We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Shawna Krueger a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Shawna, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you take us back in time to the first dollar you earned as a creative – how did it happen? What’s the story?

I was sitting by the fire at the last yoga retreat I hosted when I realized that my podcast had officially brought me income. Two people were telling me that they first discovered me on Spotify, through my show, Leadership and Yoga. Although I knew my podcast was a part of selling spots in my retreats and my guided journals and courses, I had never sat face to face with people in real life telling me they took a trip across the world that could be traced back to my podcast directly. Since then I’ve had the pleasure of meeting dozens of listeners in real life who have showed up at my classes and events unexpectedly and it always makes me smile. I have also signed my first sponsorship contracts which was surreal. Three years ago I opened a document called “Podcast,” just “Podcast” no name. I put the placeholder title of Leadership and Yoga, my two favorite subjects so I could get started. I asked myself what would happen if I never missed a week. Today that document called Podcast has 597 pages. That podcast called Leadership and Yoga has 180 episodes and interviews with 70 leaders I admire. It went from 12 downloads in its first month to thousands of monthly downloads. Leadership and yoga has become my true north, what I wake up each day. I am so grateful.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I wanted to change the world when I graduated college. But I found myself sitting in a cubicle in a law firm doing work that made me question all of my dreams. I felt useless, and more than anything I felt sad. I used to sleep during all of my allowed breaks during the day, and I felt so low energy that I had to do jumping jacks in the bathroom to wake myself back up enough to be alert. I was no stranger to struggling with mental health, as I had for years, but not being connected to a feeling of purpose threw gasoline on the fire.

One day, I stumbled on the yogis of instagram. I consumed their content with a crazed thirst. They made some part of my soul come alive like never before, and even though I did yoga growing up, I never realized how magical it could be until I saw it through their eyes. In the hours I spent watching the yogis of instagram, I started to believe that I, too, could become a yogi, whatever that was. That I too, could do something different with my life than what I was doing. If they could make me feel so alive, so light, just watching them, I could certainly feel alive if one day, I became one of them. I started meditating and stretching on my breaks instead of sleeping. I started to feel better and have more energy and excitement for life. I dedicated myself fully to my practice. I dove in and finally stopped dipping my toes and doubting my path. I read Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself by Dr. Joe Dispenza and I never missed a day of getting on my mat and meditating, for many, many months. I reinvented myself right before my own eyes. I became a teacher. I taught for a year. And then, I shocked myself and quit my job to move to Puerto Rico to follow a whim of fascination with Ashtanga and Rocket yoga, and I never looked back. That was over 3 years ago now.

Even before I became a yoga teacher, my desire to change the world shifted from wanting to work in shaping policy, to dreaming of teaching yoga to world leaders and people of power and influence who impact us all with their decisions. I was distracted by my newfound love affair with teaching yoga and traveling the world until it came to a screeching halt due to a knee injury that took months to heal. It was a massive redirection out of practicing for pride, and back into what really mattered. It got me into two things that would forever change my life: breathwork and podcasting.

In addition to the knee injury, I had a nearly simultaneous “mental injury” that came in the form of experiencing poor leadership in the yoga world. At the time, I felt betrayed and let down by teachers that I looked up to as leaders, and I realized that all of the leadership skills I learned about during my time in the business world were not as prevalent in the yoga world. My podcast idea was born: Leadership and Yoga, for more yoga in leadership (what if world leaders practiced meditation?) and for more leadership in yoga (more integrity of leadership skills in yoga teachers).

Today, that mission has evolved to a new level of understanding. My podcast has grown from 12 downloads to thousands per month, and I signed my first sponsorship contract this year after nearly 2 and a half years of never missing a week of releasing episodes. When I’m not teaching, I spend most of my days writing, recording podcasts and interviewing inspiring spiritual leaders, thought leaders and yoga teachers whose stories give us the energy to follow our own dreams. In my work I focus on stories, and the feeling of awe. I believe both are the building blocks for our own inner strength. My days start by asking myself: How can I inspire yoga teachers to change the world? How can we elevate the act of teaching yoga into an act of global transformation, class by class, heart by heart?

I believe there’s a creative and transformative power lying dormant in all of us, and when left there without purpose or outlet, we start to feel how I was feeling in my cubicle: lost, anxious, and unwell. But while yoga is a path to wellness, wellness is really the starting point, not just the end goal. It is the launchpad from which we can go out into the world and share a practice that changed our own life, so that it may free others to feel the same. It is the starting point to stop focusing only on ourselves and start asking how we can make the most positive impact.

When yoga is taught with meaning, it can change the world. When it is not, it can be part of the problem. As yoga teachers, we are uniquely positioned to spend uninterrupted time with students each week in a world where focus is rare. That time to deliver our teachings is an absolute privilege, and it is a great responsibility. We are not only carrying the torch of tradition and managing our own ability to show up as leaders, but we are also opening the door for the evolution of humanity, for millions of people to see the world with more compassion, clarity, presence and energy to care about what really matters in a world drowning in what doesn’t. I am currently writing a book called The Dragonfly’s Dream that speaks to our potential, and in the meantime, I enjoy living out its truth to the best of my ability with my students, my podcasts and with my treasured group of yoga teacher friends in our self-made mastermind group, Cactus Club.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

A teacher of mine once told me something that I despised at the time. He told me to, “teach the best class ever.” I immediately felt myself shrink with fear. I felt pressure. I felt unsure how I could ever teach a class that would represent all that yoga means to me.

I had spent so many years getting straight A’s, graduating from high school as valedictorian and college as summa cum laude, that I felt terrified to fall back into the trap of wanting to be “the best.”

And yet this statement drove me to at least try to teach the best class I could. And to try it again the next week, and the next month and the next year. Somewhere along the line I grasped the true meaning of what he meant. I was making it all about me, but it wasn’t about me. It was about the students. It was about caring so deeply that I would do whatever I could. It was about caring enough to keep refining my class. It was about having the energy to do my best.

Many times, we fear those words, “the best.” We don’t want to admit that we want to be the best, but secretly we hope it will happen. That we’ll make it to that level, whatever making it means.

But it’s much more about refinement like whittling a stick to a fine point as you sit by the campfire so you can cook a marshmellow, or sanding a sculpture to perfection even if it’s made of ice and will melt in a moment.

It’s about building something that really stands on its own two feet. That makes you jump to your feet and scream, YES! And probably, some others will jump and scream with you.

For a long time when we are building something, whether it’s a yoga class, a following, or a creative endeavor, it feels like trying to build with a bunch of sticks that keep falling down.

The progress feels impossibly slow. Each thing you do crumbles time after time until you realize that first you must go down into the earth to set the foundation. You must lose the light of day as you dig down into the dark earth long before you ever expect anyone to come and admire what you’ve built.

You must put down roots. You must look down, you must go inward, you must enter the shadow and know the intensity of the dark to ever fully appreciate the light.

You must build something strong. Not a quick fix out of straw, but something out of bricks.

And to do that, you must admit that you are trying, publicly trying often, to do the best that you can, day after day.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I believe that yoga can change the world through each of the individual lives it touches. I believe that yoga teachers are able to have so much more impact on the world than we ever imagined was possible. This mission is underlying much of the yoga poetry I write and share with my listeners and students. Here is one such piece, “Yoga can be a movement, or just movement.”

Yoga can change the world, or it can be one more thing for personal gain.

Yoga can be the doorway for humanity to feel alive or the doorway to a gym of reps and sets for six packs.

Yoga can teach us to go further into our mission than ever before, or it can fall short.

It can be a cry to unite rung with love, or yet another competition to divide.

Yoga can be wrong, or it can be right.

It can awaken the part of the human spirit that dreams, or it can put us to sleep.

Yoga can be a movement, or it can be just movement.

It can be the answer, or part of the problem.

Our hope, or the reason for our despair.

Yoga can be bigger than us, or only about us.

New eyes or a costume we wear as disguise.

Our liberation, or our cover-up.

I can’t stress it enough,

Yoga can change the world, or it can stand on the side, watching, waiting for the courage to be bold, waiting to have the energy to care about what really matters in a world, drowning in what doesn’t.

Yoga can change the world,

or it cannot.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.shawnakru.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shawnakru/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnakru/

Image Credits

Leslie Avila (for the photo of me in-studio with the glass wall that says yoga on it only!)