In this interview with Megan Sylvia of Uplifted Living you’ll learn:

• How taking your offering online can expand your reach
• The importance of finding out your clients’ true wants and needs
• How Ayurveda can help you understand yourself
• What you can do to incorporate Ayurveda into your routine to feel more energized
• Why your business should come after your self-care

What did you do before you started Yoga Healer?

“I went to the California College of Ayurveda and the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco, and when you get out of training in a serious yoga school, you become a yoga teacher!  After Ayurveda school I became a practitioner, and I worked mostly with people in my yoga classes.

That’s what I did for years, and I just learned the skills. I did a lot of continuing ed with yoga training and theraputic yoga, and with Ayurvedic trainings both in India and the US, with various Ayurvedic doctors and practitioners. I just got better at working with more and more clients, and got a lot of experience.”

What made you decide to become an entrepreneur?

“At some point I decided that I would really like to teach courses that my local clients were probably not interested in, and I wanted to reach a broader market.

  So at that point, I decided to take my business online so that I could reach people with solutions to the kind of problems that most people locally weren’t as committed or ready to invest in.

Another part of it was that I kept hearing from other people that I had a knack for business; that I was business savvy. For some reason I LIKE business, understand strategy, and the tools and technology that can help expose ideas to larger groups of people.

That opened me up more and more into understanding entrepreneurship and opening a line of my business where I help other yoga teachers and healers build a bigger income and have a bigger impact.”

When first starting out online were there any roadblocks you had to overcome?

“In the coaching I do with my Yoga Healer Business Course, I’ve learned and teach that it’s all trial and error. You have to get involved in the process of really learning how to help people with what they want help with.

That sounds obvious, but it’s really not. We kind of have this idea of what people want. A lot of yoga teachers think people want to learn yoga, but it’s just not that true; they want the benefits that come from the practice of doing yoga over time. They might just want to get out of back pain, or have a yoga butt!

You just don’t know what people really want unless you get into that conversation with them and try to figure out what they’re showing up for, and when you know what they really want and you can deliver that consistently, and you can take them places they never thought they could go before and show them what’s next, they start to attract more and more people to your business.

So, I feel like I fell into the pitfall that most people do which is selling yoga, rather than selling real solutions. Learning what people really want continues to be one of the biggest lessons.

 Can you explain what Ayurveda is and how it can help create balance?

“Ayurveda comes  from “āyuḥ” meaning “life, and “vedaḥ,” meaning “to know and to study.” To me, it means taking a whole other look at our biology. When you look at studying life, you ultimately ask, “who I am and how can I show up in the world.”

From this perspective, we can start to understand how our physiology works and what optimizes it. When we step into collaboration with our body, and we start to step into a relationship with the highest level of consciousness that we’re currently capable of, all of a sudden things change.

You start to notice things like, “when I eat this it makes me feel good. When I eat this in this time of season at this time of day, it makes me feel bad.”

So, Ayurveda is really understanding, from the inside out and the outside in, how to be deeply connected with out own physiology and the life force itself, and it will always bring us into deeper connectivity with others. The side benefit of all that, is health and longevity, and that we shift, grow, and change.”

 Any tips on simple things we can do to start incorporating Ayurveda into our routines?

“This seems sort of obvious, but going to bed early is probably the biggest things you can do for yourself.

  I co-teach a class called Healthier Hormones, and we look at the best routines to reverse stress. Fatigue creates a stressful environment in the physiology, and most people are fatigued.

Most people aren’t in a natural sleep rhythm. They’re taking pharmaceuticals to simply help them sleep, but the kind of sleep you get on them isn’t nearly as deeply qualitative as a natural deep sleep cycle. One thing i’ve found through the hundreds of women in that course, is that when people start to get the sleep that they need, so much else just falls away.

A lot of people just don’t have a routine that helps them tap into their natural sleep cycle. Say you’re a typical westerner and you eat your biggest meal at the end of the day; your sleep cycle is totally interrupted by your digestive cycle. A lot of the blood is going to your digestive track instead of going to repair and renew various issues in other cells that need attention.

It’s a big routine issue problem. In Ayurveda, a basic rule of thumb is to eat three hours before you sleep.

Overtime, as you start to become rested and get in a cycle of going to bed and eating earlier, you start to naturally start waking up earlier. Now you have time before dawn to get in some mind-body practices, like meditation and movement, that can start to change your physiology, giving you the deep anti-aging, longevity tools that Ayurveda is totally obsessed with.”

How do you manage running your business and still have time for self care and your daily routine?

“If i don’t do the very basic stuff to take care of myself like going to bed early, waking up early, doing basic self care practices, eating a big meal in the middle of the deal, a lighter, earlier dinner- if I don’t do those things, Yoga Healer tanks. I can’t diss that for Yoga Healer, or Yoga Healer won’t thrive.

I think it’s really important to know the absolute minimum things you have to do every day in order to thrive. With that, my body doesn’t have aches or pains, I don’t feel fatigued, I’ve got great energy all day, I’m in a great mood, I love my life and my business! That, to me, is baseline.

Everyone has to figure out their own, and it changes throughout the phases and cycles through your life, but be honest with yourself and make your business work around that.

  Also, drop all the cultural baggage specific to your paradigm. I’m in the yoga paradigm where they say you should do yoga an hour a day, meditate an hour a day, Pranayama for fifteen minutes; that’s two hours and fifteen minute practice, I don’t have that much time, I have a five year old! So, know that, make it work for you, and check in with yourself if things change.”