspired Yoga Teacher: https://amzn.to/4rDHU8b The Language of Yin: https://amzn.to/4rDHU8b Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 64. From Set Sequences to Lead Teacher: Lana Boone on Finding Confidence Through Framework | 16 déc. 2025 | 00:31:17 | |
When Lana Boone first started teaching formats beyond her familiar Baptiste sequence, she was terrified. Today, she's the lead teacher at Yoga Six in Potomac, Maryland, confidently teaching everything from power to restorative to sound bath—and her classes are filling up. In this conversation, Lana shares how the 6-4-2 framework and chunking approach completely transformed her lesson planning. She went from spending hours trying to memorize set sequences to creating balanced classes in fifteen minutes. And her students? They love the consistency of practicing the same sequence for a full month. We also talk about Jenny Rawlings' biomechanics work and why it pairs so perfectly with what I teach. Lana shares how understanding the "why" behind alignment gave her the confidence to answer student questions she never could have addressed before—including the moment a student declared her "the only one who understands biomechanics" in the entire studio. If you've ever felt stuck in a teaching rut, scared to branch out into new formats, or overwhelmed by lesson planning, this episode will show you what's possible when you have the right frameworks in place. Resources Mentioned:
Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 63. How I Chose My 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training (And Why I'm Building a Better One) | 09 déc. 2025 | 00:22:24 | |
Most 200-hour yoga teacher trainings teach you how to do yoga—but they don't teach you how to teach yoga. If you've been through a training yourself, you know exactly what I mean. You spent weeks learning Sanskrit names, memorizing muscles, and perfecting your own poses. Then they handed you a certificate and said you're a yoga teacher now. Except you didn't really feel like one. In this episode, I'm taking you back to 2003 when I chose my own 200-hour training by looking through the printed pages of Yoga Journal. I'm sharing what made that training brilliant, what I learned from watching my business partner go through a different program, and how running our own training for nearly a decade taught me what works and what doesn't. Then I'm telling you about the 200-hour training I'm building right now with my colleague Amy Boerner. It's designed to teach you how to teach first—giving you the pedagogical foundation most trainings skip—and then lets you practice teaching real humans at a gorgeous eco-resort in Dominica. The online portion opens January 1, 2026, and the on-the-ground intensive runs May 12 through 26, 2026. If you've been thinking about becoming a yoga teacher, or if you've already done a 200-hour and know something was missing, this episode will show you what's possible when a training prioritizes teaching skills over pose knowledge. Listen now. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 62. Your Teaching Year in Review: Reflection and Intention Setting for 2026 | 02 déc. 2025 | 00:21:09 | |
Most yoga teachers end the year measuring what they didn't accomplish. The workshops they didn't lead, the certifications they didn't finish, the Instagram following that didn't grow. But here's what I've learned after two decades of teaching: you're probably measuring the wrong things. In this episode, I'm walking you through the reflection framework I use in my mentorship—roses, thorns, and buds—and showing you how to create a Bridge Statement that turns your 2025 lessons into clear 2026 intentions. You'll learn about the Four Dimensions of Teaching Growth (consistency, connection, competence, and confidence) and discover why most teachers only measure one of them. I'll show you how to identify what you're keeping, dropping, and adding in 2026, and how to turn that reflection into sustainable intentions instead of resolutions that fizzle by February. We'll cover the Three-Part Intention Framework: your structural intention, your skill intention, and your self-care intention. If you want to do this work together, I'm hosting two free live calls in The Zone:
Both calls include workbooks, community discussion, and replays. You're already a better teacher than you were a year ago. You just might not be measuring the right things. Listen now! Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||
| 61. Teaching Yoga When Friends and Family Show Up to Class | 25 nov. 2025 | 00:22:10 | |
The most awkward yoga class I ever taught? When my husband raised his hand mid-class like a third grader to ask if he was doing it right. If you're teaching through the holidays, you're probably about to experience your own version of this—friends, family, and visiting relatives showing up to your class. In this episode, we're diving into one of the most complex dynamics in yoga teaching: what happens when people who know you outside the yoga room show up to your class, and what it means when your students bring their loved ones to practice with you. We'll explore why teaching friends and family is uniquely challenging (hint: it's about competing relationship dynamics, not respect), how to navigate these situations gracefully, and why a student bringing someone to your class is actually one of the highest compliments you can receive as a teacher. You'll learn practical strategies for setting expectations, maintaining boundaries while staying warm, welcoming guests effectively, and handling those inevitable awkward moments when things don't go as planned. Plus, we'll touch on the ethics of romantic relationships in yoga teaching—because someone needs to say it. Whether you're a new teacher worried about your mom showing up or an experienced teacher preparing for holiday visitors, this episode gives you the frameworks you need to turn these complex situations into opportunities for deeper connection and better teaching. Free open house for my online 200-hour yoga teacher training: Saturday, November 14, at noon Eastern. A mini-lesson on finding your teaching superpower and a look inside the curriculum. Can’t make it live? RSVP anyway and I’ll send the replay. Live online classes are back in the Prep Station this fall: one lesson plan a month, taught live by me on three Mondays, 6:00–7:00 p.m. Eastern, with 15 minutes afterward to talk teaching. Balance Play Trio in September, Yoga for All Athletes in October, Meet the Warriors in November. Every class posts as a recording. Membership is $39 a month. Practice with me The next cohort of Mastering the Art of Yoga Sequencing Mentorship Membership—MMM, my six-month group mentorship for yoga teachers—starts in January 2027, and the wait list is open now. Doors open to the wait list first, in December, before anyone else hears about it. MMM is also the required half of the Comfort Zone Yoga 300-hour yoga teacher training. Add your name: Want to become (almost) everyone's favorite yoga teacher? Join Comfort Zone Yoga, my virtual studio focused on teacher development. I have a ton of Sage advice in there for you! For more insights, subscribe to Yoga Teacher Confidential, check out my YouTube channel, and follow me on socials: And come explore my mentorship program, Yoga Class Prep Station membership, continuing education and 200/300/500-hour teacher training programs, and my many books for yoga teachers. It's all at sagerountree.com. ... | |||