Kula, Culture and Community
Emma Magenta owned a successful yoga studio in New Jersey. When the pandemic hit, she saw a dire need for people to reframe their values, priorities, worklife and their lives in general, and transferred her considerable skills into becoming a certified life coach.
Emma Magenta and I have known each other for almost 20 years.
The way we met was that you were one of my very first yoga students, and I taught yoga for 20 years, starting about 21 years ago.
Yoga and life
Yoga has been a profound influence on my life. It has shaped the way I think about almost everything. It shapes the way I live my life day to day. This doesn’t mean I get up every morning, eat nothing but barley, drink decaffeinated herbal teas, and sit in meditation for forty hours. That’s not my day. Yoga has been an influence on my life in more subtle, deep, and persistent ways.
You have really embodied yoga. More than just studying it yourself, you have also held the responsibility of imparting it to other people.
Enough about me: What is your journey?
I started my professional life in the internet business, and I did that for five or six years, and at the end of that I was specifically producing websites for an advertising firm. I was feeling pretty unfulfilled by that, so I did a yoga teacher training, and I became a yoga teacher. After I’d been teaching yoga for five or six years, again, I wanted to do something to shift it a little bit, so I opened a yoga studio in New Jersey, which I owned and operated for 15 years. And then, right before the pandemic, I had decided that I wanted to shift gears and do something different. I had no idea what that was going to be; I’d been in the yoga business for 20 years.
At the height of my yoga teaching career, I was so passionate about it - it really defined me as a person - and that transition out of the yoga business was really challenging. But the pandemic gave me the opportunity. It kind of gave me an off-ramp of my yoga business. Because the business had to change so radically to accommodate covid, it became something that I could actually allow myself to think about - what I might like to do that was different. So I started training to be a life coach pretty early on in the pandemic, and now I’m a life coach full-time.
Focus: the individual
From interweb design to life coach. It’s sort of an individually-focused career, and yet you’ve always worked with people.
Oh, I never thought about it like that, but yeah, that is the truth. I mean, when I was producing websites, I ended my internet career working in an office with a team. But at the beginning of that, the way that I learned to build websites - at the time, I did a lot of that work at home. It was very ahead of its time because I was working from home at that time. And then as a yoga teacher, there is this wacky thing where you go through teacher training and you’ve got a bunch of people with you, and the person who trains you is ideally there and is present and giving you feedback. And then once you start teaching, it’s just you in a room full of people who are looking to you to tell them what to do.
And there is that sort of feeling of isolation. As a person that owned a yoga studio, I was the face of the business. My vision of the business is what drove us forward, and in some ways that felt very isolated as well. I had to really learn how to prioritize creating teams and creating community around me, because I found out in all of these different careers that I’ve had, isolation - while it was sort of the default or easiest way to approach it, I’m a little bit of an introvert - that became really problematic as time went on. I had to really learn how to reach out and create networks around me of people that could support me.
Kula: community of individuals that practice together
Early in my life in yoga, I learned this term kula, which I think of as the root word for cult, but also means the community. The studios I was drawn to had this sense of commonness; each felt like a community. And I think great teams have a sense of community about them. What is it that you think underpins a feeling of community?
Gosh, what a great question. That is something that all of my yoga endeavors emphasized, and it is something that they were known for. People used to leave reviews online that said that the thing they really loved about my yoga studio was that when you went in there, you really felt the presence of a warm community vibe. When I think about what went into creating that, one thing that comes to mind is that idea that we really tried our best - me and my husband - we really tried our best to know every student that came in the door. We really tried our best to see them. I took a lot of pride in knowing almost everybody’s name and getting almost everybody’s name down the first time that I met them. It became kind of a joke amongst my students that I really only had to hear a name once or twice before I knew it.
I would make a point before each class, even in the biggest classes that I taught - at the end I was teaching classes that were, like, 35 people - I would go around to each student at the beginning of class and I would look them right in the eye, and I would say hello, and I would take a couple of minutes and just engage with them about whatever was going on with them. I really feel like the vibe that I brought into my individual encounters with each student not only made that individual student feel seen, but then the other students in the room saw me doing it with each of them, and then they treated their neighbors with the same respect.
Culture of the community
So, you know the old saying: fish stinks from the head. [laughs] Well, what I hear with that saying is that a leader can really determine the culture of a community, for good or for ill. And I feel like when my students saw the way I treated each individual student, they learned to treat one another with that same degree of respect and warmth, and to really take the time to see one another as individuals and as human beings, to see their vulnerabilities and their strengths.
I was never a terribly hands-on boss at the yoga studio, and I really feel like the main way that I imparted culture to my team over time is the way that I showed up when I was teaching classes. I would have these interactions with my students that really allowed them to feel seen, and then the students would bring the vibe into the other classes. Everybody was learning from everybody else. These values were being embodied without me having to actually go around to each person and say, “Let’s be respectful! This is what respect looks like!” Instead, it was something that was present in every moment and every level of the community.
Culture’s a mysterious thing, right, (there’s that word cult again, by the way) because it is transmitted that way: person to person, often nonverbally. It’s intention and gesture, to a great extent. I’ve always been fascinated by is this relationship between the individual and the group. You were treating your classes as collections of individuals who you affirmed as different and unique, and yet somehow out of that arose a commonness. I just think that’s amazing. That’s almost like magic.
The magic of affirming individuals
I love the metaphors of magic, and one of the ways I think about them is that magic is something that is happening on levels that we cannot fully perceive. And I think that’s exactly what was happening at that studio and in my classes: the warmth that I brought to each encounter that I had with each student trickled out. It just sort of spread through the whole studio. And it actually took me years - because I taught yoga for 20 years.
It's not something that I was good at right from the get-go. At all. In fact, I remember this exchange I had with my husband, where my husband had been in sales his whole life; he’d grown up in a family business, so he really knew a lot about sales and customer service. One day, maybe a couple of years into owning my studio, he took me aside as we were leaving the studio and he said, “Listen, I notice that when you get done teaching, you come out into the lobby right away, and you hover around the near cubbies where your purse is, and you look like you can’t wait to get out the door, and you don’t really interact with the students that much.” And I was like, “Well, yeah. At the end of the class I'm freaking tired. I wanna collect my purse and go home.” And he said, “Well, [laughs] have you considered interacting with the students?” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” It was like a classic argument between a husband and a wife. I want to do things my own way, and I don't want you to be judging what I’m doing after class.
But on a deep level, I knew he was right. He was speaking to the values that I had as a teacher. And the values that I had as a teacher, even when I didn’t really know consciously or intellectually how to embody them, were that I wanted each student, in a very profound way, to feel this sense of being seen and respected - not just for, I don’t know, their external accomplishments, but for the spark of life that is inside of each one of us. And I knew that the way that I was acting after class, where I would kind of just sweep out and be distant from my students, wasn’t serving the deeper underlying goal or value of my yoga teaching.
So I had to learn to be different. It was a learned skill for me to know each student’s name, look them in the eye, have conversations with them that indicated that I gave a damn about them as a person, and then to be able to replicate that again and again and again with each student, even on days when I didn’t really feel like it.
Building a collaborative environment
If I were to distill a lesson for people managers out of this, it would certainly be to start with hearing and seeing the individual, as a foundation of building a collaborative environment at both the beginning and the end. I remember later in your teaching life when you walked over to someone and very quietly offered a suggestion about how they might be doing this particular pose. It was much more personal.
Yes. As time went on, my teaching became much more focused, in part because I grew in my confidence as a leader. When I first started, the way that I was trained to teach - and you were actually trained in the same school of yoga that I was trained in - my perception was that we were taught to sort of stand on one side of the room, where we could see the most students at once, and then call out any feedback that we had to the students. Like, I was trained to say, “Carlos, turn your back toes in more,” or, “Sally, bend your front knee more deeply.” “John, lift up your chest more,” right? I was trained to do stuff like that.
Then, in 2012, as you know because you and I were trained in the same school of yoga, there was this enormous…I’m going to use the word rupture or falling apart of the yoga organization that we were originally trained by and associated with. After that happened, I really had to learn what my own values were, and among the many, many things I learned is that people don’t necessarily want to receive feedback shouted across a room at them!
It seems really obvious now. And I’m sure there are situations - like, especially for your listeners who are in corporate or what have you - I’m sure there are situations where there is a benefit to other people hearing the feedback that you’re hearing, right? Maybe you’re on a team and your whole team is, I don’t know, building websites, and everybody is making the same mistakes, so you want to make sure that Sally hears what John has been doing wrong, right? I’m sure that there are cases where that’s so.
But the thing is that a yoga practice is so deeply personal. The students are having a profoundly intimate experience with themselves when they’re on the yoga mat. And so, for me to stand at one side of a room and call across to them… Over time, once I felt more liberated to step into my own values as a leader instead of embodying someone else’s ideas about how I should teach, it became more and more clear to me that I wanted to meet the students in the quietness of the intimacy of the experience that they were having with themselves, and that if that’s what I wanted to do, I needed to go across to them [lowers voice] and I needed to speak to them like this, [normal voice] instead of standing at one side of the room [raises voice] and talking to them like this!
Work from home - an intimate relationship with self
I think COVID and work-from-home stuff made this even more intense. I think when I'm at my desk doing my work, that’s also a deeply intimate thing. It’s me, myself, and I. It’s me trying to solve a problem, or answer a question, or learn something that I can then share with others. I really love that notion. You’re with yourself in a very intimate way. And I think in a work-from-home world, you can be left too much alone. You want to be left to yourself and your intimate relationship with whatever your task is, and you do want the teacher/manager/boss to come around once in a while and say, “looks like you might need some help with that; here’s a thought.” And then back away and let me have my practice again.
The intimate space of our personal relationships with ourselves, that is the source of everything that human beings have built on planet Earth. In the intimacy and the sort of…I want to use the word silence of the inside of our own heads. But all of those ideas - e = mc2, the great ideas of engineering, the great works of art and literature - all of those things come from the darkness and the intimacy of a person’s relationship with the creative spark inside themselves. This is why meditation as a practice is so effective, and why you’re seeing, more and more now, the practice of meditation being recommended for people. It’s not a thing that’s only in vogue. It’s not just for people who are spiritual. It’s not just for people who are artistic. A meditative practice can be something that serves people in technical fields.
Even, like, an attorney, a doctor, a surgeon. That inner, fertile darkness of the inside of your own being is so important to be connected to. And yet, as you point out, that can also be a very lonely and isolated place. Part of the work I’m doing now as a life coach is helping people get that internal longing and knowing and artistry and magic - get that inner magic out of themselves, because I do feel that you're 100% correct. If you're only ever in the space of your internal self, (a.) you stagnate, and (b.) I think there’s a feeling of frustration because you’re never actually seeing your inner life embodied in the outer world around you, and it can be very lonely and isolating.
The harnessing the momentum of community
All that attention on the individual, and that space that they inhabit, the internal experience they’re having, somehow still comes back to creating a sense of “we’re all in this together.” That community. I remember being in some massive classes, because when we were still studying that particular form of yoga, I’d go to workshops. I mean, 400 people spread out under a massive tent all moving together. Being in that kula, in that community - there is something magical about all these people following this direction, doing this together, very much in their own ways. That vibe of “we’re all doing this together” is magical.
I really think that’s what kept me doing yoga for 20 years, for as long as I did. Teaching yoga. All these individual people coming together and creating something new - it’s magic. It feels divine. And I think that feeling of merging with a crowd is a profoundly human experience. It’s part of what makes us who we are as a species, right? Obviously the wildebeests and the animals that move in herds, I'm sure that they have some kind of an experience like that as well. The thing that I think is interesting, as well, is how the sort of magic of being part of a crowd is something that can be used for good or for ill. When we’re talking about it in the context of a yoga class, especially a big one like that, oh, it’s almost ecstatic. It is ecstatic.
The joy of moving your body, of breathing together, it's almost beyond words how meaningful that is. One of my hobbies is that I sing in a choir. There’s all this research that’s been done that shows the positive impact on mental health of singing in a group. And you don’t have to be singing in any particularly skillful way or any particular song; it’s like, if you sing in a group, your mental health improves almost right away. Those are positive things, right?
But then, as you know, there’s also this incredibly dark side, or shadow side, of how human beings in crowds can get together, be sort of carried away by that same momentum, and really do atrocities. So, one of my lessons from 20 years in the yoga business was learning how that synergy of groups of human beings can be harnessed for good or for ill. And that I see my values on this earth, my goal for myself in this life is to make whatever contributions I can to make the organizations I’m involved with, the people I’m associated with - to move the energy of myself and the people around me as much as I can towards things that are beneficial, healing, benevolent, growthful - good, in a word.
“Nobody gets into a cult because they think it’s a cult”
It took me a while to get my head around the fact that, in those early years when I was first studying and teaching, that it was a cult.
I’ll summarize it for your listeners, using general and vague terms. Carlos and I were loosely associated with a style of yoga that had a very charismatic leader. This style of yoga had been around for decades. There were people all over the world who practiced this style of yoga, and we all looked to this one charismatic leader.
It was brilliant as a style, as an approach to yoga. It was so accessible, so affirming. It was a lovely, lovely thing to be a part of.
I always joke, “nobody gets into a cult because they think it’s a cult,” right?
They discover a cool style of yoga or what have you. So then, what happened in 2021 was that this particular leader was discovered to have been up to no good in a number of different ways, and the community really splintered about it. When that rupture happened, when the veil was parted and we realized that this leader that we had looked up to so much had actually been up to all kinds of no-good, I called my friend and we were both like, “Oh my god, it is a cult.” Outsiders had been sort of telling us for years, “there’s something about the community that’s cultish,” and we were like “What are you talking about?!”
Helping people feel seen and heard
In organizations of all types, we still tend to get drawn to the charismatic leaders, and groups form around them, and it does get a little cultish sometimes. I think my wish for those listening to this podcast who lead teams, or want to lead teams, is that your approach is much more in line with, “how can we help people feel seen and attended to?” Let the culture of your team or the climate of your team arise out of those good actions. The focus on the individual is so important because everybody is different. It’s not this undifferentiated blob of people; that’s not what a team is, right? It’s highly differentiated and needs your attention. And it doesn’t have to be braggadocious, it doesn’t have to be in front of a room with a microphone. It can be intimate, in all the healthy, positive ways.
One of your guests on your podcasts: a gentleman who had worked with the Navy SEALs.
He was talking about how, in his mind, the ideal team is single-digits. There’s a threshold of a number of people over which it’s hard to effectively have a team, and I think that’s a truism that people work with all the time in corporations, in any business. I think the issue there is that when it gets over a certain number of people, it gets harder and harder to see people as individuals instead of as an undifferentiated mass.
This is all about me - cultivating personalness
Yes, and I think it is a skill. One of the magical aspects of being in any good yoga teacher’s class is that you always feel like they’re just paying attention to you. There may be 20 other people in the room, or 30, but you always have the sense - “that comment was for me. That pose, she put that in there because I needed to work that. I needed that hip opener, I needed that hamstring stretch.” Somehow, the best leader/teacher has a way of cultivating that sense of personalness.
Willy Nelson, the singer - and apparently, Bill Clinton are very much the same way with people - you could be in an audience of 2,000, 3,000, 30,000 people, and you felt like Willy Nelson was singing right to you. When people would greet Bill Clinton in a line, it was like there was no one else there. When he walked up to you and shook your hand, it was like, “this is all about me.” And it is a skill.
I love that you’re saying that is a skill, because it 100% is a skill, and I can say that because I wasn’t that good at it when I started my career. And, like, I had to fake it. When I first started teaching - and I don’t feel any shame about this or regret about this. This is how we learn, right? You have to inhabit the space of not-knowing in order to move into the space of knowing. When I was a younger teacher, especially when I was teaching within this yoga community that was more authoritarian and cult-like, I faked it a lot. I made all the gestures, I modulated my voice in the way that I had seen my teacher do it. I was following instructions. There was a little bit of a sort of robot or automaton thing that happened.
And then as I got older and wiser and more experienced as a teacher, I was even making some of the same gestures, but the impetus behind it changed. More and more, what happened was that my vision for what I wanted for my students became clearer and clearer. More and more shit got moved out of the way. My anxiety about doing it wrong got moved out of the way. My, I don’t know, worries about my personal appearance got moved out of the way. My adherence to this particular yoga style got moved out of the way. All of these things got moved away, and instead what shone forth was the vision that I had - and I prefer to think of “vision” as being something that doesn’t necessarily come from me as an individual. The way I conceptualize my vision for my yoga students and my life coaching clients, and indeed for my life as a whole, is that it’s informed by my relationship with Spirit, by the presence of my ancestors (either in a spiritual sense or even just presence in my genes). All of these big-picture forces, even the essence of nature itself, came through me as a vision for what I wanted for my students. And what I wanted for my students was for them to love and respect themselves, to cherish their beautiful, miraculous bodies for just an hour in the middle of their crazy weeks.
That was the vision I had for them, and the more all this other stuff got moved out of the way, the clearer that vision got. So a lot of these gestures that I had been kind of just making because my teacher told me it was a smart thing to do - instead, those gestures became mine, because they were an embodiment of my value system. And I feel that that’s when my yoga teaching became really powerful.
I remember early on, when I finished my teacher training - it was 200 hours compressed into one summer - I came out feeling a lack. And that lack was kind of what you’re describing. I learned good words to say, and good places to position myself, and how to show people how to line their mats up so I could see everybody. But I didn't have what I would later dub my “yoga eyes.” I was too busy worrying about what to say and the sequence I had devised; I wasn’t really seeing what people were doing. It took me years, actually, to get to the point where I could unburden myself of all the stuff I had learned.
So well said.
You built a team of teachers at your studio. I attended classes with a few different ones. But it all felt like Emma’s studio.
Building a team of teachers
You’ve talked about how you approach students. How did you approach building a team of teachers? And…the word “brand” keeps coming into mind but it doesn’t do it justice: the way your teachers showed up.
The word “brand,” all these words we use in business, always point to - at least gesture toward - more universal truths, so I’m comfortable with the word “brand.”
To tell the truth, Carlos, I wish I could tell you that I really had some kind of a formula that helped me nail whatever it was that made my teachers carry through the vibe that I had established. As the owner of the studio and as a teacher myself, that was the part I struggled with the most as a person that owned a business - and that business was around for 15 years, it was mid six-figures business, it was very successful for a yoga studio - that was the part that I struggled with the most. I have two thoughts for your listeners about it.
Respecting the students and bring their energy into class
With what I was doing as a teacher, I trained my students how to interact with each other based on the respectful way that I treated them, then they brought that energy into the other classes. In a certain way, they ended up teaching the teachers, because I didn’t do a whole lot of training of my staff. I didn't take them away for a weekend and have a values meeting, I didn’t have long training sessions with them, but I will tell you that toward the end of my time there, there were a few things that I did do that I feel really helped engender the vibe that I wanted to create. And this goes back to something that you were saying in the beginning about how gesture and intention create culture.
Gesture transmits culture
One of the most effective ways that I trained my team of teachers is that I stopped telling them so much about what the culture was. I wrote it down and I would read it to them during our initial training session or whatever, but one of the main things I worked on with them was gesture. How they positioned themselves in the room before and after their classes. And I found that a lot of teachers, just like me, didn’t know that. They would come in one minute before their class started, they would keep their head down, walk over to the cubby, dump their bag, and then go into the room and start teaching. The thing that I found was most effective in training my staff in terms of creating the vibe - the intentional thing, right, beyond just me teaching my class - was showing them, physically, with my body, how I wanted them to position their bodies. That I was present in the space fifteen minutes before class started; I was not holding my phone, or looking at a magazine or a pamphlet; that I was sitting up, visible to my students as they entered the studio; that as they came in, I made eye contact or I waved, I asked them about themselves; and all this stuff around the gestures that I was making. And the thing is, they understood that gesture is powerful because they were yoga teachers! Really what I was teaching them was, “these are the yoga poses that a teacher does before class to foster a connection with their students.” And of all the things I did, I feel that was the most effective in transmitting the culture.
Even teams that don’t have external customers have customers inside. You want to think about - how is the experience of our team landing on those stakeholders within this organization that rely on us, that are looking to us for stuff and our time or our ideas? It’s really interesting to think about - what are the gestures that communicate who we want to be to them? I also love the other idea of infusing it in your students and letting your students sort of infect your teachers with it the other way around. Very powerful.
Yeah.
Emma Magenta, this has been fascinating. Thank you for the original thinking, and the depth of your thought about how you do what you do. For your reflections on yourself, and your values, and your behaviors, and the congruity of all that.
Thank you for making it so comfortable. I was pretty nervous before we started, but you really make a very comfortable environment for your guests. It has been such a pleasure to be associated with you in so many different roles over these 20 years.
Check out Emma’s website, HangWithEmma.com
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