3 Things You Need to Know Before Starting a Yoga Festival
I’ve heard it said that the studio model of yoga is “outdated.”
I don’t know about that. I still love the feeling of walking into a much-loved yoga room, where I know the teachers and regulars, and can sit in stillness without social anxiety, pressures of comparison and judgment. Where I can just be in my practice, contented.
Nonetheless, Bend Oregon has seen many studios come and go, and all of them were wonderful. Just recently, we lost The Yoga Lab, which for seven years had offered some of the most highly skilled instruction in the area.
As the footprint made by studios continues to evolve, the imprint made by outdoor experiences of yoga seems to be increasing. From pop-up outdoor classes to yoga combined with other outdoor activities – to yoga festivals – moving yoga out of the studio and into other spaces is now, I think, becoming the norm.
Since the pandemic, there’ve been three new yoga festivals in the western US just that I know of. Our own, the Bend Yoga Festival; a new festival in Southern California focused on Bhakti and kirtan, the Bhakti Love Reunion, and most recently, the Teton Yoga Festival out in eastern Idaho.
For anyone thinking about starting a yoga festival, here’s what I’ve learned about the process.
1. Location is everything.
Not everything exactly, but it certainly matters as much as the yoga teachers who present your festival sessions.
Of the regional yoga festivals in the west, Mammoth Yoga Festival, Telluride Yoga Festival, and Sedona Yoga Festival (and of course the Bend Yoga Festival!) are all situated in stellar environments with exceptional access to outdoor activities and adventure. This is important. With the continued expansion of yoga instruction, especially online, a yoga festival that offers only yoga instruction may not be as competitive as it needs to be. Excellent yoga can be found online through most brick and mortar studios, and on YouTube from amazing teachers at no cost. What can your location offer that would appeal to yogis, and also take them out of the stressors of everyday life?
Another aspect of location that matters is how close the yoga festival is to a transportation hub. Making it easy to get to your festival removes barriers to attending — travel hassles, extra flights, more expense — barriers that might just keep someone from buying a pass. If your location is near a major, but small, airport, you’ve maximized the value of the setting of your festival. The Bend Yoga Festival for example is just 30 minutes from a very small but international airport, ensuring yoga fest attendees from out of the area can get to Bend quickly and with a minimum of hassle.
It’s also helpful to choose a festival location that is to a certain extent already sought-after. Sedona is known for its energy vortex, red cliffs, and great spas. Telluride is known for its skiing and mountains. The Asheville Yoga Festival, now called Love Shine Play, happens amid a thriving arts scene. In short, it’s got to be in a place where people already want to be.
So choose your yoga festival location carefully – make sure it’s a beautiful place, with lots of outdoor recreation and natural beauty and away from the stressors of big cities. But also close enough to big cities that your attendees can arrive at your yoga festival with ease and relatively stress-free.
2. It will take a village, as many villages as you can find.
Like location, the partnerships you forge with others could make or break your yoga festival. Early on in my planning process, before I could even imagine reaching out to yogis like Sianna Sherman, Christina Sell, or Kia Miller to invite them to teach, I consulted a business coach. I had no budget for it but knew it was important.
I got some excellent advice from her, which I’m happy to share: she said,
For every decision you make, I want you to ask yourself, ‘How am I involving the community in this?’
Accordingly, keep these questions in mind as you begin to plan your yoga festival:
Who can you loop in?
Who will be passionate about helping the festival succeed?
Whom do you know who could teach at it? Market it?
Where will you find volunteers, and how will you mobilize their efforts?
What relationships do you have with nearby yoga studios?
And most importantly – how will your efforts bring your local yoga community together?
When you begin to think about your festival from this perspective, you’ll find new and exciting ways to grow your festival, and it will be even more fun to bring it to life.
3. The yoga festival you create isn’t a part of you, and it doesn’t belong to you.
For women especially I’ve heard that we tend to become enmeshed in our businesses, and for me, this was very true early on. I thought of the fest as my soul in festival form. (Goofy, maybe, but that’s really how I felt.)
But in conversation with a friend who had the courage to call my attention to this enmeshment, I was blessed with another amazing piece of advice that instantly changed my relationship to “my” yoga festival. She said that the Bend Yoga Festival is “a living breathing creature and it will take its own shape and form. It’s its own entity, its own being.”
From that point forward I was able to drop my attachment to the outcome of my planning and vision, and more fully embrace the fact that the festival is in fact a co-creation. It’s created by the people who attend and experience it, by the teachers who create magic in sessions, by the vendors, sponsors, and by the very community that holds it. The fest is created by what happens in the sessions between teacher and students, what happens in brief interactions between attendees, in moments big and small.
Any festival belongs to all those who feel pulled to it and respond to the beauty it holds and has the potential to offer. Being a part of creating something that has already impacted lives for the better – something that offers growth, refuge, companionship, camaraderie and joy – well, that’s something worth doing. No ownership required.
Learn more about visiting Bend Oregon and our upcoming yoga festival!