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