Episode 12- Branding Your Business as a Spiritual Entrepreneur

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Alanna Kaivalya. I have a 500-hour teacher training online with YogaDownload and I have over 250 hours of higher education for yogis online in the areas of spirituality and mysticism.

If you’re listening to this podcast, it’s very likely that you’re not just a yoga teacher, or a modern mystic, but you’re also a spiritual leader and in this day and age, being any of these things: modernistic yoga teachers, spiritual leader. We are also small business owners, so it’s important for us to keep our entrepreneurial hat on and turn our attention to our business and in fact, to treat our business as part of our spiritual practice.

I know that for many of us as spiritual leaders, it’s difficult to think of ourselves as a business person and it’s difficult to do some of the elements of business that we particularly don’t love, but in any type of spiritual practice, there are going to be moments that we have to do the things that are challenging.

So in today’s podcast, I want to bring our attention to an important element of our business, which is branding. And again, you are a brand, you are a spiritual leader and small business owner.

It’s important that you really hone in on your niche because this is the foundation of your brand

I know first or that if you identify as a yoga teacher, that it’s very likely that your yoga teacher training program didn’t really include any kind of business training and if it did, it was most likely just for an hour or two, and probably just told you how to build a resume and maybe do an audition at a yoga studio. And for the rest of you who are spiritual practitioners of a different sort, reiki practitioners, massage therapists, body workers, healers, light workers, whatever else you do. It’s also very likely that you’ve received very little business training, so if you have a business background obviously you’re going to have a leg up because you’ve got the proper training that it takes in order to become a small business owner in this very challenging spiritual community and spiritual industry. And in the yoga industry, for sure, it’s I think even more compounded because we have this incredibly heavy stigma within yoga that as yoga teachers, we should not make money.

Frankly, that notion is ridiculous. What we do as yoga teachers and spiritual leaders is incredibly valuable, and in fact, if you really think about it, the kind of value that we impart to people’s lives as we teach them the practices of yoga and spirituality is deeply transformational and impactful on many aspects of their lives.

So the idea that we should do this work for free and be uncompensated for it is ridiculous and it’s a stigma that I look forward to doing my part to changing with my work as much as possible. But also in helping you overcome this stigma in changing this moving forward. The way that we’ll do this is most likely one person at a time, because the yoga industry, in particular, but I do believe the spiritual in industry by and large was not and is not developed to value the yoga teacher and spiritual leader.