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Matt KramerThe Self-Employed Depression
By EMILY BAZELON
On a rainy morning in April, Lisa Feuer took the subway to the Brooklyn Dojo, a martial-arts studio where she was scheduled to teach a mommy-baby yoga class. Outside, streams of water poured from awnings into the collars of passers-by. When she got to the studio, Feuer shook out her umbrella and picked out music from her iPhone to play for the class. But in the next 20 minutes, no one else showed up.
Feuer called Karma Kids Yoga, which rents out the dojo and pays her $40 to teach the hour-long class. If no students come, teachers get paid half their fee as long as they stand outside for 15 minutes and hand out postcards advertising Karma Kids. Feuer asked to postpone the postcarding because of the rain. On the wet walk to the subway, she tried to reassure herself that her students would be back next week, even though attendance had been sliding for a while.
When Feuer started teaching yoga four and a half years ago, when she was 38, it seemed like the perfect entree to a life of free agency. Feuer spent most of her 30s working for her husband’s goth record label doing publicity and promotion. When they divorced in 2005, she wanted a job that gave her some of the same independence that he had. “I’d watched my husband go into business for himself, and I felt like I could do it, too,” she said.
Yoga gave her the same pure, elated feeling as dance, which she had done professionally in her 20s. She spent $4,000 on a 200-hour yoga training course — paid for with a home-equity loan — and then more to specialize in prenatal, mommy-baby and kids classes. Many of her prenatal students came back to thank her after giving birth. She could pick up classes from a half-dozen studios, gyms and schools, and she could arrange her schedule around the needs of her son, Sasha, who is almost 7. Since Feuer did not work full time for any employer, no one gave her health insurance or other benefits. But she earned between $35 and $65 a class, and students paid more for private sessions.
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