Cozy Yoga Life Ep13 Real-Life Struggles: Burn Out

In this episode of Cozy Yoga Life, we dive into one of the most common and challenging experiences for yoga teachers—burnout. Teaching yoga is a fulfilling and transformative profession, but it can also lead to emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion. We explore the signs and causes of burnout, from overworking and emotional overload to the pressure of social media. Learn practical strategies for avoiding burnout, setting healthy boundaries, and reigniting your passion for teaching. Whether you're feeling drained or want to prevent burnout before it happens, this episode offers real-life solutions to help you reconnect with your purpose and sustain your energy. Tune in for advice, inspiration, and actionable tips to keep your teaching journey balanced and fulfilling.

Links related to this episode:

• Yoga of Decluttering
• Yoga Class Planners

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Transcript

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You're listening to Cozy Yoga Life, the podcast for yoga teachers who crave more from their practice and lives. I'm Shannon Caldwell, and I'll be your guide on this journey of simplicity, self care and self discovery. So let's cozy up, unwind, and dive into today's episode. This season we are talking about real life struggles of yoga teachers. In today's episode, we're going to be covering burnout, which is ironic since we're talking about yoga teachers and typically burnout is a result of stress. That irony is the reason behind today's episode because I want to acknowledge that those of us who are teaching others how to have less stress in their life and bring more balance, how we can find ourselves on the wrong end of stress as well. Like all of the topics that I have covered in the Real Life Struggles of Yoga Teachers, I have also dealt with burnout multiple times. It's kind of hard not to deal with burnout when you've had the lengthy career that I have had in yoga. For many yoga teachers, this starts off as a passion project. You go take a yoga posture class, you fall in love with it, you love it. Like the way it makes you feel, you've had your own personal transformations, and then you want to share this gift of yoga with other people. So you look into becoming a yoga teacher. So it goes from being a passion, to turning into a passion project. And for many teachers, that's where it stops. They only teach a couple of classes a week. Maybe they teach enough classes at a yoga studio that they can get their membership taken care of. Or maybe they're just doing it as a way to get out of the house and have adult time and something that is just for them. You also have just as many yoga teachers where it goes from passion to passion project to passionate career. While it doesn't happen for everybody, it is a common occurrence to get stressed out in your career, even in one that is designed to help people lessen their stress and have more calm in their lives. What are some common signs of burnout? Some of the ones that I experienced about the 24 hour mark before I would need to go teach or even before I would need to go to yoga teacher training I would just start dreading it. I'd be like, just unenthusiastic about it. Not having any excitement around it anymore. And then when the teacher training was over, I would just be exhausted for a couple of days after. I loved my time during, I loved being able to feed off of the energy of the participants in the class but when it was all over, my energy would just plummet. You might have is just this lack of creativity. It feels like the sequencing is all the same, that your classes are getting boring. If you have to hear yourself say a certain phrase one more time, you're just going to scream into the void. Another sign that I experienced was I was so burned out on teaching and doing teacher training that I stopped having a passion for my own practice. I would look at my unrolled mat in the, on the floor and I'd be like, Oh, I just can not put myself on that mat today or tomorrow or the next day. You might experience self doubt, or you might be feeling like imposter syndrome. Who am I to be teaching if I feel this way? I was so passionate about it in the beginning and now I'm dreading it. Maybe I wasn't meant to be a yoga teacher. Those are all very common feelings around burnout. Why are yoga teachers subject to burnout? Well, there's a lot of reasons. One is because When you're teaching yoga, it's not like teaching an aerobics class. There's a lot of emotional and mental work that goes in along with the physical. So you're, you're emotionally holding space for individuals. People may be sharing their own struggles with you, and you want to be there for your students. But if you're already nearing burnout, that can just be one more straw on the camel's back. Another reason that yoga teachers can experience burnout is because for me, for sure, I know was the inconsistent income. I mean, it was a constant roller coaster. Some months were up, some months were down, and this was in particular to yoga teacher training because I never knew how many people I would have in each session. So one session I might have 20 people and then in the next session I might have six. So that makes a really big gap in terms of how much I was making in income. And being constantly worried about your income is going to heighten your stress, especially if it's. It's no longer a passion project. It's your passion career. And you need to bring in income as a yoga teacher or in your yoga career. Also, if you're managing your yoga passion as a career, you're not just walking into the door and teaching, you're also managing a small business. That's going to be paperwork, that's going to be taxes, that's going to be finances, that's going to be marketing, and that's on top of already the time and effort that you put in to creating classes. When you're starting off and you're pursuing yoga as a career, you are spending a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a lot of effort to get that business up off of the ground. What if you're doing this and you also have a family at home? What if you're working a full time job while you're getting your business off the ground until it's creating enough income that that's all that you do? It can get very exhausting to juggle all the responsibilities in your life. So we have a lot of challenges that people don't think of when you tell someone, Hey, I'm a yoga teacher. But I truly believe the largest contributing factor to yoga teachers is burning out is simply overwork. If you are needing to make a livable wage as a yoga teacher, you are teaching a lot of classes. Let's just say you're making 50 a class. Yes, the class is one hour. However, that 50 has to cover your prep work, your drive to the studio, setting up your class, teaching the actual class, setting up the actual class. Wrapping up, staying however long it you need to talk to the people who were in your class. Then you have the drive home. The truth of the matter is when you take into consideration prep and after, It's closer to about two and a half to three hours of work. So that 50 spread out over three hours is closer to about 18 to 19 an hour. So if you're making 50 a class, you have to teach a lot of classes to be able to pay your bills at the end of the month. When I first started my career in yoga, I didn't really have to worry so much about this particular, cause of burnout and that is the pressure that comes from social media, the comparison game, looking at what others are doing, looking at others' highlight reel and comparing that to your behind the scenes or you're growing pains. That's really an unfair comparison that we put ourselves through, so that can also lead to increased stress. Your best bet is to put parameters in place that help you to avoid burnout. It's been my experience that once you are in the middle of burnout, There's nothing that you can do except step back and allow your mind and body that time to recuperate, and nobody can define how long that time is gonna be. But how do you step back? How do you take time off when teaching yoga is your career? When teaching yoga is what brings in your income, you can't afford to take time off. For me, during those times when I would hit burnout, particularly involving yoga teacher training, I would rely heavily on my co-teachers. I had two or three individuals that over time I trained them up and they could come in and they could teach a day for me. They could teach half a day. Worst case, they could teach the whole weekend for me so that I could take that time away and just not be involved directly in yoga. How do you avoid burnout? You have got to set those boundaries. You've got to say no when you've been saying yes. You've got to get those substitute teachers when you need the time off. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to every single teacher who comes through yoga teacher training with me is, I tell them to hold on to their personal practice with everything that they have. Never sacrifice your practice to go teach another class. That is one of the most common occurrences that I see happen with new yoga teachers. That you get in there and you're so excited and You want more experience. You want to get in front of students. And so when a substitute opportunity comes up, you jump on it and you jump on the next one and you jump on the next one. Or you're like, Oh, I was going to take that 5 p. m. class, but they need an emergency substitute. So I'll go in there and I'll teach that class instead. Once is okay. Twice is okay. But when giving up your personal practice is becoming a habit. Just know that you're on that slippery slope toward burnout. It's also important that you find ways to work smarter and not harder. And what I mean is, if you're teaching eight classes a week, you don't need to be creating eight different classes. You create one skeleton class, and then You modify it based on the type of class that you're teaching. Another way that you can work smarter when you're planning your classes is to make sure that you have both volumes of my yoga class planners. That is going to save you a ton of time in researching and looking up all the different things like themes and quotes and different ways of putting classes together. My last recommendation for helping you to avoid burnout is to outsource those tasks that drain you. For me, accounting and finances and the marketing piece, that was always the parts that I just, I dreaded end of the month because I had to do all of my end of the month paperwork. When I'm feeling really energetic and up, my marketing is up. When I'm not feeling energetic and my energy is low, it's usually my marketing that suffers. And if you've followed me for any length of time, you You can look at the amount that I communicate with my audience when I email, when I come and do podcasts, when you see me on social media, you can tell when my energy is up because I'm on there a lot more. And you can tell when my energy is down and my stress is up because I'm a lot less on my marketing, a lot less on my social media. So those were some great tips about how to avoid burnout. But what do you do if you're in burnout? How do you get that spark back? Well, for me, my last burnout happened About two years ago. It was right after the pandemic. It was right after my revenue took a nosedive, so I was really stressed out about income. And this also was happening around menopause. So it was this great little perfect storm where it just kind of all imploded at one time. Personally, therapy helped me. But again, that was for the whole storm of things, burned out was kind of a contributing factor for me to do therapy. It was through therapy that I was able to make the decision that I needed to step completely away from yoga for a while. To find out if it was something that I was still truly passionate about, or was I doing it because I didn't feel like I knew anything else or could contribute in any other way. I found a part time job with consistent income that would pay my bills and one layer of stress was removed. And so over a good year to a year and a half, one by one, I removed a layer of stress until finally the burnout lifted. And when my burnout lifted, I realized, yes, I still want to be involved in yoga. It's still my passion. I just want to be involved in it differently. I want to share my experience and share my knowledge in a different way, which is how I'm I came to the decision to transition to doing Cozy Yoga Life podcast and focusing on more writing, putting the knowledge that is up here down into written format, so that that can be shared with more people. Because it takes a lot of time to work one on one. It takes a lot of time and energy to work in group yoga teacher training or in private lessons. But for me, the choice was if I can do the writing and do books, I can reach more people that way without burning myself out again. And that's really how you find your spark after burnout, is you have to figure out what aligns with you now. Not three months ago or six months ago. Just because you loved yoga at one time doesn't mean that you have to love it your whole life. That's as with any passion. And our passions ebb and flows as our own lives flow and as we evolve. I can thankfully say that when I stepped back and had that time for myself, when it wasn't a career for me, that I can now really and thoroughly enjoy yoga again for all of its incredible gifts that it provides. So Cozy Crew, if you are feeling those hints of burnout, or if you're sitting right smack dab in the middle of burnout, know that it is okay. And it's going to take as long as it takes to come out of burnout. Know that when you come out of burnout, if you have a different view of yoga or other things in your life and you need to make a different decision, you are absolutely allowed to make that different decision. Because this is your life. You get to decide what works for you and what doesn't. And it doesn't matter what anybody else is doing. It only matters that at the end of the day, when you put your head on your pillow, do you feel good about what you did in that day? And are you excited for what the next day brings? Burnout happens. Because remember, yoga is not all unicorns and rainbows and confetti. It can get real and it can get ugly and we're here to talk about that. So, if you have experienced burnout, I would love to hear about it. Drop that into the comments and let me know. I'm going to drop the link below where you can check out more about the yoga class planners that I mentioned earlier. And very soon, in just a few weeks, I'm going to be releasing The Yoga of Decluttering and it has to do with my favorite form of yoga. I can't wait to share more details with you. So Cozy Crew, thank you so much for listening and I will see you in the next episode.. That wraps another soul nourishing episode of Cozy Yoga Life. As always, thank you for letting me be a part of your yoga journey. If you enjoyed today's authentic conversation, please subscribe, rate, and leave a review. Until next time, stay cozy, take care of yourself, and keep it real.