We were lucky to catch up with Daniel Max and Sejal Shah recently and have shared our conversation below.
Daniel and Sejal, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.
Our efforts to run a yoga studio that promotes equity and community care has required us to take some big risks within an expensive and highly competitive market, especially during the tumultuous times of the Covid19 pandemic.
Affordability is often a great concern for people who want to practice yoga. Since opening our studio doors in 2012, supporting financial accessibility to yoga has been part of our vision. We didn’t want money to dictate who could and couldn’t take part in our community. From the beginning our offerings always included discounted community classes and work-study opportunities. In March 2020, at the start of the pandemic, it felt important to make the practice of yoga available to anyone who needed it. At a time when we were all experiencing such unimaginable loss – of normalcy, jobs and stability, loved ones, and the ability to safely be together – it was the moment to serve our community. Yoga is so much more than a physical fitness modality, it is an age-old system designed to aid us in navigating hardship, cultivating joy, and alleviating suffering. We wanted to ensure people had access to these teachings at any cost.
The day after the government mandated shutdown closed our physical doors, we transferred all our classes to livestream and introduced a Pay What You Can sliding scale – $0-$20. Five months later we had a better understanding of the prolonged realities of the pandemic and its impact on our bottomline. We shifted to a tiered pricing structure, committing to maintaining increased accessibility and equity while tending to the viability of our small local business. Providing these subsidies was a huge financial risk, especially at a time when we had lost all profitability and watched many other independent local studios like ours permanently close their doors.
There is no documentation necessary to access our tiered pricing. It is entirely based on an honor system, and applies to all of our offerings: classes, workshops, and professional trainings. Over the past two years, this change has not only supported people’s practice, but also fostered new career paths and financial livelihoods through our professional yoga teacher training. In addition to our tiers, we established an optional 50% discount available to practitioners who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. We don’t assume that all who identify as BIPOC require or want financial support to access yoga. For those who do, we see this as a step our business can take towards offering reparations within a healthcare system that has predominantly failed communities of color.
It was obviously a huge risk to reduce our rates at a time when our entire industry was shifting, our business was struggling, and other yoga studios around us were closing. Thanks to the dedication and hard work of our entire team as well as the ongoing support of our ever-growing community, we made it through the first two years of the pandemic and have plans to build out a third studio room this year.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
We, studio co-owners Daniel Max and Sejal Shah, opened our doors at JP Centre Yoga in 2012. As the founders, we built the studio with a vision of a community space that reflects the diversity of our home neighborhood and holds reverence to the ancient roots of Yoga.
Daniel (he/him) – I grew up Jewish in Jerusalem with Israeli citizenship. My father and step-mom lived in India during my childhood and I was fortunate to visit several times. Consequently, my first introduction to yogic philosophy was through Hinduism and Buddhism in my teenage years. I returned to India in my early 20s as a backpacker and began to study more formal practices of meditation and yoga. After 2 years of backpacking, in 2003, I came to the US and received certifications as a shiatsu practitioner, massage therapist, nutrition and holistic health counselor and yoga teacher. I’ve been teaching yoga since 2005.
Sejal (she/her) – I am Indian-American and my parents immigrated to the US in the early 70’s. I pursued a medical education and am currently an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School in the Department of Radiology. I discovered a passion for yoga many years ago while on a trip to Rishikesh India and sought to find a regular practice at a neighborhood studio when I returned. I gravitated towards the larger yoga studio where I was blown away by the high quality of instruction which added a new exciting dimension to my “western medicine-based” understanding of anatomy. The community I found in the larger studios gave me friendships and experiences that I so craved. What happened next began as a daydream during shavasana to create a space like that in my local ‘hood of JP. The stars aligned and I discovered a space in the center of JP which felt destined to house a yoga studio. Co-founder, Daniel Max then entered my life through shared friends… and the rest is history. Over the last 10 years, a community has formed at JP Centre Yoga around the practice of yoga that has far exceeded my imagination of what was possible.
Our studio has a team of 30 highly skilled teachers who offer a variety of class styles – from heat building vinyasa flow, to structural alignment, to nervous system nourishing restorative practices. Many teachers come from different yoga schools and share the particular perspectives of their lineage, and our students often comment that they appreciate the variety. As a studio we have designed our offerings to incorporate the diverse voices of our teachers, and meet every individual where they are at in their yoga practice. As a school of yoga, we offer a 200 Hour Foundations Yoga Teacher Training, a 300 Hour Advanced Teacher training, a 25 Hour Restorative Yoga Teacher Training, and a 35 Hour Trauma-Informed Yoga Therapy Training.
Beyond the physical practice that yoga is associated with today, Yoga is an entire system, millenia old with deep roots in India, designed to promote equanimity of mind and clarity in action. As students of this practice ourselves, our approach to running a studio is both a material and a spiritual undertaking, and we are continuously reconciling how our small independent business can survive in a market economy while holding true to the yogic values that we strive to apply and live by.
One of our missions is to make yoga more inviting to a wider range of people. As a queer, BIPOC, and immigrant owned small business, our goal is to be a studio by and for practitioners from all walks of life. We are committed to being an organization and community that keeps its eyes open to the realities of the modern day world and stays anchored in the timeless teachings of Yoga. These teachings offer us a universal view and provide the tools to engage with our own human nature, and a path out of suffering toward self-realization. Our pursuit is to bring these two realities of the modern day world and the timeless teachings into union as a lifelong practice.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Running a business in 2020 felt like flying the plane as we built it. The ongoing restructuring of our business that was necessary during the pandemic required us to remain resilient despite ongoing, fast paced change. Especially considering that Covid-19 shook up our entire industry and threatened to permanently close our doors. Some changes were imperative, such as shifting to livestream, and others like providing tiered pricing, were by choice. We had to build the technical systems necessary to run a virtual yoga studio and our team of teachers had to develop the skills to teach effective online classes overnight. Due to changing state and city regulations, we had to restructure our services and policies numerous times.
We are very fortunate to work in our field, with a team of peers who all have cultivated resilience through their yoga practice. Yoga can help manage stress more effectively and restore balance to the nervous system. The practice promotes emotional resilience. It normalizes change and hardship and provides the tools to recover from hardship.
Much of our resilience is thanks to the practice of yoga. One of its central teachings is to put in the effort without any attachment to a particular result. Essentially, the practice asks us to surrender to the unknown. While we certainly make plans and form strategies, letting go of the fruits of our actions reduces the stress associated with expectation for reward.
Fortunately, things worked out well for us. Thanks to our proficiency in live streaming, the demand for it remains high today. Our entire class schedule is now hybrid and available in-person, via livestream, or as recorded playback. Our members often express how much they appreciate the flexibility these options provide them in maintaining their practice regardless of location or circumstance. And when it comes to tiered pricing, we have successfully created a community model that reinforces communal care.
The story surrounding resilience can always change, depending on the day or year. Thankfully the practice has the tools to cultivate resilience, both within the individual and a collective.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
It probably sounds redundant, but the pandemic was obviously a massive pivoting moment for us. In the first weeks of March 2020, we had to regularly assess and reassess how our studio could safely and responsibly exist, doing our part to flatten the curve and still provide opportunities for our student base to practice and stay connected with us. Within a span of 1-2 weeks, we went from reducing the class schedule, to sanitizing everything, to spacing out mat spots and masking, to removing all props, to a full studio shut down. We sent out a newsletter with new regulations every couple of days. When it became clear that a total shutdown was inevitable, we created an entire online yoga studio and schedule – overnight. We locked our physical doors at 8pm on a Monday and by 9:30am the next morning, we were teaching the first livestream class. Our doors stayed closed to the public for 14 months and all classes were offered online, something we never thought we would do. Once we started to reintroduce in-person classes, we kept the livestream option to offer a hybrid model. People can now attend class in-person or online, or sign up to receive a recording of their favorite classes so they can take them at a time that best works with their schedule, something people really love!
In the face of the pandemic and the impact that it had across our community and far beyond, we were committed to making our online classes financially accessible to everyone. Because we could not know the progressive and ongoing ripple effects the pandemic had, all classes were available on a sliding scale to every person, $0 to $20. .We also gave everyone the option to freeze their memberships for up to 15 months, when we restarted in-studio classes.
2020 was also the year we expanded our programming in service of racial equity in Yoga. Our studio had been working in partnership with Yoga Diversity Initiative since 2015 to offer full scholarships to People of Color in each cycle of our 200hr Teacher Training. In 2017 we added an additional scholarship path to anyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, interested in teaching yoga in communities that have little to no access to the practice. These educational pathways evolved once again when, having felt the impacts of the 2020 Movement for Black Lives, we realized we needed to do more for Yoga Practitioners of Color and future teachers. We created our Fellowship Program, which offers full funding and one-on-one mentorship throughout and after training to prospective yoga teachers from Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. Developed in collaboration with our BIPOC alumni and faculty, the program provides specific support to new BIPOC teachers in order to diversify the leadership and teaching voices within the yoga industry.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jpcentreyoga.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/jpcentreyoga
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/JPcentreyoga
- Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/jp-centre-yoga-jamaica-plain
Image Credits
Photos by Korri Leigh Photography.