Why I Brought Yoga to the Office (And What Happened)

A founder’s origin story (featuring a storage closet, a pencil skirt, and the best 10 minutes of my career)

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I didn’t start with a grand vision. I started in a storage closet.

It was a Wednesday morning in October of 2010. I was moving boxes and chairs outside the storage closet of a 10-person tech startup. A friend of a friend said a startup needed a yoga teacher. I said yes before she finished the sentence. There was enough floor space for about four mats, three for whoever wanted to join, and one for me. I wasn’t at the stage of teaching where students could only follow my direction. I had to demonstrate and walk them, and myself, through the sequence.

Teddy, one of the tech engineers, helped me move the boxes and chairs. It was just after 9 AM, aka “yoga time,” which eventually became my morning mantra at that office. Teddy poked his head outside the storage closet door to see if he could find any of his 9 other colleagues. “They’ll come eventually,” was all he said. It was just Teddy and me in a storage closet. Not awkward at all.

About 10-minutes later, Monica runs in, giving a full breakdown of her morning commute and why she’s late, along with a testimonial about how much she loves yoga. Right behind her is James, who has the posture of a person who has been hunched over a screen for so long that his body has simply accepted it as the default shape of a human. He is also 23. I thought: this is exactly who needs yoga but would never come to a studio class. And then I thought: how the hell does someone so young have the posture of a shrimp?

That gap between who yoga could help and who yoga was actually reaching became the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about.

The Studio Problem Nobody Talks About

Before Office Yoga, I taught in studios. Beautiful spaces, expensive class fees, a population of people who were already pretty well off, and who were using yoga to stay that way. I had regulars, like Jessica, who wanted to perfect an Instagrammable backbend. There were the once-a-weekers, like Mark, who wanted to prevent their hamstrings from seizing up in their next triathlon.

I’ll never forget Eve, a young law school student who came to the 8 PM evening classes so she could sleep better at night. Eve eventually graduated, got a high-paying job at a law firm, and then left to become a yoga and fitness instructor. She invited me to one of her classes, and I had an unusual proud yoga/mama moment.

Teaching studio classes was easy, and I loved them. I still love them. But I kept noticing a pattern. The people who showed up to class were the ones who already had bandwidth. They had 90 minutes free on a Wednesday evening. Looking for metered street parking didn’t deter them. They had activewear. They had already decided yoga was for them.

Everyone else, the people white-knuckling through back-to-back meetings, the ones eating lunch at their desks, the people who went home too exhausted to do anything but make dinner for the family and collapse, they weren’t there. They were the ones who actually needed it. I don’t say this to criticize studio yoga. I say it because it pointed me toward a question that I couldn’t let go of: what if we brought the practice to them, instead of waiting for them to come to us?

The First Time I Taught in a Boardroom

My first Desk Yoga was not Instagram-worthy. The session was meant to be a break during an all-day manager’s meeting at Wells Fargo. I waited eagerly in the hallway, looking out the 9th-story window, trying to ground myself. The presentation before mine ran 20 minutes over, leaving me with 10 minutes to teach a 30-minute session.

The room smelled faintly of carpet and windows that couldn’t be opened. Half the attendees were there because their boss had told them to stay. One woman, Sandra, was wearing a pencil skirt and high heels that could cut through all nine floors. She looked uncomfortable before we even started, but I guess I would be, too, if I were Suran wrapped in tweed. We did seated cat-cows. Then, I moved to chair twists. We did the most basic breathing exercise I knew: Calming Breath, four counts in, four counts out.

At the end, the woman in the pinheeled shoes walked up to me. I braced.

“My lower back hasn’t felt like that in years,” she said. “Can I get the name of that breathing thing?”

That was it. That was the whole moment. She didn’t become a yoga devotee. She didn’t sign up for a studio membership. But something shifted in 10 minutes with a borrowed room and no mat, and she noticed. I noticed that she noticed.

I walked out of the building and thought to myself, I don’t know what that was, but it’s something. That moment planted a seed. The next year tried very hard to kill it.

What I Got Wrong in Year One

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Let me save you some trouble. I thought corporate wellness was about yoga. It’s not. It’s about outcomes. HR managers don’t care if employees find their breath; they care if their team reports lower stress, fewer sick days, lower medical claims, and better focus. Data on employees’ well-being matters more than an employee’s actual well-being. If it doesn’t make sense to you, you’re not alone. I had to learn to translate. “Seated pigeon is a great hip opener” became “this counteracts what 6 hours of sitting does to your posture and pain levels.” Same thing, different language, completely different reception.

I also thought companies wanted more. More sessions, more variety, more content. They don’t. They want simple, repeatable, easy-to-say-yes-to. My best-selling offering was eventually a 20-minute weekly Desk Yoga series. Twenty minutes, twice a week. I fought that instinct for over a year before I accepted it.

And I also thought I should dress like a yoga teacher: leggings, tank top, barefoot (see the cringy photo from the Boardroom session). What actually worked was being quasi-professional and looking like everyone else in the office: slacks, scarf, shoes on. Showing up looking like the rest of the office made employees feel like they could do it, too.

The lesson underneath all three: leave your yoga teacher identity at the door. Walk in as a professional who happens to know how to breathe.

Fifteen Years Later

Fifteen years later, I’ve worked with hundreds of companies, trained a steady flow of teachers, and built Office Yoga into a place where yoga professionals can learn the specific, tailored, wonderful craft of bringing this practice into the workplace. Some of those early students became regulars and are now friends. I’ve been to their weddings and baby showers. Some companies I pitched in year one became clients in year five, after their wellness budgets opened up. Sandra, the pencil skirt from Wells Fargo, eventually brought me to her next company, a Credit Union I still work with to this day, nine years later. She still has the posture of someone who spends a lot of time at a desk. But she’s lighter on her feet and breathes differently now. I notice.

The gap is still there. Most of the people who need yoga the most will never walk into a studio. But more of them are getting wrist circles in conference rooms, Calming Breath before presentations, and a Desk Yoga sequence that actually addresses what sitting all day does to a human spine. That’s what I’m here to share with you, not the polished version of how this works, but the real one. The version with the carpet smell and pencil skirt. The version where it works anyway.