Yogi In The House

Maty Ezraty was just 23 years old when she opened the original YogaWorks in Santa Monica, California.

- Andrea Ferretti

Her vision was simple but revolutionary: She wanted to create a yoga school that offered a diverse, high-quality selection of classes to appeal to a wide array of people. It was 1987, and yoga studios typically only offered one style of yoga. But Ezraty had been influenced by both Iyengar and Ashtanga Yoga, so she knew the benefits of studying several methods.

YogaWorks quickly became the school Ezraty had set out to create, offering more than 120 classes per week, serving more than 700 students per day. She also trained many of the yoga teachers we seek out today, including Kathryn Budig, Annie Carpenter, and Seane Corn. Although she sold YogaWorks in 2004, Ezraty still teaches around the world and is considered a true pioneer in the yoga community. Here, she gives her perspective on leadership: How she approached it, the potential risks of commercializing yoga and glorifying practitioners on social media, and how all of us can learn to be leaders in our own right.

I definitely didn’t set out to be a leader when I opened YogaWorks. I created it because I fell in love with yoga, and I felt that yoga had a place in the world for helping and—this is going to sound corny— to create world peace. I wanted people to see that yoga could be for everyone. People tell me that YogaWorks was a catalyst for a lot of what is happening now in yoga—the popularization of vinyasa flow. I personally don’t think of it that way. The original YogaWorks classes weren’t flow classes. There was no linking of poses, no music. The original method was a mild Iyengar class with more heat. At some point, some teachers were influenced by music, and they brought it in and it stuck. But it was not the vinyasa flow that people associate with yoga today.