Finding a Founder — Ann Marie Johnston from YogaMate
Every Wednesday the residents of Inspire9 Richmond slap on some sunscreen, put on their sunnies, grab a yoga mat and make their way up to the rooftop of the AKM building. They‘re in for a blissful mid-week breather with Ann Marie Johnston, the founder of YogaMate, who presents yoga for members of the Inspire9 community.
Anelia Heese, our General Manager and yoga newbie, caught up with Ann Marie to talk about the transformative impact this health practice has had on her own life.
What is YogaMate?
Ann Marie: YogaMate is a marketing and educational platform for yoga specialists.
YogaMate has two sides to it: one is YogaMate Pro, which provides professional tools and resources that help therapists better carve their niche, connect with their students and market their services. Then there’s YogaMate.org which is an educational resource for the public and healthcare community; helping expand knowledge of the depth, breadth and therapeutic application of yoga.
Anelia: That’s an interesting way of doing it.
Ann Marie: Well, YogaMate was originally developed to provide a drag & drop tool to help yoga teachers create and share their class plans. However, as I was researching the market I saw how yoga is often portrayed almost solely as a physical pursuit. It became vital that YogaMate should serve as a platform to create public awareness around the therapeutic benefits of yoga.
If you can breathe, you can practice yoga. That’s why YogaMate now features hundreds of articles, case studies and research around the therapeutic benefits of yoga.
Does YogamatePro provide your specialists with a level of credibility?
Ann Marie: Yoga is an unregulated industry, so anyone can technically call themselves a yoga teacher. In the US you can be recognised as a ‘teacher’ with merely 200 hours of training.
If you’re an able bodied, healthy individual, you can probably follow yoga from someone who hasn’t had much training. But, my board of advisors and I felt that if we were going to be championing therapeutic yoga, then the teachers highlighted on YogaMate needed a minimum 500 hours of training.
Anelia: What defines someone as a specialist yoga therapist?
Ann Marie: Yoga therapists receive specialised training — they usually have 1000+ hours of study under their belt. Moreover, they’re trained to work with individuals in a one-on-one capacity.
They look at the biopsychosocial health model and address all aspects of an individual’s health and well-being. A yoga therapist might provide yogic tools to assist an individual with breast cancer, fibromyalgia, chronic depression, etc... Yogic tools can be used to help the individual move towards better health and well-being for a variety of health challenges.
So, yoga can be quite niche and have a customisable application as therapy?
Ann Marie: Totally! The key word there is customised — creating specific practices to address an individual’s needs. Unfortunately, there is a big misconception about what yoga is and who it’s for: a lot of people think that you can only do yoga if you are thin, young, and healthy, (and maybe white and female). Right?
Anelia: And at a paradise resort in top-of-the-range compression tights!
Ann Marie: Exactly, there’s a stereotype around it. Just look at social media platforms like Instagram that feed into that stereotype…
This misconception — that it’s exclusive to a particular crowd — is doing a lot of damage to the industry and prevents people who could really benefit from this knowledge from accessing it.
In actual fact, anyone who can breathe can practice yoga. Yoga could be solely breath work or solely meditative work: you could be bed bound and still practice yoga.
Yoga encompasses so much; it’s not just the asanas — or the physical postures — there’s so much more to it. Yoga has been practiced for over 5000 years — the postures (asanas) are meant to help you move towards being able to sit in stillness in order to meditate.
Anelia: I was always under the impression that yoga is mostly movement and that meditation is somehow separated from yoga.
Ann Marie: You and most people, Anelia, but meditation is yoga. I started YogaMate.org to help the public understand that anyone, literally anyone, can practice yoga. If you have the ability to breathe and you have a brain that functions, you can practice yoga.
For me, breath is the biggest aspect of what yoga is about.
When you can regulate your breath, you can regulate your thoughts, which help regulate your emotions, which regulates everything.
Breath regulation is phenomenally powerful. It’s become my personal mission to help people understand the power of controlling their breath and that yoga is not just what they see on Instagram — this image of a beautiful person that’s slender doing a headstand in the sand. That’s not yoga, that’s a-
Anelia: That’s an Instagram post.
Ann Marie: Yeah! That’s an aesthetic, pretty thing to look at and can wow people, but it has actually really nothing to do with yoga.
On your website, you make a pretty bold statements saying, “Yoga has the power to transform lives and change the world.” Is that what you are aiming to do with YogaMate?
Ann Marie: Yes, because I know that it’s transformed my own life and it transforms the way that I relate to the world now. I’ve been practicing yoga for ten years. I first learned Yoga through a pranayama-based practice (a seven day course in Pranayama) — which is a Sanskrit word for “breath work”/ “controlled breath”. During that course I was instructed to go on a walking meditation and ‘just be’.
Anelia: What do you mean by that?
Ann Marie: Literally — to just ‘be’… To stop the mind and be in the present moment. This seems more commonplace now with the focus on mindfulness, but 10 year ago this was an entirely new concept to me: the idea that I could stop my mind from it’s incessant chatter. I’d never considered that idea before, and it was a revelatory.
I wanted to learn more, so I bought a book about yoga and I continued with the pranayama. I started to move into more meditative stuff, and slowly began to add in a bit of postural movement.
When I took that pranayama course, I had been suffering from persistent depressive disorder for over half of my adult life and had been on medication for years to manage it. One day, about two years into my yoga practice, I realised, “Hang on, I’m taking these anti-depressants and I’m not depressed anymore.” And so I stopped.
I started looking at other aspects of my health and recognised a range of benefits I’ve experienced. Not only was my depression gone, but so were my headaches, my allergies and my IBS. Even my relationship had improved — all that was different in my life was the Yoga. That’s the moment I decided to do my teacher training. I signed up for a 500-hour course, with absolutely no intention of teaching. I just wanted to understand why it worked for me.
During the course of it, I realised how powerful it was. I thought,
“If I’m going to keep this only to myself, it would be a disservice to other people.” It’s become my duty to share this knowledge with others, and I started teaching others.
During a meditative moment one day, I had the idea for YogaMate.
And that’s why I decided to start teaching. One day, (during a meditation, actually), I had the idea for YogaMate. Initially, it was just the idea of providing a tool that helps teachers create plans and share them with their students to help empower home practice.
Anelia: What do you mean with home practice?
Ann Marie: Well, if you practice yoga once a week for an hour, it’s not going to make a huge impact. But when you empower people with the tools so they practice safely from home and create a consistent practice, then yoga can be truly transformative. That’s what YogaMate aims to achieve.
Anelia: I grew up in a religious community, and I think I understand what you mean. When you’re trying to instil a sense of spirituality in a community of people, you teach them to incorporate certain daily habits, like prayer, into their lives that as a precursor for spiritual wellbeing. So, only if you practice yoga daily, it will be transformative.
Ann Marie: The more you practice, the more transformative it will become, no question. But I do want to reiterate that yoga can be practiced completely secularly. It does not have to have a spiritual connotation. But it’s hard not to connect to that inner sense of your being and affirm some sense of spiritual connection.
Anelia: Ten years ago, it was a scandal in the Christian community for people to consider prayer as some form of meditation. Church leaders were really scared that it infringes on their connection to a deity, but I think it has become much more accepted that religious people can meditate in a secular way.
Ann Marie: I agree. There’s a lot of fear around a lot of religious entities about anything that they don’t understand or isn’t part of their construct. For instance, if you try to take yoga into schools, you really have to strip out any kind of “om”-ing or hand gestures…
But ultimately, we are doing a disservice to our children if we don’t teach them, “Hey, you can tame your mind. You can prevent your mind from running away and causing so much suffering to yourself”.
If these tools, like breath work and meditation, were introduced in early childhood, it could change their world dramatically.
So, is it your mission to have yoga taught in schools then?
Ann Marie: Resoundingly, yes. That’s my ultimate personal ‘why’. YogaMate doesn’t directly relate to getting yoga to be taught in schools, but YogaMate’s mission is to educate more people about its benefits and make those benefits credible. Yoga needs to be better understood and have more credibility behind it. In order to get that to happen, championing the therapeutic application of yoga and helping it move into hospitals, into prisons, into rehab centres and all the areas that yoga therapists are taking it, is a way to dovetail into the others. It’s a bit roundabout, but that’s why I do what I do.
From a business perspective, yoga teaching has low barriers of entry, there is a big, ubiquitous market because anyone can go yoga, and on top of that, it’s unregulated. It must be a massive challenge to legitimise yoga?
Ann Marie: It is, but there are amazing associations that are creating benchmarks and standards, and it’s my strategy to collaborate with those associations that are setting the bar higher.
So even if yoga is so personal and all-encompassing, you can still standardise it to a degree? And where do you see this going with YogaMate Pro?
Ann Marie: Well, I’d like to see it across the board in schools, in hospitals, helping patients, but helping service workers in particular. It would obviously be good for the trauma patients, but it be just as good, if not better, for the medical professionals that are experiencing trauma secondhand.
The results we’ve seen from research of traumatised patients who practice yoga have been amazing — it has proven to bring people back into their body by helping get them out of their head to deal with trauma that’s been stored in the body. It’s profound, and it also proves the importance of having a solid, scientifically sound research base. But it doesn’t stop at trauma patients — we can expand it to different populations, from pre-natal to seniors.
YogaMate Pro is providing these specialists that are working within the space a better understanding of how to differentiate themselves from general teachers, and help educate the public about the value they can provide and to better connect with their students. And there seems to be a need for it. We’ve just celebrated our one year birthday of taking payments and generating revenue.
Anelia: Congratulations!
On a personal note: in the startup scene, I always admire mothers with young kids, because I know that I’d like to start my own business one day, but I also want to have kids. Do you have any tips for young entrepreneurs who have to juggle family life and their careers? Or is it just difficult?
Ann Marie: Look, it is a challenge… No doubt about that. If you have a partner at home that’s supportive of what you’re doing, that can make it much easier. If you have a partner at home who isn’t supportive, it’s much harder. Obviously, there are times when your business does take precedence, and you have to be able to know that your children are being taken care of.
I’d say there are times when you also need to acknowledge that you can’t do everything and whether it’s delegating tasks to other people or bringing on employees or consultants to do it — because, at the end of the day, you have to think about what you want your legacy to be. Part of it is having healthy, resilient children, and part of it is also doing your work.
Self-care is hugely important. If you don’t have the bucket-fill of your own resilience and love for yourself, then you don’t have it to give out to your business or to your children. It’s very easy to get depleted if you’re not giving back to yourself.
You’ve been at Inspire9 now for over a year. Have you found it to be a supportive environment? Would you recommend it to the people?
Ann Marie: I can definitely recommend it. I worked from home by myself for the first two years. I got to the point where I just need to be around people. Plus, it’s also educational — some of the Lunch & Learns, evening programs and office hours have been beneficial to my business.
Anelia: I’m glad to hear that! Anything else you’d like to add?
Ann Marie: People need to come to yoga on the roof.
Anelia: Yes! Yoga on the roof at 41 Stewart Street, every Wednesday at 12:15.
Ann Marie: See you there!
Ann Marie’s book recommendation:
Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body by David Emmerson & Elisabeth Hopper PhD
