Yoga students and teachers all are talking more and more about taking our yoga practice off the mat and into our daily lives, and we are also talking more and more about the power of the yoga community to create a more peaceful, humane, abundant, and sustainable world. When we talk this way, often we say we are starting with an inner strength at our core and radiating resiliency and calm outward into the world. At the same time, we all spend large amounts of time living and working in organizations that are for the most part still structured like medieval fortresses or nineteenth century factories, rigid and cold on the outside and often very messy and not at all calm on the inside. Our organizations take little account of the fact that human beings are organisms, and our social and work lives are essentially another kind of ecosystem, flexible, resilient and healthy… or not!
Curious and entrepreneurial yoga teachers and studio owners are perfectly situated to explore the possibilities of new organizational forms that reflect the form of our practice, our alignment, and the natural forms and forces we are all connected to in the world around us. The yogic concepts of Iccha (the will of the heart), Jnana (spiritual knowledge), and Kriya (action) speak not only to the organization of the self and the cosmos; they speak also to the organization of our work lives. What would happen if yoga studios, as businesses, looked and felt like the natural extension of the beings practicing within them? What would happen if the networks of yoga studios acted like an ecosystem of interacting beings, weaving or looming together, like an abundant and expansive community of the heart, instead of seeing themselves as individual competitors in a world of scarcity? I want to explore these possibilities in a way that would inspire a conversation about new forms for structuring and practicing our businesses that are aligned with our practice and our philosophy.
What are your thoughts about this?
