I walked away from Wall Street to teach yoga full time

I didn’t plan to quit the week the bonus hit. I planned to say thank you, stash the check, and keep grinding spreadsheets until the next promotion made my parents’ eyebrows relax. But somewhere between the eighth espresso and the ninth “circle back” email, my chest felt like a violin string tuned too tight.

I was twenty‑something in a navy suit, paid to calculate risk, and somehow couldn’t calculate the cost of never exhaling.

Wall Street teaches you to translate everything into a number—time into billable hours, sleep into “sacrifice,” lunch into a Slack message eaten over a keyboard. Yoga snuck in as a counter‑language.

At first, it was just a Tuesday night vinyasa with a friend who bribed me with dumplings. Then it was a Saturday morning class where the teacher said, “Inhale, not to inflate; exhale, not to erase.” My brain, which lived on pivot tables and P&L, tilted its head like a confused golden retriever. I kept showing up for the feeling that my body was less of a spreadsheet and more of a song.

If you’re waiting for a cinematic quitting scene—me dropping a badge on a mahogany desk while “thank u, next” plays—you’ll be disappointed. I wrote a careful email. I shook hands. I cried in the stairwell, where the acoustics are built for soft collapses. Then I walked outside and realized New York sounded different when you’re not sprinting through it.

The week after I left, I did teacher training and thought, “Ah, this will be gentle stretching and incense.” It was biomechanics, Sanskrit, ethics, trauma‑informed cueing, sequencing as precise as K‑pop choreography. We learned how to stack joints, not just blocks; how to see a room, not just a pose. We learned to say “both feet or neither” instead of “good leg” and quietly retire the judgment baked into casual language. I loved it more fiercely than I expected. I also panicked when I looked at my checking account.

Here’s the un‑Instagrammable part: I made a spreadsheet anyway. (Recovery is a spiral, not a straight line.)

Rent, health insurance, groceries, Subway card, emergency kombucha fund. I calculated a runway: six months if I taught three classes a day, four days a week, plus privates, plus the occasional corporate lunchtime session where everyone insists they’re “not flexible” and then surprise themselves with a perfectly patient Warrior II.

The first class I taught had four students and a fifth who thought it was Pilates and stayed anyway. My voice shook. I said “inhale” when I meant “exhale.” I learned there are at least six different kinds of silence: focused, confused, resistant, relieved, resting, and “I am actively negotiating with my hamstrings.”

I learned to read ankles and eyes, to dial back heat when the weather was already doing the most, to offer rest without making it sound like defeat.

I also learned yoga teachers are small‑business owners in stretchy pants. You market. You invoice. You post a reel that flops and another that inexplicably gets 12k views because your cat sauntered across the mat during Savasana like a furry studio manager.

You memorize who likes blocks for triangle and who needs a knee blanket for pigeon and who is only there because their therapist said, “Try breathing someplace that isn’t your car.”

People imagine I left finance to be less ambitious. I left to be ambitious about different metrics. Instead of chasing a promotion, I chased the moment a student who could barely balance on two feet the first week rocked a stable tree pose for three breaths and whispered “oh.” Instead of optimizing a quarterly return, I optimized a room at 6 a.m.—lights low, playlists dialed (yes, a little City Pop in the warm‑up), hands warm enough to adjust shoulders kindly.

That measured shift from cortisol to calm? I wanted to broker that.

Not everything glows. There are months when three clients go on vacation at once and the rent looks like a cliff. There are days my wrists ache from demoing too much chaturanga. There are nights I wonder if I traded one hustle for another, just with better pants and the freedom to eat samosas at noon without hiding them behind a screen. And then there’s the odd cultural whiplash when former colleagues ask, “So…this is forever?” and I say, “Forever is above my pay grade. For now, it’s a yes.”

• I kept the parts of my old life that were secretly beautiful: the team huddles (now community classes in the park), the debriefs (now tea with students after practice), the data (now noticing, with real curiosity, what works for bodies that are not a template).
• I use spreadsheets to track class sequences like a DJ tracks sets—don’t burn out shoulders on Monday if you’re asking for binds on Tuesday.
• I tie teaching to my plant‑based life, hosting “flow + snack” pop‑ups where we move for 45 minutes and then demolish tahini‑drizzled sweet potatoes like a squad who earned their lunch.

What I didn’t expect was how teaching would rewire my attention. In finance, I prized anticipation—predict the move, hedge the bet. In the studio, presence is the currency. I can’t cue a safe twist if my brain is chasing next quarter. Breath only trades in now. The more I practiced paying attention—to my feet, to the tempo of a room, to whether someone’s jaw is trying to do a shoulder’s job—the more the rest of my life softened its edges.

Friends noticed. My mother noticed. Even my inner critic, who used to do CrossFit with insults, sat down for a minute and tried meditation like, “Okay, fine, I’ll inhale.”

People ask what I miss. I miss free snacks and the sense that my job title made small talk easy. But I like the longer conversations I have now—the ones about grief, divorce, new love, post‑surgery courage. Yoga rooms become confessionals without the burden of answers. We breathe together and the questions feel less like cliffs.

On Sundays, I teach a slow class that ends with a three‑song Savasana. Someone always cries. No one is broken. Sometimes the body just opens a window and the weather clears.

I still admire my former colleagues. Many of them do work that powers pensions and small cities and grants to artists who make the world less beige. Some come to class and bring their interns, and we laugh when I cue “soften your spreadsheets,” which is not an actual cue but probably should be. 

On the good days, teaching feels like playing a small part in someone remembering their body is not a to‑do list. On the hard days, it’s still better than rehearsing a self I outgrew.

There’s a moment in almost every class when the room is quiet, the playlist is a whisper, and thirty people are lying on their backs, eyes closed, completely ordinary and absolutely extraordinary at the same time. The door creaks, the city hums, someone’s stomach growls, and everyone is still. That is the richest I have ever felt.

I keep a photo of my old ID badge tucked into a drawer with the studio keys.

Not as a trophy, not as a warning. Just as proof that lives can pivot and still be yours. I don’t know how long I’ll teach full time.

I know I’ll keep choosing the kind of work that helps people inhabit themselves with tenderness.

If I can make a living at that, wonderful. If I can’t, I’ll still be on my mat tomorrow morning, breathing in, breathing out, practicing the art of staying.