Our Story
Our story began long before we had any glimmer of the community we now call The Yoga Collective.
How The Yoga Collective Was Born
Clara and Malina both fell in love with yoga in their late teens. Over nearly three decades, they each cultivated a deep, devotional, and consistent practice — one that transformed them profoundly, first and foremost, before either of them ever stepped in front of a class to teach. In time, that devotion carried them into the yoga industry as teachers, and along the way they gathered a wide range of experience inside modern studio culture. That experience became the seed of The Yoga Collective.
Culture changes over time, and the needs of people change with it. This is one of the truths The Yoga Collective is built on. What Clara and Malina began to notice, after years of teaching, was that modern yoga culture in the West — and the studio systems built to house it — needed to change.
We believe that students who are drawn to yoga deserve access to the most wholistic, authentic, life-changing practice possible. For that to happen, teachers must be taught from that same place: they need a solid home practice, a way of life that supports it, and an environment to teach in that upholds that lifestyle too. This is where we first saw the gap — the distance between practicing yoga on the mat and actually living it off the mat, inside studio culture itself.
Clara and Malina started to see the patterns that had quietly become the norm in the yoga world: burnout in teachers and studio owners, power-over dynamics in place of collaboration and repair, performance and celebrity status prioritized over community care, a lack of inclusion and diversity across identities and bodies, and yoga practices stripped of their cultural roots. All of it pointed to the same missing piece — relationships rooted in accountability, growth, and care. We practice yoga on the mat to work with our own body, mind, and heart — to self-heal, to self-realize. When we step off the mat, that same practice has to extend to how we treat one another.
This is where Indigenous ways of being, carried through Malina’s bloodline and lived experience, entered the picture. As a Nehiyaw (Cree Métis) woman reclaiming her culture, Malina learns from the matriarchs in her own family, from her elders, and from ceremony — a way of life where everything comes down to relationship. Through these relational and cultural practices, a new model began to take shape, one built to support teachers, staff, and students alike.
It’s important to understand that these symptoms of unwellness inside the wellness world are symptoms of the larger over-culture we’re all swimming in. The extractive, colonial systems we’ve inherited have infiltrated yoga through the very business models studios are built on. Somewhere along the way, we got lost in transaction and forgot the art of relationship — and that shows up in the numbers too: most yoga studios don’t make much money, and neither do most yoga teachers.
So Clara and Malina asked a different question: what if the studio itself wasn’t trying to turn a profit — what if it paid everyone who worked there very well instead? How would that change the way the business is run?
That question is an homage to Yoga for the People, a donation-based studio that operated here in Vancouver starting around 2008–2009, making yoga financially accessible to far more people than the standard model allowed. The Yoga Collective carries that spirit forward: each class offers an allotted number of mats on a sliding scale. Once the studio’s costs are covered, the rest goes to the teacher — allowing teachers to earn a livable wage, so they’re resourced and supported to share the teachings of yoga rather than run themselves ragged to survive.
For good medicine to move through right relationship, at every level, the container that holds it matters — because that container will either strengthen the medicine or dilute it. It was through this shared foundation of values that Clara and Malina found not just a working partnership, but a friendship, a shared vision, and a mission: to build a new kind of home.
The Yoga Collective is an experiment in building a thriving, matriarchal, relational studio model — one that reclaims and redistributes power and resources. We believe in collaboration, shared power, community building, relational repair, authentic and transparent leadership, accessibility, diverse representation, thriving reciprocity, and yoga medicine that genuinely changes lives.
As dedicated yoga students ourselves, we at The Yoga Collective are committed to paying our teachers well, offering a sliding scale to our students, doing the relational work off the mat, receiving guidance from a wisdom council to support the collective, and building community — day in, day out — with yoga at the center to keep ourselves, and each other, well.
Through the practices of yoga, sangha, and intention, may we stay anchored within ourselves, supporting one another as we care for our home, this land, and this planet.
The Yoga Collective is a home for community, and a practice — together, we thrive.