Andrew McGonigle - "Anatomy of Human Experience"

I don't know if listeners saw the article that Rebecca Sebastian wrote about the Yoga Alliance and how much the CEO gets paid.

Caused a little bit of a stir online, but if you're not online, you probably don't know about it.

And if you're someone who's paid attention to the financial statements of the Yoga Alliance over the years, it might not be a total surprise.

But she certainly presented in a way that kind of brought in stark relief the way there's all these imbalances and misperceptions about yoga and yoga teachers.

I had another moment this week that totally blew my mind.

I took my car in to get an oil change done, and I was sitting in the waiting room of the dealership, and they had a TV on, and the TV show that was on was Million Dollar Homes.

Like, this very swanky real estate lady was taking people to view million-dollar homes in Los Angeles.

And it just so happened the, the person that she was showing homes in this episode was a yoga teacher, and the yoga teacher was looking for a home in which she could also have a yoga center space.

She basically was doing the same thing that I was doing, like, teaching classes out of your home.

I currently do it out of my living room.

But she was looking for h- a home that was over a million dollars.

She had a $5 million budget, and I was like, "How is that possible? How does a yoga teacher have a $5 million budget?" Of course, we didn't, we didn't get to find out [laughs] how she's funding the whole thing.

But it just blew my mind.

It was like, wow, like, the perception of, like, what's possible in yoga practice in terms of it being a profession and, like, that you would have a $5 million budget to buy a home.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I just was scratching my head and just really wondering about this yoga thing these days.

It just, sometimes it feels like things have gotten pretty bleak.

And there's just all other kinds of stuff online, claims people are making, claims that I thought we were done making.

And maybe it's not that the claims are totally inaccurate.

Yoga does lots of wonderful things for people.

But I guess it's just the way we're making the claims and the kind of language we're putting around it and the impression that it gives people about yoga.

I don't have a point I'm getting to at all, just that it seems like things are in a somewhat chaotic state when it comes to yoga in the world.

And fortunately, my guest today is Andrew McGonigle, sometimes known as Dr. Yogi.