Over the past few weeks, I've been comparing and contrasting the features and pricing of the plethora of yoga scheduling software solutions. I have an opportunity to take the time to pick the best yoga scheduling software for Heights Yoga Collective. 

My list of things I need from a scheduling app is: 

1. low monthly price
2. Five admin users/teachers
3. Class calendar for student self-registration
4. Email notifications for class registrations and cancellations. 

A lot of yoga studios are using Mindbody because it's the scheduling app they used at a previous yoga studio. Mindbody is expensive, IMO, starting at $169 a month. It is often buggy, down for hours at a time, and studio owners have to spend lots of time on the phone with tech support to get problems solved. There is no way I'm going with Mind-Body just because I've used it before at other studios.

I started out using Square to take payments for pop-up classes because that feature is free, and I've used Square to sell things at night markets. Square also integrates with ClassPass which may be deemed a positive thing, but that's debatable. ClassPass pays a yoga studio $6 per student, regardless of the studio pricing. Nobody knows how ClassPass sets the point value for a studio's classes either. 

Back to Square: creating a class calendar requires the $ 29-a-month Square Appointments feature. I enabled the free trial period to see how Square Appointments worked. It was obvious that Square Appointments is tailored to support hair salons, massage therapists, and tattoo parlors. The user interface was confusing and hard to navigate to the same place quickly. The interface was not intuitive. I called tech support during my trial period to figure out why I could not fully customize our site location and remove verbiage for Appointments when I only wanted to display Classes. I was on the phone with a very helpful person (Adriana) for an hour and a half. She helped me figure out where the Liability Wavier should be stored, among other things. When I had to cancel a class, I could not use the Square app or the Square Appointments app to cancel the class; I had to pull up a web browser on my phone and log in to access the ability to cancel a class. This was extremely frustrating given that Square has two different apps that should be able to handle this function. I was also unable to quickly see a list of students registered for a class or a list of people who had purchased tickets to a pop-up yoga event. I also had some confusion around the difference between classes and services with regard to how Square defines each of these terms. I cannot see our group using this interface and being happy with it and able to handle our own problem-solving.

I took part in a demonstration of Mariana Tek's software. They're a full-service, white-glove application partner who will design your website, input the verbiage for your yoga classes, and create the recurring class schedule—basically do everything for you. This comes at a high price. The additional setup fees are $1250 to set up your studio in the Mariana Tek platform, plus 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, and a 3-year term is required. Mariana Tek Starter pricing in 2024 is $349 a month. For this price, you get their Biz App, Kiosk Check-in app, insights, waivers, and transactional email function. This does not include SMS messaging, landing pages, standard forms, or email marketing automation. That's another $200 a month.

Recess.tv also kept their pricing hidden until I participated in a demo of their platform. Similar to Mariana Tek, they want to do it all for you, again at a high price. The difference with Recess.tv is that they pass along the cost of their services to your customers. Sort of like how Ticketmaster has all those service fees that you don't quite know what they're for, and you can't opt out of them, and you have to pay if you want to see the show. Recess.tv has a sliding scale based on the dollar amount of the transaction that they use to charge your customer for their functionality. If your business transactions are low priced items, your customers will be paying 13.5% + $0.75 per transaction. That may not sound like a lot, but it will add up quick. I know I wouldn't be pleased with such a high percentage fee being blended into the price of a class pack.

Recess.tv Fee Scale (percentage + cost per transaction)
$1 - $49 13.5% + .75
$50 - $99 9.55% + .30
$100 - $199 7.75% + .30
$200 - $1000 4.25% + .30

Now, to my favorite yoga scheduling software. I found Zenamu mentioned when I was digging through Reddit threads looking for users who recommended their favorite group fitness scheduling apps. Zenamu has transparent pricing listed and if you only need one teacher's account? The application is free and will do 99% of what you would need a scheduling app to do for you. You just don't get tech support which should be obvious because it's free. I want five staff accounts, so that puts me in the Expert/Studio price bracket, which is only $39 a month if paid by the year or $42 a month if paid monthly. 

I exchanged several emails with Zenamu's co-founder before our demo and complimented her on the excellent documentation wiki, Zenamu's ease of use, and robust feature set for a reasonable price point. I had many questions about 'Can Zenamu do this' or 'Can Zenamu do that'. She answered each one and provided links to documentation and screen captures of where to click and what to look for. 

Features of Zenamu I got excited about:

• Recurring classes can be scheduled to repeat every week for X number of times or until a given date.
• Students are automatically emailed if a substitute teacher is assigned.
• Buddy passes can be allocated to a student's account manually.
• Emails are sent automatically at class registration, class cancellation, and waitlist changes.
• Zenamu integrates with MailChimp, SmartEmailing and Ecomail
• Students can easily book guest users, who can then be added to Zenamu when they show up for class.
• Promotional codes will be added to the platform this winter.
• For donation-based classes, if you want to indicate the suggested donation, put it in the class description.
• Liability waiver verbiage is currently blended into the Terms and Conditions that students accept when they register for class, but making the Liability Waiver more visible has been added to the Zenamu backlog of things to come.
  
• It is possible to create automatic discounts for cash payments.
• Payroll functionality allows exporting teachers' data to an Excel spreadsheet for use in third-party payroll applications.
• Payments supported: credit card, ApplePay, Google Payments, cash
• Email reminders to students integrate with Google Calendar, Apple iCal, and Outlook
• Unlimited monthly memberships can be created manually by adding an "impossible" amount of credit packs or entry passes to a client's profile.
• Recurring memberships are coming in Q2 of 2025

Following on the Hands On Assisting book I wrote, I have compiled all of the uses for props that I have learned into a single spiral bound book that you can purchase from Lulu.com or you can buy it from my Square shopping site. 

This book includes easy-to-understand drawings of over 70 different ways to use props in over 36 poses, accompanied by easy-to-understand explanations of how to use the props in the poses.

The front cover shows what you can expect to see inside the rest of the book. I will post more photos of the finished print on demand book when the copies I ordered arrive.

Print on demand from Lulu.com: https://bit.ly/PropsIntoPowerBook

Square shopping site: https://jentechyoga.square.site/

I've forked my yoga repository. 

A fork is a new repository that shares code and visibility settings with the original “upstream” repository.

Last year a friend asked me if I would recommend taking a training course with the leader of the yoga school I'd trained in. I'd seen some questionable content in his podcast channel on YouTube, as well as being wary of those he's recently aligned himself with professionally (ex-Landmark Forum personnel). Initially, I couldn't quite put my finger on what was off, but I'm going to gather some links here so I can find them in the future. Link Link Link Link Link || Link Link Link Link Link. 

As I watched a few of his videos, I was dismayed to hear him referencing articles on NewsMax (a far-right digital media company), opining on toxic feminism, and referring to the Patriarchy with air quotes, as if Patriarchy is a myth.

"the toxic feminism that's like imbued our culture that wants to tear down men, strong men, good men, this toxic femininity, a part of it is it gossips about you, it dresses itself up as a victim, it's got to tear down men, tear down the, you know, the patriarch, it's patriarchy, it's patriarchy. [ed- He's using his hands here to make air quotes]"

The transcript of the last few minutes of that video is here. If you want to see the whole video, I've archived it as an unlisted YT video in case the original gets deleted.

As I composed my email reply with my thoughts, it was clear to me that after I sent the email, I would have to create a split between myself and the school of yoga I was trained in. This split was something I'd been avoiding. There have been many red flags in the past few years.  His words and actions were not aligned with my personal ethos or my worldview. It took several hours to edit the artwork for my website, podcast and social media presence and remove all the verbiage that I'd used to associate myself with that yoga school.

I then started the slow process of figuring out what words I wanted to use to describe the name of the yoga sequence and the concepts around how I teach yoga. After giving it a lot of thought and trying a few different phrases out, I settled upon Pilgrimage To Power. I like the alliteration and the simplicity of the phrase. I like that one way to define a pilgrimage is 'a journey to a holy place, which can lead to a personal transformation, after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life.'

Words are powerful, and I needed a way to teach yoga without the trappings of trademarked words and phrases. I submitted for a Wordmark on the phrase "Pilgrimage To Power" to have a phrase that was mine and not subject to litigation. The cost of the Wordmark application was $250, and the process takes 8-14 months to complete on average. Wordmarking the phrase "Pilgrimage To Power" is largely symbolic for me as I do not intend to generate revenue with this terminology. I see it as a turn of the phrase that I can use in my teaching and not fear being sued over it.

Stripping out the Trademarked verbiage from my documentation, my speech and my writing has been an arduous task. What should I call each section of the asana sequence if I am going to refer to it, if I am to teach students how to teach it? Which poses should I add in or take out now that I am at liberty to prune or graft to this yoga tree? I left a majority of the sequence in place as the structure is good, but. I needed new words to use. I noted where poses can be swapped in or left out as needed. 

It is well documented that yoga poses or sequences cannot be trademarked (thanks, Bikram!). 'Only the selection, coordination, and arrangement of photographs, drawings, or writings that depict the exercises may be entitled to copyright protection, but not a compilation of physical exercises itself. Yoga sequence is rather construed as a functional system, procedure, or process under 17 U.S.C §102 (b).'

Therefore, I devised new terminology to represent the energetic qualities of the yoga sequence I'll refer to as Pilgrimage To Power.