The Long Argument Co-founder YogaPros at twenty
He has made one argument for twenty years: teaching yoga is a profession. And he built the body that proves it.
01 The Six
Invisible. I found it as a boy, long before it was something you could buy. By the time I opened The Yoga Shop in 1999 you could count Britain's serious teachers in rooms, not registers. No industry. No career path. Just a practice, passed hand to hand. Part of me misses that world — and part of me knows it needed building.
That the teaching is the easy part. The room is the reward. Everything around the room — insurance, invoices, being findable, being believed — is a second job nobody trains you for. I have watched brilliant teachers give up over admin, not ability. That gap is the reason the body exists.
Sitting still. The ashrams, the long Vipassana retreats, the fasts in the Thai jungle. You can only transmit what you have tested, and I tested it in rooms with no audience and nothing at the end but the next sit. Every standard we hold at YogaPros traces back to something learned the slow way.
That standards are a kindness. At thirty I assumed rigour would make us unpopular. It made us trusted. The most generous thing you can do for a profession is hold the bar where it belongs and say so in public — then keep saying it when it costs you.
Your room already knows the answer. Ask the people who keep coming back. Three years in is exactly when the doubt is loudest and the craft is quietly compounding — the worst possible moment to trust the doubt. Get the floor under you, then let the teaching do what it has been doing all along.
The idea, more than the institution. That teaching yoga is a profession — with a published standard and a body that answers for it. Names change. We have had three. If the idea holds, someone will be holding it. That is enough.
Everyone on these pages answers the same six, unchanged. Across the profession it becomes a record of itself — read sideways, not down.
02 The arc
1999
Yoga, posted. An online retailer before Amazon reached the mat.
Open →
2003
The Edinburgh studio, co-founded with Brian Cooper. The observation deck.
Open →2006
The professional body, founded with Brian Cooper — because nobody else was building it.
Open →
2016
'Professional' enters the name — then the industry's vocabulary.
Open →2025
Three names. One continuous body. The standard never changed.
Open →2026
10,000+ teachers. 100+ countries. The argument continues.
Open →
03 The landmark
In 2016 the body he co-founded became Yoga Alliance Professionals — the first time the word stood in a yoga institution's name. The industry has been borrowing it since. YogaPros is what the word looks like built out: standards, insurance, a verified record, a body that answers.
04 The practice underneath
Every standard YogaPros holds was tested in its founder's body first. A register that asks teachers to evidence their hours is kept by someone who spent five decades logging his own — in rooms with no audience, no certificate at the end, and no one watching.
He has practised since childhood; he could hold his breath through a long retention by seven. The deeper training came the old way. Ashram life in India, inside the lineage rather than reading about it. Repeated long Vipassana retreats. Many extended fasts — one of forty-one days, alone in the jungles of Thailand. And the older medicine traditions of the Amazon basin, sat with the shamans who hold them, in the mountains of Peru and the jungles of Costa Rica.
None of this appears on a certificate. All of it is why the standards read the way they do. The rigour is not administrative. It is autobiographical.
05 The unseen hours
Twenty-seven years does not fit in a gallery. Scroll through it.
06 Beyond the mat
The drummerSemi-pro to pro across five decades. Rhythm, repetition, craft — the first discipline, and the one that taught him how bodies learn.
The entrepreneurThe Yoga Shop in 1999 was the first. Seven-figure ventures since. The body runs with an operator's discipline because its founder is one.
The analystProject leader and senior analyst before yoga was a career. The published-standards, audit-trail instinct comes from somewhere.
The cityThe shop, the studio, the body — all built from the same city. Twenty-seven years, one home ground.
Off the matTo be filled in his own words. This is the tile that makes it a portrait.
One surpriseEvery founder has one. Ask for it directly — it is what readers repeat.
07 The voice
Twenty years of saying the quiet part out loud — on standards, on hours, on what teachers are owed. Six conversations he does not give stock answers to.
“Bruce Mackay has practised yoga since childhood and taught it for twenty-five years. In 2006 he co-founded what became YogaPros — the professional body behind ten thousand teachers in more than a hundred countries. He's also been a drummer since he was eleven.”
For the microphone · cleared for broadcast · verified by YogaPros08 Speaking & media
He speaks where the profession's interests are decided — conferences, media, institutions, partners. Invitations are read personally. Yes is rarer than no.
On stage
Conferences · institutions · industry
The state of the teaching profession, twenty years of the register, and where the industry goes next.
Long form
The deep conversations
Two hours on standards, practice and the economics of teaching. Any topic above runs forty-five minutes on its own.
On the record
Journalists on deadline
Verified positions, a host-ready biography, and a direct line. Comment given as the professional body, on the record.
09 Invite Bruce
He reads these himself, which is why it is not instant. You will hear back either way.
The body was built by two — and both clear its Sage bar themselves, the honour no one can buy. Brian Cooper's portrait — fifty-six years of practice, The Long Practice — is the other half of the record.