Free Yoga in the Park!

@Cherry Tree Walk, Bowral

7.30am - every second Saturday morning during Summer

As a beginning yoga teacher, I felt like somewhat of a fraud expecting people to actually pay me to teach them yoga.  So, I felt the safest option, being new to town and all too (with at least 4 yoga studios in the area that I knew of), was to offer some sort of free yoga in the park during Summer.  I actually got this idea from my big trip!  In New York and all through Europe, I would always see either Tai Chi or Yoga scattered through parks. More specifically, the experience I had doing yoga in the park in Vienna really stuck with me and I was determined to recreate it. (Click here for Yoga in a Park in Vienna Blog) I thought it would be great to do something like this in a little Australian country town that's never had anything like that before.  This would, in turn, give me a bit of practise as a first time teacher, without the pressure of people expecting to get value for money AND introduce people to yoga who otherwise would never have the guts to walk into a yoga studio. Hey, I did yoga from a  DVD for about 3 years before I even set foot inside a yoga studio!  As a bonus, I felt it was a bit of karma yoga too. It still remains my favourite class to teach.  Being outside, under the trees, in the sunshine with ducks walking through the class and working with complete beginners, was total heaven. One of the regular students, the gorgeous Margot, who travelled half an hour just to come to yoga, would always bring me some sort of gift, be it flowers from her garden or homemade marmalade. It was just lovely. 

The logistics weren't so bad either.  Here I will outline what I did in case you'd like to do it yourself:

1)  Contact your local Council to get permissions. I had to fill out a few forms to allow me to use  that section of the park every Saturday morning over the Summer months. I also had to do a Risk Assessment of the area to ensure the yoga students were safe. Finally, I had to upgrade my Insurance to include a $20 million Public Liability Plan.

2)  Make flyers.  My friend Sammie and I then did a letterbox drop in the area surrounding the park to deliver all of my "Free Yoga" flyers. I also dropped them at most of the local cafes and shops. They looked like this:

3) Get yourself in the local paper. I contacted the Southern Highlands News to see if they would give me a free advertisement in the "Classifieds" section seeing as I was offering a free service to the community.  Little did I know that they would end up running not one, but TWO feature articles on the concept. Score! Also, hilarious.

Yay for free advertising!

I was just stoked that they put me in the "Entertainment" section!

4) "Borrow" your niece's blackboard and catch the foot traffic once classes have started.  The area where i taught yoga was right near a walking/bike path, so I placed the blackboard, with spare flyers, strategically next to it and managed to garner lots of business as a result.

My friend Nell came to every class at the beginning
until other people started turning up. What a good friend!
Also she taught me this, "one is better than none".

5) Persist! Some mornings, it would get to 7.30 and I had to make the decision to start packing up or hang around. Then I had that dilemma, which I think most yoga teachers have but often don't talk about. That whole, "Gosh, if nobody turns up, then I get to go and get myself a coffee or have breakky. I secretly wish nobody turns up now…" But, I always had at least one person arrive, so that was nice. By the end of summer, I had a maximum of 12 people, including one lady and her 3 children. It was so cool!  Also, after one free yoga sesh, I received an email from a couple of joggers who had picked up flyers on their way past after seeing us doing yoga that morning. I then ended up doing a private session for them and a couple of their friends once a week over the course of a few months.

All in all, a successful and rewarding venture and one in which I will have a repeat performance next summer. Yay for free yoga in the park!

NOTE: Jessica, my niece, now has her blackboard back. My sister told her it was "getting fixed"…for 6 months.