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There are many ways of teaching yoga to your students. Today let’s have an overview of eight main options of teaching yoga that are available to you, their upsides and downsides, and what you need to do to get the most out of them.

Are you teaching yoga in a city, or thinking about moving to an urban center to teach? Would you like to work one-on-one with individual students and clients for yoga and yoga therapy? Here are my thoughts for you about challenges and rewards of growing an urban private practice.

Charting a course to work full-time as a yoga professional takes careful planning and possibly a bit of time, depending on the opportunities in your community.

About twelve years ago my most reliable and consistent yoga client decided to move to New York to be closer to her family. The news hit me hard because I both cared about her, and relied on the income from our sessions (she was doing yoga with me three times a week). But I dealt with it, and did my best to connect her with a teacher from the same tradition in New York.

I’ve had the chance to work on great projects as a yoga teacher involved with research— to study whether and how yoga can help with heart health, chronic back pain, and cancer care. Teaching therapeutic yoga classes and working with yoga research studies were two parts of my pathway. Perhaps my experience can be helpful to those of you who are curious about teaching in medical research and integrative health centers.

Are you attracted to natural spaces as the place to live and work? Do you find comfort in mountains, forests, lake country, an island or farm fields? Whether you’ve always been in a rural area or you’ve relocated to a natural setting for lifestyle, employment or family, you can find meaningful work as a yoga teacher and Yoga Therapist. Your professional life will have variety, adventure and real-life connection.

Over the holidays I got hooked on the NPR podcast called “How I Built This” that interviews the founders of some big companies about how they got started. Some of those stories are truly fascinating and chronicle the classic tale of rags to riches. Others had a pretty good jump-start. For example, the founders of Soul Cycle started with an original cash investment of about $250,000. That’s a big chunk of cash! How many of us have access to that kind of money?