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| Austin, Texas
A Letter from Mehtab
Founder, Yoga Yoga
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We Get Started
“Enthusiasm,
perseverance, discrimination,
unshakable faith, and courage are the ways
to bring success to yoga.”
– Hatha Yoga Pradipika (1, 16)
The first
day we opened on January 22, 1998, forty-five students turned out to
support us. A few even brought friends new to yoga because they were
afraid we would not be able to stay in business very long. That thought
finally occurred to us when we realized we were paying several thousand
dollars a month for the privilege of offering yoga classes that we could
not afford to even pay ourselves for teaching.
Over the next few months, yoga teaching friends joined us. We added Ashtanga
classes, morning classes, and finally one day we counted (in the days
before we had a computer) over 100 students on one day! So we paid ourselves
a $100 salary for that month.
As much as practicing yoga had changed our lives, it was the yoga teaching
that completely transformed us. We wanted to share that discovery with
our students, so we offered a teacher training course in Kundalini Yoga.
As these students became teachers, they wanted a space to teach and the
original Yoga Yoga on South Lamar was getting full.
One of our newly trained teachers, Rich, started scouting out possible
locations in the summer of 2000 for a second Yoga Yoga. He found a place
on Anderson Lane at Burnett and working with us as a new business partner,
we opened what we cleverly called Yoga Yoga North (which meant that the
original location had to become, what else, Yoga Yoga South).
With the new North location, we added more Ashtanga classes, prenatal
classes, and ultimately more teacher training courses, including
Hatha as well as Kundalini. Which of course meant more new teachers,
which
meant – another Yoga Yoga!
In May 2003 (after protracted labor), we delivered Yoga Yoga Westgate.
It was ridiculously huge. I stood in the brand new large room that
held nearly ten times the students we were teaching just six years
earlier.
My wife said to me, “You know, we can actually fit our entire house
into this one room.” “Great,” I said, “Because
we may have to sell it and live here.”
Like the neglected sibling after a newborn, the original South Lamar
studio started asking for attention. We made one big room out of the
two existing studios and moved the Kundalini room into an adjacent storefront
that once sold safety work boots. The mothership was ready for new arrivals.
Now we had eight studio rooms, three locations, 75 teachers, and our
names on leases that financially obligated us to do yoga, yoga, yoga
until my beard would become completely white.
All the growth, the expansion, even the very beginning of Yoga Yoga was
completely organic. While we finally get around to making business plans,
we realized that planning was something you did while you waited for
God to smile.
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