Affordable, Accessible, Authentic

Bhakti Rose - Values and Mission

Many years ago when I was running yoga studios both in London and here in Sydney I came up with three words that described how I wanted my business to be.  I guess to use modern marketing talk you could say they form the mission statement of what my yoga studios were all about.  They are as relevant now that I run my business (Bhakti Rose) in the online space as they were 20 years ago when I first came up with them. These three have been the pillars of my work in the world for the last 25 years and they are still so today:

Affordable - I want to offer a ‘premium’ experience at an affordable price. It’s easy to get trapped into talk about ‘attracting the high paying clients your work is worth’ or ‘positioning yourself at the top of the market’ but I know in my heart of hearts that all that does is price so many people out of the possibility of learning and growing.  I’ve never worked with inflated price points and I never will.  Back in the days when I ran yoga studios we offered $5 lunch time classes.  People still remember and talk about those.  Some of you reading these words will have attended those classes.  They were FULL of magic and bhav. There was a homeless lady who lived in the park across from the yoga studio who would often attend (if you didn’t have $5 you could come in for free).  We served chai or soup after class. The doors were open.  Here in the ‘virtual yoga world’ where I teach now the doors are still open.  I offer lots of scholarships and trades for skills. I offer discounts and sales several times a year.  Ayurveda and yoga shouldn’t be exclusive.

Affordable - It has always been my mission to make these teachings easy to understand and digest. What that means for an asana (physical practice) class is that it’s not about the teacher demonstrating how to be a pretzel at the front of the class in a way that intimidates the participants.  What it means for me as a teacher is that I practice and understand the teachings in my own life and share them from a place of (sometimes imperfect) embodiment.  My focus is to have the women I teach feel that change is possible, that the teachings are speaking to them and that they understand what is going on.  This does not mean diluting or simplifying the teachings.  It just means taking the time to break them down step-by-step and explain diligently what we are working towards.

Authentic - Yoga and Ayurveda are systems of philosophy with a history that’s thousands of years old. I didn’t invent yoga and although I can embody and teach it as an evolving discipline it’s important to have a frame of reference for that which acknowledges teachers, lineage and those who came before us. You can read about who my teachers are here.  My main teachers have been in my life since my teens.  I’m always growing, training and evolving as a teacher.  The study is lifelong but it’s not ‘new’.  I bow down to the golden thread of teachers that come before me in all my work.  I also acknowledge and hold in high esteem the wisdom teachers of the First Nations people from the land on which I work and live as well as those of my own personal culture and heritage.

Of course the world has changed in the last 20 years (just a bit!!) and it’s really quite wonderful to me that the words above are still anchors for the work I do, as much now as they were then. There is however a word I’ve added to the ‘founding three’.  This word has to do with the fact that today we have information at our fingertips in a way that we never did in the past.   The word is ‘applied’.  When I first started teaching yoga and ayurveda it wasn’t easy to access the knowledge and information I learned from my teachers and taught to my students.  I had to spend time in India, travel the world, read hard-to-find texts and attempt to understand them without much guidance.  For my teachers (most of whom are in their seventies now) it was even harder. These days none of us has this problem.  The answer to any question you have is available in the palm of your hand for free via the internet. Information is no longer a valuable commodity.

What is valuable is having someone help you make sense of that information and APPLY it to your life.

Applied - If you’re anything like me you spend some of most days mindlessly scrolling a vast array of overwhelming information. The scroll, scroll, scroll mentality is both numbing and addictive.  It has us imagine and fantasise about all the things we might do in our lives but the algorithms are not designed to have us get out of our seat and do anything.  In fact they want us to stay right there – stuck in Facebook fantasy world – they are designed to keep us locked into the scroll.  Add to this the compulsive ‘busy-ness’ so many of us are drowning in these days and it’s been my observation that the last decade or so has seen a huge increase in overwhelm (what in ayurveda we could call vata imbalance) and a decrease in intentional, patient action over time. Yoga practice and the application of ayurveda into your life require practice – intentional, patient practice over time.  We have to APPLY the things and do the things we are thinking about not just consume more information about them. For this reason a big part of the mission of my work now and the offerings from Bhakti Rose is accountability and application.

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