An intro to my substack

here goes nothing.

Twelve years ago I entered the fitness industry as a yoga instructor. I spent twelve years working as hard as I could to not have a “real job” which sounds very ironic now based on the fact that I ended up working twice as hard and having by all accounts a “real job”. But what I meant at that time by “real job” was a 9-5 (or 8-6) that makes you completely beholden to the company that you work for and to capitalism. This was never for me, or so I thought. I spent so much time, money, and energy on my one goal of not becoming swept up in the throws of our capitalistic system that I didn’t even notice that by the end of my time in the industry I had done exactly that. I ended up working full-time in the fitness industry at one of, what some would call, the “top” yoga studios in NYC. I trained over 300 people to become yoga instructors, literally taught thousands of hours of teacher training and taught tens of thousands of yoga students along the way. I taught yoga retreats and trainings all over the world. I taught privates to a lot of clients that people would care to know about who they are. I worked a lot. And I deeply cared about the work I was doing and I especially cared about the students, which is to say the people, that I came into contact with and got to know during this time. Needless to say, I worked extremely hard, but now I see how much of what I was fighting against I ended up becoming, or at the very least, endorsing.

My time in the “wellness” industry has shown me just how unwell we all are, and how unwell the industry is as a whole. This has shown me the exploitation of workers in this industry, the exploitation of practices that were meant to heal, the complete erasure of those who developed these practices initially, and the harm that is caused all at the sake of being “well” (and to make money, of course).

My journey has been a lot and of course, it’s nowhere near over, but I cannot move forward as I had been up until last year when I finally left my job in the industry. I still don’t know how to change many things I am going to speak about, but leaving my job has caused me to reevaluate my entire outlook on the wellness industry as a whole. And I finally feel ready to start talking about it.

I have a lot to say. I have a lot to say that will quite possibly shun me from ever working in this industry again. And I’m okay with that. I’m okay with that because I can’t and won’t move forward in the way that I was before. I love the practice of yoga. I love meditation. I love to exercise. I believe in these practices, which is exactly why I feel it necessary to speak about what’s happening in this industry.

So I hope you’ll join me on this journey as I begin to write about topics that have been on my heart for over a decade of working in wellness. How workers are exploited over and over in an industry that reeks of white supremacy and patriarchy. How people’s insecurities are exploited as a profit-making machine and how sexual assault runs as rampant through this industry as any other.

When I left my job last June I put out a statement, and in it, I asked a question that is still on my heart, “What are you willing to give up to disrupt the status quo?”

These are just some of my stories that I can only hope will start to disrupt the status quo. I hope you will join me in this journey and start to share some of your own.