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 something catches in your throat.
Most teachers know that catch. It arrives as a small apology before the number, or a discount nobody asked for. Sometimes it’s a rate that hasn’t moved since before the pandemic, held in place by nothing you could name.
Here is a different reading. Your fee began life as a sentence. You wrote it, usually years ago, under beliefs about yoga and worth that you would 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
Charging for yoga sits on an old fault line. The practice 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 you stay on the right side of your own conscience.
Research on money beliefs shows how this works underneath. These beliefs form early, at home and in the rooms we learn in, then run under our decisions for years without being examined. They behave less like opinions and more like rules. You don’t weigh a rule each time you quote a rate. You obey it without noticing there was anything to decide.
So when you set your first fee, you weren’t reading a market. You were finishing 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 work that way.
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 ever feeling like one. Teaching becomes something you subsidise from the rest of your life. And subsidies run out. The teachers who leave in year five are often the ones whose fees were never once reviewed. Their students lost a teacher they trusted, which is the part the humility story never mentions.
There’s also what the sentence teaches a room. A fee named plainly, without flinching, tells people how the work is held. You trained for years. Students take their cue from you.
Rewriting it
This is paper work. Twenty minutes at the kitchen table will do.
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 appears around line three, and it is rarely about the number at all.
Then test it. Read what you’ve written as though a teacher you respect had written it about their own work. Someone whose training you know, whose classes you would happily send people to. Notice where you want to argue with them, gently, the way you would with a friend selling their work short. Most teachers start arguing within a line. We keep rules for ourselves that we would never let a colleague keep.
Then draft the revision. Write the sentence you would want that teacher to charge by, and try it on for yourself. A workable revision has less to do with nerve than it looks. It simply names what the fee holds up: the training behind each class, and a livelihood that lets the teaching continue. That last clause is the point. The fee is part of the craft, because it is 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.