Cathy Madeo is a yoga expert and founder of Cathy Madeo Yoga, a global online yoga school educating and empowering thousands of yoga students and teachers worldwide.
Cathy creates high quality online courses and 200 & 300 Hour Yoga Teacher Trainings for all levels of yoga practitioners. Her school has graduated over 500 yoga teachers in 50+ countries. Cathy’s deep knowledge of alignment draws students who want a solid foundation of the asana practice, her passion for living a yoga life brings those seeking a spiritual connection through the yoga practice, and her dedication to developing yoga teachers into the best version of themselves, keeps students and teachers alike coming back for years.
Students from all over the world train with her to deepen their yoga journey and gain a mentor. Cathy Madeo Yoga’s mission is to transform lives through the practice of yoga.
Women Fitness President Ms. Namita Nayyar catches up with Cathy Madeo, she is an exceptionally talented is a yoga expert and founder of Cathy Madeo Yoga, here she talks about her Yoga Teacher Training, and her success story.
Namita Nayyar:
You began your yoga journey in the 1990s and started teaching in 2004. Can you take us back to your very first yoga class? What was it that made you realize this practice would become your life’s work?
Cathy Madeo:
Since a young age, I was a spiritual seeker and looking for a “home” or place to fit in. I read books like Thích Nhất Hạnh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness in my teens. In 1994, at 19 years of age, I took my first yoga class. During class, the Iyengar instructor held us in postures for what felt like forever, but he would speak about yoga philosophy, and it made the discomfort of the postures feel more easeful. The spiritual lessons coupled with the physical practice made me feel finally at home. That’s when I knew I would practice yoga for life.
Namita Nayyar:
You’ve mentioned that early on, you were in “absolute awe” of people balancing on their hands and thought, “I could never do that.” Looking back, what shifted that belief for you?
Cathy Madeo:
I grew up in yoga in Los Angeles in the mid-1990s–early 2000s. LA, at the time, was the heartbeat of yoga in the west. Over the years, as my strength grew from practicing consistently, I was able to do many of the things I saw in class that inspired me. I realized it was my own limiting beliefs that had stopped me before. Once I realized that, it motivated me to keep practicing.
Namita Nayyar:
You hold degrees from Columbia University and the University of Virginia—a BA and an MA in socio-cultural anthropology. How did your academic background inform your approach to teaching yoga and understanding its place in modern culture?
Cathy Madeo:
Having an academic background gave me the skills to research and develops programs. I believe attending such rigorous institutions gave me the backbone to build out so many online programs and trainings and the confidence to do so.
Studying cultural anthropology, which is the study of the human condition, gave me a deep respect for the roots of yoga and also an appreciation that nothing in culture is static. As much as we’d like to believe there is one way to do yoga, yoga evolves as humans do. There is an underlying philosophy that is unchanging–we get this from our ancient texts like The Yoga Sutras–yet how humans interact with yoga ultimately shapes and continuously changes it.
Namita Nayyar:
You launched your online yoga school during the COVID-19 lockdown as a newly single mother with no capital. What was the tipping point that made you take such a significant risk? What gave you the courage?
Cathy Madeo:
I had two kids at home and no income coming in and had just lost $40,000 because I had started a retreats business just before COVID and then had to cancel them all and I refunded the money to customers. These rock-bottom moments show us what we’re made of. But if I didn’t have a strong reason to support my kids, I might not have had the courage to take the risk. So if you want to build something, make sure your why is strong enough to fuel you through the days when you don’t feel motivated.
Namita Nayyar:
You’ve been very vocal about the shortcomings you observed in online teacher trainings that simply moved the in-person model onto Zoom. What was your vision for a truly effective online training, and how did you completely reimagine the student experience?
Cathy Madeo:
During COVID, when I was thinking of putting a yoga teacher training online, I looked at what everyone else was doing. What I witnessed was yoga studios recording live 7-hour sessions in the studio. I had been making online content for some time, so I knew that you must adapt your teaching to the medium, or platform in order for it to be engaging. Students can’t stare at a screen for 7 hours and learn yoga.
I thought deeply about what the constraints were of online and what would people feel like they were missing if they trained online, such as community and peer-to-peer interaction and personalized feedback from me. So I solved those problems by filming high-quality top-tier education, creating small group practice sessions with peers, opportunities for personalized attention from me both in the lives and in submitting videos for review, capping my trainings so I can actually give everyone the attention they deserve, and setting up a big monitor so I can see everyone. In the end, I created a hybrid training; half the training is in weekly live training sessions with me and half of it is in pre-recorded videos that students can watch and learn at their own pace.
Full Interview is Continued on Next Page
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