At some point in almost every new student's journey, there is a moment of quiet embarrassment. The teacher offers a block, or suggests a chair, or brings over a belt, and something in the student's face shifts. A small tightening. A reluctant acceptance.

People come to yoga with very specific hopes. A longer hamstring. A flatter stomach. A back that stops complaining every time they get out of a chair. Valid reasons, all of them. But a year in, those are rarely the things anyone is still talking about.

One evening she stayed back. I was rolling up a bolster when she said it, not quite to me, not quite to herself: "I don't know why I keep coming. The poses are fine. But something is supposed to be happening, and it isn't."

There is a cue that gets passed down through yoga teacher trainings like a family heirloom. Every teacher uses it. Every student has heard it. And for the longest time, I used it too, without question, because it sounds right. It sounds wise. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing a yoga teacher should say.

What I eventually came to see is that this conversation about money, about comparison, about why someone else is cheaper, is almost never really about money. It is about timing. And timing, it turns out, is something no business coach will teach you.

There's a version of this story that starts with a teacher training certificate and ends with a tidy, "and then I began teaching." Priya Chaphekar's story isn't that one. "More than how I got into yoga," she says, "I'd say I just stayed long enough for it to change how I see everything."

Beyond Numbers: The True Essence of Teaching Yoga There’s no quick formula for filling your yoga classes. No guaranteed method to ensure...