Rachel Brathen is a famous yoga teacher who strives to keep it real. Raised in Sweden and now living on Aruba she walks her talk and brings you back to your mat. She is a new mom of a baby girl. In this show she raps about becoming “popular”, teaching teens, and how she connects with her students.

I rap with Rachel Brathen about Bringing Online Yoga to Your Home Practice:

• How to bridge learning yoga online with a real relationship with a teacher and community
• Why your practice needs to evolve with time
• Best tip for Yoga Teachers to fill their retreats

What you’ll get out of tuning in:  

• Connecting to the core values of the practice of Yoga
• Why teens start yoga
• Is yoga + Ayurveda a flash in a pan of modern popularity?
• Motherhood + Homesteader + the painting the perfect picture
• The humility of the path of yoga

Links:

• Online Studio
• Yoga Lifestyle Website
• Home Studio Website
• Facebook URL   
• Yoga URL 

Related podcasts:

• Jason Nemer on AcroYoga, Trust, Connectivity, + Small, Powerful Communities
• Communication Skills for Yoga Teachers (+ everyone else) with Julia Beauchamp
• What the Millennials are Bringing to Ayurveda with Nadya Andreeva and Alicia Diaz
• Hosting Retreats as an exploration of Collective Leadership with Tina Forsyth
• Yoga Teaching Through Instagram with Robin Martin

Show Highlights:

• 4:30 Social media, fame, and celebrity is sometimes judged in the yoga community, but if done in the right way, can still hold the integrity of yoga itself. And at the end of the day, it brings yoga and mindfulness to more people.
• 10:30 Yoga and Ayurveda aren’t going away: they aren’t a trend that will become uncool in ten years. Because there’s more access than ever, more and more people will continue to find these ancient traditions and use them to thrive.
• 11:25 Yoga is more than a receptive, consumer relationship of simply following a practice: it is about community, participation, collaboration, and co-creation.
• 17:05 In order to truly inspire people to live a life of thrive, it’s important to allow followers to still connect and relate by sharing the bad days along with the good ones.
• 28:15 We can learn from the transparency of emotions that babies instinctively bear. By really feeling and releasing every single emotion, their energy is much more efficient than adults who don’t process and release negative energy to make room for more positive energy in the future.
• 37:10 Connect to the why: figure out what your intention is for a specific business venture, and make sure that all plans and actions are aligned with that intention. Ask for divine help, and be aligned with why you are creating this project in the first place.

Favorite Quotes:

• “There’s a lot of judgment from the yoga community… but at the end of the day, when I look around, there’s just more people doing yoga.” – Cate Stillman
• “It’s the outer world bringing them in, but then the moment the practice has begun, all of that just fades away.” – Rachel Brathen
• “Are you not going to do yoga if you don’t have wifi connection?” – Rachel Brathen
• “The idea of telling someone to drop into a pose for the purpose of posting something online is just really absurd… That’s what sells, but that’s not really what’s real.” – Rachel Brathen
• “People you follow on social media should be people that lift you up, that inspire you, that make you feel good about who you are. If jealousy or resentment creeps up, then unfollow. Don’t look at that every day if it doesn’t make you feel good.” – Rachel Brathen
• “It has to be the balance between what’s inspiring and fun but also what’s real and true.” – Rachel Brathen
• “It’s fun to disconnect, because then you get to rediscover the amazingness of connection.” – Cate Stillman
• “The transparency of emotion is energetically efficient. When we carry  stuff… that’s unprocessed… it’s inefficient for all levels of the physiology.” – Cate Stillman
• “It’s more than ‘I need to make this money, I need to fill these slots, I need to be successful.’ It’s that energetic piece of ‘I need to be aligned with why I’m creating this in the first place.'” – Rachel Brathen

BIO:

Swedish native Rachel Brathen is a New York Times best-selling author, serial entrepreneur and international yoga teacher residing in Aruba. After graduating school in Stockholm she traveled to Costa Rica and it was here that she found the joy of incorporating yoga into her everyday life. Deepening her yoga practice and also taking her first steps towards teaching, she ended up moving to Central America where she spent years exploring the intricate studies of yoga and spirituality. After moving to Aruba early 2010 she started teaching yoga full time on this Caribbean island. Her classes are a dynamic Vinyasa Flow integrating alignment, core work, and breathing techniques with basic poses and creative sequencing. With over two million followers in social media, Brathen shares pieces of her life with the world every day and constantly travels the globe to connect with her community.

In addition to teaching worldwide, Rachel is the founder of www.oneOeight.com; an online platform for yoga, meditation, and healing. As the most successful crowd-funded yoga project of all time, the platform is made up of a vast community of dedicated practitioners from all over the world looking to cultivate balance, create space for inner healing and deepen their yoga practice. With an amazing team of experienced guides and teachers, oneOeight offers heart-centered classes designed to fit the always evolving needs of both body, mind and soul.