I first met Bobbi Paidel in 2022, when she joined the Blissful Biz Incubator right as she was moving from being a lifelong student of yoga into teaching it. Today she’s a yoga teacher from Canada with more than 20 years of study in yoga, meditation and non-dual philosophy, she splits her time between Sweden and India, and she shares her work through classes, retreats, an online membership and her podcast A Curious Yogi. In this episode we talked about what it has really taken to build all of that, including the parts that didn’t work.

Making Peace With Earning Money From Yoga

Like so many yoga teachers, Bobbi found it uncomfortable at first to earn money from something so personal. What helped her was seeing money as energy that supports not only her own freedom to practise and study but also the freedom of others. She believes it’s important for yoga teachers to know that what they share has real value, rather than giving it away for free because they love it.

A Podcast at the Centre of It All

When we talked about long-form content in the Blissful Biz Incubator, Bobbi knew a blog wasn’t for her, so I suggested a podcast. She had it running within a few weeks and is now halfway into her fifth season. Many of her retreat guests in India and Scandinavia found her through the podcast first, and it has grown into a membership with a monthly satsang that listeners from all over the world have joined for three years. One member even pays every month without coming to class, simply to support what Bobbi is building.

She’s also really relaxed about the slow burn. Inspired by the Bhagavad Gita, she focuses on taking right action and trusting the results will come, and she lets herself experiment without needing everything to be perfect.

From “Yoga Is for Everybody” to Sincere Seekers

Finding her niche was hard for Bobbi because her first instinct was that yoga is for everybody. But teaching her closed 90-minute advanced groups felt so much more joyful than teaching mixed-level studio classes, and when she asked herself what she had been missing when she started out, the answer was a community for deeper conversations. Today she speaks to sincere seekers, she interviews people before they join a retreat, and many of them come back again and again.

What Didn’t Work

Behind the scenes, Bobbi has tried plenty that didn’t suit her. A yoga collective she built in Sweden ended with her earning very little and hitting the wall, and in the early days she taught English online to children in China to make ends meet. She also shared that she had only five people registered for her retreat in Norway two weeks before it started, and how she chose to approach it as if it were sold out.

Looking ahead, she wants to grow her online membership and teach more classes online, while making more time for her own study. In her words, she’s working towards working less but earning more.

CONNECT WITH BOBBI PAIDEL

Website: https://bobbipaidel.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bobbipaidel/