The Mission Position Podcast
Real conversations, no incense
Most wellness culture is bullshit. This podcast is about what actually works. We’re going to ask:
Has yoga lost its way?
Why is load changing the future of movement?
What does ageing really do to the body?
Why does serious practice and training matter more than ever?
Hosted by Genny Wilkinson, co-founder of Mission in Shoreditch.
Grounded in yoga.
Expanded into load.
What does it actually mean to run a movement and yoga studio in 2026?
Not the Instagram version. Not the incense version. The real version.
In Episode 3 of The Mission Position Podcast, Genny sits down with London studio owners Olivia (of Sahna Yoga in Primrose Hill), and Vanda (of Down to Earth in Tufnell Park), for a candid conversation about what happens behind the scenes of modern wellness businesses: the financial pressures, community expectations, competition and collaboration, and the emotional weight of holding space for other people while trying to hold yourself together.
This discussion explored the tension between accessibility and commercial survival, why raising prices feels emotionally loaded in yoga spaces, and the hidden labour behind building communities that people often romanticise without understanding the cost both financial and emotional.
This is a conversation about what happens when your identity becomes tied to your business. About exhaustion, responsibility, purpose, and the strange expectation that wellness founders should somehow absorb endless pressure while remaining endlessly calm.
Running a studio is not just classes, playlists and incense. It’s payroll, risk, staffing problems, difficult decisions, leaking ceilings, loyalty, leadership, and trying to keep something meaningful alive in one of the hardest operating environments imaginable.
Grief, resilience, and what practice is for.
Elle Daniel is a yoga teacher, writer, and mother whose life and practice have been profoundly shaped by the death of her daughter, Ruby, from Congenital Disorders of Glycosylation (CDG) in January.
Teaching for more than a decade, Elle’s work blends breath-led vinyasa with philosophy, but it’s her lived experience of loss that gives her voice its depth and clarity. In this conversation, Elle speaks with rare honesty about grief, identity, and what it means to keep showing up when life changes irrevocably. This isn’t a conversation about performance or progress; rather it’s about what remains when those things fall away.
A conversation about depth over aesthetics, and why the practice only really begins when life doesn’t go to plan.
Eddie Stern has spent decades at the centre of modern yoga and now finds himself quietly at odds with much of what it has become. A long-time student and teacher in the Ashtanga lineage and founder of the Broome Street Temple in New York City, he has now helped evolve a strand of practice that is deeply traditional yet unexpectedly progressive. In this conversation we talk about Yoga Sangraha, what it feels like as a well-known teacher to suddenly lose students, why strong asana is no longer central to his own practice, and whether he carries regrets about not speaking sooner about the Pattabhi Jois scandal.
It’s a candid, wide-ranging conversation about lineage, responsibility and the transitions happening inside modern yoga. Eddie reflects on authority, devotion, doubt and the slow shift some long-time practitioners are now making toward breath, nervous system regulation and longevity. If yoga is going to evolve rather than simply repeat itself, conversations like this are part of that process.
