The company I work with (Yoga Yoga) was started with a commitment to bring more yoga into the world. Mehtab, Guru Karam and Kewal Kaur were looking to teach and to share. Making money was not primary, but it was important...they did have to pay the rent, and pay utilities, and eventually anyone who would wind up working at the company. In short, they were small enough to decide to care, rather than focus on making money. Their decision, and theirs alone.
However, as Yoga Yoga has grown, we now have different constraints, different needs, and different demands. Instead of 3 folks, other jobs, and no employees, we now have over 150 people who earn money from Yoga Yoga each month, and 4 landlords to pay rent to, and many many other bills. Now, we get to focus each day on 'can we care'? Can we make the decision to care on an equal (or sometimes senior) footing to 'is this profitable'?
Riane Eisler's newest book (she wrote the Chalice and the Blade) , The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, altering the value we place, as a society, on caring work. Here's a quote:
An economics based on caring may seem unrealistic to some people. Actually, it’s much more realistic than the old economic models, which strangely ignore some of the most basic facts about human existence..In some ways, Yoga Yoga is simply an experiment in economics...'is it possible, on a level scaled up from a one room studio, to offer a high quality experience of yoga - steeped in lineage, respectful of all, honoring of tradition, yet accessible to all levels of students - AND be economically viable?
I say it is audacious to try, but it makes our work teaching yoga to thousands of people each week a joy and an adventure. As a team, those of us who work at Yoga Yoga know that we can put caring above profit (as long as we are skillful enough to succeed), and that we are working with a group of folks who are committed to seeing if we can make this work. We are really a bunch of audacious yoga-economists!
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