The Practice of Staying: How Priya Chaphekar Found Her Path and Keeps Finding It

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."

Priya is the founder of Priyog Wellness and co-founder of Mind & Mat Co., a Holistic Wellness Facilitator whose work spans yoga, sound therapy, tarot, and bodywork. But none of that came in a straight line. The mat pulled her in first. The body asked the questions. Curiosity did the rest.

Gathering Pebbles Along the Way

What strikes you immediately about Priya is that she doesn't dress her journey up. She is direct about the fact that no training fully prepares you for teaching, for people, or for running a business. "You only pick things up along the way," she says. "It's like going on a trek. You keep gathering small things as you walk, flowers, pebbles."

Much of her learning, she says, has come from observation. The more students she worked with, the more she began to understand not just bodies, but people, what they carry, what they're looking for, and sometimes, what they can't yet put into words. She studied with Indian and international teachers, attended workshops, explored props, but always returned to the same practice to refine it.

"There's no fixed manual," she says plainly. "You end up designing your own."

That designed practice today reaches more than 50 students every day. And while the numbers reflect real growth, what Priya holds onto isn't scale, it's gratitude. For her teachers, for her students, and for the fact that she is, as she puts it, still learning in the middle of it all.

The Iyengar Influence

Ask Priya who shaped her teaching most profoundly, and the answer comes without hesitation: B.K.S. Iyengar.

"He's given us the gift of approaching yoga with intelligence and support," she says. The use of props — chairs, bolsters, blocks, belts — is central to how she teaches, not as a concession to difficulty, but as a tool for deeper understanding. Her classes are, by her own description, more playful and exploratory than exhausting. The point isn't to power through; it's to stay longer, understand the posture better, and feel more centred within it.

"When the body finds alignment, the mind naturally begins to settle," she explains. In a world of shortening attention spans and performative wellness, this is a quiet act of resistance. Both Priya and her students, she notes with warmth, look forward to staying in poses, not rushing through them.

Reading the Room

One of the things that sets Priya apart is her refusal to separate what she does from who she is. Yoga led her inward, and everything that followed, sound therapy, tarot, hands-on bodywork, orbits the same centre: energy. How you're feeling. What you're holding on to. How close you are to completely falling apart.

"Not every day is a 'let's power through a strong class' day," she says. "Some days, everyone walks in half-dead, and that's my cue to pivot." Out come the essential oils. Things slow down. And often, the same people who didn't want to move end up refusing to leave.

This responsiveness, call it emotional intelligence, call it intuition, is, she says, as much a part of the job as any asana. "I teach yoga, but I also read the room, adjust, and occasionally rescue people from their own moods."

On Being a Woman in This Work

Priya doesn't frame womanhood as a barrier in her professional journey, which is itself a kind of radical honesty. If anything, she says, this path has allowed her to embrace her body more deeply: through different phases, through age, through the natural rhythms of cycles and seasons.

"There's something very empowering about that," she reflects. "It teaches you to work with your body instead of constantly trying to override it." For Priya, that isn't just a philosophy of practice, it's a way of living.

What Success Actually Looks Like

She loves it when her reels go viral. She'll admit that freely. But ask her what success really feels like, and she'll tell you about a different kind of message entirely, the student who calls two years later to say they can't imagine having anyone else as their yoga teacher. The one whose delivery felt smoother after months of prenatal practice. The one whose blood markers are finally back to normal. The one who bought a chair and a stack of blankets and is now, suddenly, obsessed with practising at home.

"Headstands are great, sure," she says. "But these are the stories I'll choose every single time."

Advice From Someone Still Figuring It Out

Priya is as candid about entrepreneurship as she is about practice. Her advice to aspiring professionals is grounded and a little blunt: don't chase Instagram trends. Choose something with depth, something that can stay with you. Read. Practice. Understand your audience.

"You can't compare your journey to someone else's because you're not speaking to the same people," she says. "You attract what you put out." And your style, she adds, won't be everyone's cup of tea, which is exactly the point. It means the right people will find you.

She also makes a pragmatic distinction that often gets glossed over in the wellness world: the difference between wanting a sustainable livelihood and chasing something large-scale. Both are valid, she says. But they are very different paths, and clarity about which one you're on matters especially at the beginning, when your work has to pay your bills before it becomes anything bigger.

At its heart, Priya Chaphekar's story is about staying on the mat, in the work, in the questions. Not because there's a finish line, but because showing up, again and again, is the practice itself. The shift from effort to effortlessness, she believes, doesn't come from doing something extraordinary. It comes from returning to the ordinary, with presence, every single day.

And somewhere in that return for Priya, and for the students who keep finding their way to her, something quietly transforms.