New Teacher Leadership Council, Reimagined Agreements, and Listening Sessions at Down Under

May 24

This human heart is a tender thing and vulnerability is hard. Down Under has spent 18 years striving to create a sustainable yoga studio model—one that supports its teachers, managers, and students. Looking back, many of the biggest steps we've achieved arose from mistakes or a feeling of embarrassment about how we were doing things. Today, I again feel the need to acknowledge, apologize, and create changes that will allow us to act with greater integrity.

In the beginning, our model was like every other 'mom-and-pop' yoga studio: unrelenting 7 days a week, dawn to dusk, and doomed to minimum wage for desk managers. We realized that yoga studios rarely generate enough revenue to escape an endless cycle of chaos. That feeling of dissatisfaction, coupled with the unethical reality that most yoga teachers are employed illegally as independent contractors (no sick days, retirement, access to healthcare, family leave), meant we had to think outside the box. We knew it would take audacious risks to create a world where our teachers enjoyed that security, but daring greatly is in our DNA.

When the issue of physical touch and consent arose, I felt ashamed that we'd provided no way for our students to indicate if they wanted to be adjusted. Our students called us out on the trauma inflicted by a system that assumed consent by the student to be touched. From that critique, we developed a system where students can indicate consent. Further, we have all had to confront and act on the racial injustices created by our system and the lack of diversity in yoga. The need to right this blatant wrong led us to begin to diversify our faculty, management, and staff. We doubled our scholarships, as well as started inclusivity trainings and social justice programming. We have such a long way to go in these areas and the discomfort continues, but we took positive steps when we listened to critique.

In each chapter, change arose from the vulnerable feeling of admitting our actions did not align with our ethics. I find myself examining another painful admission, namely that the employment agreement we created in 2010 feels punitive, overreaching, and contains clauses that make people afraid. I'm embarrassed and I am very sorry. I'm most sorry for personally causing pain to people who have worked at Down Under and others who were impacted. I am deeply sorry for the hurt I caused and ashamed for not responding before now. I know apologies must also be accompanied by action, so we are once again changing and evolving to be better aligned with our ethics.

We are instituting a teacher-led leadership initiative to re-envision and re-write our employment agreement. Our first-ever Teacher Leadership Council will oversee all major decisions at our school, shaping our school's agendas, codes of ethical conduct, and more, as we move into our next exciting chapter. At monthly meetings, I and the other leaders of Down Under will hear priorities important to the teachers and be held to account for Down Under's decisions. I am deeply honored to share that Down Under's Leadership Council is comprised of well-respected leaders in the yoga field and lead teachers from every school at Down Under:

Iyengar: Patricia Walden, Nadja Refaie and Donna Gross Javel

Flow & Hot Power: Natasha Rizopoulos, Kate Heffernan, Larisa Forman, Jojo Flaherty, Gregor Singleton, Braxton Rose, Brittney Burgess, Michael Ponte

Restorative: Kate Robinson, David Magone, Sabbi Lall, Stephen Gresham,

Movement: Ashley Mitchell, Meredith Evangelisti and Susan LoPiccolo

Ayurveda: Claire Este-MacDonald & Kim Povey

Ashtanga: Didi von Deck Prenatal: Char Willingham

Desk Team Teachers: Kyle Morgan and Jennifer Juenemann

A smaller faculty-led Rewrite Committee within the Leadership Council will help rewrite our employment agreement with input from every teacher in the school. True partnership between studio and teacher means abandoning any sense of a one-sided agreement where teachers feel controlled, manipulated, or disadvantaged. This partnership will govern our next chapter moving forward and set the stage for sustainable growth for Down Under and its faculty and staff.

Additionally, beyond contracts, we begin a weekly Listening Session next week where I and teacher leaders will be at our Brookline studio every Tuesday from 8-9pm. We warmly invite everyone— other studio owners, former or current employees, current students, managers and teachers—to join us to dialogue, share experiences, give feedback and critique us to help make us better. I am also happy to come to meet you wherever you are in MA. Do you run a small business? A yoga teacher trying to figure out a way to create a sustainable career? Labor activists? We want to hear from you. Are you a student who has great ideas to share or just want to give your opinion, please join us. Are you a studio owner doing wonderful things for your teachers, please share. Former employees who feel hurt, please allow me to learn from my mistakes and hear you. If you don't feel comfortable coming to Brookline, I'll come to you.

It's no secret that in 18 years I have never responded to social media. Social media relies on a type of dialogue never intended to evolve true understanding or healing. As teachers, we all know that healing requires two people willing to actually talk and listen to each other. For those genuinely interested in communicating, healing, and reimagining better teacher-studio scenarios that will shape this industry, come and chat with us in our Listening Sessions. Alternatively, my personal cell phone is 617-833-0848 and my info is always available at the front desk. If this is really about your personal relationship with me, then I am happy to talk personally and make amends. But that cannot be through social media. Conflating my personal flaws with Down Under, however, is wrong and only hurts yoga teachers and the students that study with them. That is something neither my personal critics nor any one of us should abide.

I am not Down Under School of Yoga. Down Under is much bigger than one person. We have amazing teachers who have dedicated their lives to sharing their ideas about yoga. We have incredible management and staff that create the space for us to all concentrate on our practice. We have beautiful students who are old and young, strong and vibrant, intelligent and kind. Down Under has helped thousands of people find the beauty of yoga. I am proud of all the teachers, management, staff, and students that make Down Under a truly special place to teach and learn. As its leader, however, it is time I rise up and match their impeccable character. I have not always met that challenge. I look forward to creating this new world with you all and cannot wait to see your smiling faces again as we all start to gather again and welcome each other back to the studios. Many great things emerge from the simple act of acknowledging where we've been wrong. And in 18 years of helping to build this incredible community, I've seen time and time again how owning and apologizing for areas of ethical misalignment then births an evolution of something incredible. So in the most sincere way, I am indebted to and deeply grateful for all those who genuinely prompted this moment and change. Thank you for the courage to share your truth, how it impacted you, and why it needed to change.

With much gratitude,

Justine

Justine Wiltshire Cohen

Australian-born Justine Wiltshire Cohen is known for her warmth, humor and lucid instructions for opening the body. Justine was introduced to yoga and the cultures of the East by her journalist parents, who taught English to Tibetan monks in the Dalai Lama’s community. While her parents resent that her law degrees have culminated in a career as a yoga teacher, Justine claims they remain entirely to blame for having hauled her as a child to far-flung places and forced her to examine how “every man is an island” when she should have been allowed to watch TV and eat food that wasn’t salad related.

After law school, Justine worked in international human rights, spending “crazy hours doing good” while neglecting her own body. She decided to experiment with “cleaning house” before resuming her attempts to fix humanity and thus began a journey of study with many remarkable teachers of meditation, psychology, and yoga. She, like many of our other teachers, stands on the shoulders of giants, including Dr. Sandra Parker in Vancouver, John Schumacher in Washington, D.C., and Patricia Walden in Boston.