An Ashtanga Yoga Book for Building a Daily Practice That Lasts
Asbjørn and I have spent a long time putting the Primary Series into words. The book walks through the sequence pose by pose and looks at why it is built the way it is, so you can keep coming back to the mat and make the practice your own. It is book 2 in our A path within series, and the Kindle edition is available to pre-order now.
Every pre-order helps the book reach more practitioners, so thank you if you order early.
By Huong (Claire) Luu (Bjaanes)
Key takeaways
Patanjali gives us two wings for practice: abhyasa and vairagya, steady effort and non-attachment (Yoga Sutra 1.12). Those of us who teach yoga have lived with both for years. We practise them on the mat and we pass them on in every class.
However, many of us carry a quiet misreading of the second wing, and it is costing our studios more than we see.
You know the scene. A student who came every Tuesday is gone for one week, then two. Her corner of the room stays empty. You notice, and you think about writing to her.
Then a voice says: “Let her go. Reaching out would be attachment, or worse, selling.”
So you stay silent, as most of us do. We became teachers to share practice, not to chase people. In our world, yoga should feel free, and a follow-up message can feel like a sales call.
Meanwhile, the studio keeps paying. Rent, software, campaigns and teachers’ fees do not pause when students drift away. Fitness and boutique studios keep roughly 40–50% of members by the end of the year, so a large share must be replaced, every year.
Therefore many studio owners live on a treadmill. New ads, new intro offers, new campaigns, all to refill a bucket with a hole in it. Research by Frederick Reichheld at Bain & Company found that a 5% rise in retention can lift profits by 25 to 95%. Keeping a student is almost always cheaper than finding a new one.
Patanjali defines vairagya as freedom from craving for what we have seen or heard (Yoga Sutra 1.15). It is freedom from grasping, but it is not freedom from care.
The Bhagavad Gita (2.47) draws the line even more clearly: we have a right to our action, but not to its fruits. Reaching out is that action. Whether the student returns is the fruit, and that was never ours to grasp in the first place.
Seen this way, a short message to a drifting student is not a sales move. It is a teacher doing what teachers do best: noticing. We notice the breath that shortens, the shoulders that tighten. Noticing a student’s absence is the same skill, off the mat.
Students are no different. Few will tell a teacher that a class felt too hard, that their back hurts, or that they feel lost in a class.
So the teacher is silent, and the student is silent. The system gives neither of them a way to speak in time.
It is not a courage problem. A student needs three things to open up:
When these three are in place, silence turns into signal. The teacher hears the student in time. The student feels seen, heard and known. That is the missing feedback loop, from both sides.
The signs of a drifting student are there, but they are scattered: a gap in the booking system, a message in a chat thread, a feeling in the teacher’s head after class. No one sees the whole picture until it is too late.
At The Yoga Nest in Stavanger, we brought those signals together in one place, so teachers could see who was drifting while there was still time to act. In the first month, 3 students flagged as drifting came back.
Retention, done this way, is practice. It is abhyasa, steady effort, and vairagya, letting go of the result, working together, just as Patanjali taught.
This week, write down every student you have not seen in two weeks. Choose one. Send a short message with no offer in it, only care. Then let go of the outcome.
Keeping is not selling. It is seeing.
May every student feel seen, heard and known, and may every teacher have the clarity to notice in time.
This article was first published on Conscious Flow.
Claire (Huong Luu) – Conscious Flow
Congratulations to our co-founder Claire on becoming a semifinalist for (Tech Entrepreneur) Aret Tech 2026 for her work with Conscious Flow.
With support from Innovation Norway, she has led a development team, including talented female software developers in Vietnam, while continuing to show up fully for her students and our community at The Yoga Nest.
Claire represents a new kind of female founder in the tech industry, bringing human insight into an increasingly automated AI landscape. Conscious Flow shows that technology does not need to replace human connection, it can scale emotion, awareness, and meaningful support.
Conscious Flow’s mission is to help yoga practitioners progress safely in their unique journeys, while supporting yoga teachers in building sustainable careers, so teaching yoga becomes a profession, not just a side hustle.
If you believe yoga can save lives and help prevent preventable disease, we invite you to support Claire and this mission.
Vote here and help Claire (Huong Luu) to the finals:
Deadline to vote: 23 Feb 2026
Press release
The Yoga Nest and Conscious Flow Announce Strategic Partnership to Strengthen the Future of Yoga Communities
A collaboration designed to support safe practitioner progress and sustainable careers for yoga teachers worldwide.
The Yoga Nest and Conscious Flow today announced a strategic partnership aimed at strengthening the future of yoga communities by combining studio experience, teacher education, and technology-driven wellness solutions.
The collaboration brings together The Yoga Nest’s thriving yoga community in Stavanger and Conscious Flow’s emerging wellness technology platform focused on supporting practitioners and teachers globally. Together, the organizations aim to help practitioners progress safely while empowering teachers to build sustainable professional careers.
Through this partnership, both organizations will work to integrate practical studio experience with digital tools that help people practice smarter, improve wellbeing through awareness and prevention, and help teachers grow sustainable livelihoods doing what they love.
Conscious Flow, supported by Innovation Norway, focuses on helping individuals take ownership of their health while addressing systemic challenges in the yoga industry, where many teachers struggle with unstable income and lack of long-term professional support.
The partnership aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly:
• SDG 3 — Good Health & Well-being
• SDG 8 — Decent Work & Economic Growth
“This partnership allows us to bring together community, teaching experience, and technology to support both practitioners and teachers in a more sustainable way,” said Claire Huong Bjaanes Luu, co-founder of The Yoga Nest and Conscious Flow. “We believe yoga communities deserve tools and systems that help them thrive long term.”
The collaboration will support development of tools, programs, and educational initiatives that help yoga practitioners maintain safe and consistent practice while giving teachers opportunities to grow professionally in a rapidly evolving wellness landscape.
More initiatives and community programs resulting from this partnership will be announced throughout the year.
The Yoga Nest is a Stavanger-based yoga studio and community space offering Ashtanga and modern yoga programs, teacher training, and workshops designed to support long-term practice and community wellbeing.
Conscious Flow is a wellness technology initiative designed to help yoga practitioners progress safely while enabling teachers and studios to build sustainable careers and businesses through technology-enabled support systems.
Every New Year begins the same way: new goals, fresh motivation, a sense that this year will be different. And yet, weeks or months later, many of us find ourselves right back where we started, and quietly ask, “What’s wrong with me?”
The truth is uncomfortable but freeing: most people don’t fail because they lack motivation.
They fail because motivation is fragile, especially when motivation rests purely on strong will.
Motivation is emotional, spikes when things feel exciting and fades when life gets hard. And life always gets hard.
When stress rises, when energy drops, when doubt creeps in, we don’t rise to our goals, we fall back to our habits. That’s why so many people set powerful goals in January, push hard for a short period, and then quietly abandon them and feel defeated, not because they are weak but because they were relying on willpower instead of a system.
Goals are visible to us, but the system is not clear. For example, my goal is to lose weight, build a business, write a book, feel better, find balance and my system are my daily habits, routines, environment, feedback, support, and structure.
If there’s a gap between your goal and your system, the system always wins.
You will inevitably end up where your daily habits are carrying you.
Think about athletes wanting gold medals, every job applicant wants the role, every entrepreneur wants success. Every academic wants a PhD. The goal is the same.
What differs is preparation, consistency, coaching, recovery, feedback and structure.
We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the level of our systems. The outcome followed naturally.
People fail because:
And then comes the worst part: people blame themselves.
For example: If you want to read 30 books a year, start with one page before bed. If you want to get fit, prepare your yoga outfit the night before, prepare your meal and kombucha the night before. You want to build a business, start with hiring systems, feedback loops, testing, not just revenue goals.
This is exactly why Conscious Flow exists.
Not to motivate you more. Not to give you bigger goals. Not to replace human wisdom with technology But to help you build and sustain a system that supports daily habits, offers reflection and feedback, connects you with real teachers, coaches, therapists, adapts when life gets hard, prevents breakdown before it happens
Because most people don’t need more inspiration.
They need structure that holds them when inspiration fades.
Goals are useful but they are not enough.
Without a system, a goal is just a wish.
Without support, discipline becomes fragile.
And when you build the right system, with the right habits, the right structure, and the right human support, the results begin to take care of themselves.
That’s not failure-proof living, that’s sustainable change.
Written by
This began long before Conscious Flow had a name.
It began years ago, in a yoga class I almost didn’t belong in. I was 18, a student of Diplomacy in Hanoi, surrounded by people decades older than me. The class was organized in a formal setting, quiet, traditional, almost clinical. Most participants were seniors or people managing serious health conditions. I didn’t know why I had signed up but I only knew that something inside me was restless at that time.
And then, something unexpected happened. As the class unfolded, I felt a calm I didn’t have language for yet. My breath softened. My mind slowed. My body felt… inhabited. I left the room changed, even though I couldn’t explain how.
At the time, I didn’t know this moment would follow me across continents and decades.
Nearly ten years later, in 2007, I was in the United States pursuing a master’s degree in International Service at American University. Life was busy, ambitious, and intellectually demanding. I felt excited but also stressed constantly and one evening, a friend invited me to a yoga class. The moment I lay down in savasana, the feeling returned: the same breath, the same stillness, the same sense of coming home to myself.
Different country, different language, different life but same nervous system, same human need. That was when something quietly shifted. I wanted to help people feel this too.
What followed was a long, imperfect journey into yoga education.
Like many practitioners who feel the call to teach, I stepped into the formal pathway: 200-hour, 300-hour teacher trainings, accredited through Yoga Alliance. I was determined to learn “properly,” to meet global standards. What I didn’t anticipate was how hard the system would be for people with real lives.
Most trainings required four to six weeks away from work, often during summers or holidays, precisely when professional responsibilities peak. Beyond tuition, there were flights, accommodation, food, insurance. A single 200-hour training cost me nearly $5,000 USD, not including travel.
To attend, I almost had to give up the very job that allowed me to afford the training in the first place. That training was a very nice experience for me in a sense that eventually, I managed to keep my day-to-day job when I came back to reality.
Later, I chose another training in the U.S. This time at a stage in my life when I could take five weeks off, travel comfortably, and absorb the experience fully. It was rich and meaningful, more than a holiday could ask for. And yet, even then, felt something familiar and unsettling.I felt left behind, not because I did not have help, not because I did not commit to the training, but because standardized classrooms do not serve everyone equally.
I excelled in chanting and sequencing. I struggled with philosophy. I hesitated to ask questions, afraid they might sound “stupid” or slow the group down. Research later confirmed what I felt intuitively: standardized education fails a significant portion of learners, not only in embodied, philosophical disciplines but also in physical training because we are all different and have unique needs.
I eventually deepened my philosophical studies through both academic routes and immersive learning in India. But I kept wondering:
What if no one should be left behind in education and training?
I tried online trainings too because online trainings are convenient, affordable and flexible. I can be at the comfort of my home and still have live training with my favorite teachers who are living continent away. Yet, I still fell something essential was missing…. Without mentorship, without meaningful check-ins, without a sense of being truly seen, learning felt flat. I could consume content, but I couldn’t feel uplifted. That quiet loneliness stayed with me.And when I later opened my own yoga studio, it shaped everything I did: from noticing the hesitation to ask questions from students, to feeling of being “not quite aligned” with the group pace.
The gap between knowledge delivered and wisdom integrated.
I became determined to close that gap for my students. And if only I have 40 hours in a day wearing many hats running a yoga studio, a yoga program, a yoga training.
Then something unexpected happened. I know I need to create a smart solution to assist me to bring my teaching at scale, without losing sights of my concerns. After many discussion rounds with Skape, Innovation and trusted friends and advisors, Innovation Norway said yes to funding Conscious Flow.
So did GG Young to collaborate with us.
So did advisors at Living Heritage.
What surprised me wasn’t the validation it was the recognition that the pain points of yoga students, teachers, and studios were being acknowledged not as personal shortcomings, but as systemic design failures.
Conscious Flow didn’t emerge from a business plan but from lived experience.
From years of moving between cultures, classrooms, studios, retreats, and inner landscapes always asking the same quiet question:
What if we didn’t have to choose between personalization and scale?
What if wellness education could adapt to humans, instead of humans adapting to rigid systems?
This is an invitation to explore that question.
And if, as you read, something in you feels recognized—
if you’ve ever felt unseen in a classroom, disconnected from your practice, or overwhelmed by trying to do it all alone—
you are already part of this story.
Conscious Flow is currently opening its early testing phase.
If you’re curious to experience what adaptive, reflective, human-centered wellness can feel like, we invite you to join us.
Not as a user.
But as a co-creator of what wellness can become.
The wellness industry needs a paradigm shift
Three years ago, I thought the biggest hurdles in yoga and wellness were things like consistency, business models, and team dynamics. But over time, I began to see a deeper truth as I sat surrounded by teachers, students, and studio owners, some burned out, some drifting, some quietly thriving, I started seeing something deeper:
We weren’t lacking content. We were lacking connection. Connection to practice, to purpose, to progress, to each other.
The modern yoga world is full of beautiful tools. Zoom classes. Free Youtube class. Wearables. Insight dashboards. Booking software. Community forums. But they often exist in silos.And that’s when I had my Moonshot moment. People often say, “Yoga saved my life.” And they mean it, deeply. In a world of overwhelm, disconnection, and burnout, yoga and wellness practices aren’t just trends. They are lifelines, but the way we deliver wellness today, it’s overdue for transformation.
The global wellness industry is expected to hit $9 trillion by 2028, and yet the sector is saturated with platforms, apps, and services that are increasingly indistinguishable from each other. In many ways, the industry has become louder, but not deeper.
This is the question I kept coming back to: How do you create something in wellness that is truly innovative?
That question is what led us to create Conscious Flow.
At first, we thought we were building a platform that would help students and teachers track, reflect, and grow across their wellness journey. But when we pitched our idea to Innovation Norway, the answer came back clear: That’s not innovation.”
And they weren’t wrong. Because at this point in history. Platforms aren’t new. AI isn’t new. In fact, when AI is everywhere, it stops being innovation. It becomes infrastructure
So, what is innovation when everything innovative has already been done?
That’s when we realized: Innovation in wellness today isn’t about more features, it’s about creating systems that truly understand people.
We went back. We redesigned and that revised vision got Innovation Norway backed us, and more importantly, it got us aligned with what the world really needs.
Whatever company you’re working in today, whatever you sell, whatever service you offer, will be irrelevant in 10, maybe even 5 years. Just ask the 50% of companies on the Forbes list who no longer exist. Since 2000, more than half of Fortune 500 companies have either gone bankrupt, been acquired, or been replaced by those who moved faster and thought more boldly (KPMG, 2024 Futures Report)
Someone, somewhere, is already working to make your business obsolete. So before doing something meaningful that make us sustainable to support yoga, wellness and community, we have to think about premoterm our project, as if what we are creating will eventually fail, and how to fix this. And we come to these two choices: innovate ourselves or The world will do it for us.
That’s what taught me: It’s not about building the next yoga thing, It’s about reimagining the experience of growth in a hyper-digital world.
It’s not about using AI because it’s trendy. It’s about asking: What happens when AI stops being the innovation? I believe what’s left is human-centered a system designed for people. That’s what Conscious Flow is trying to become.
We’re not here to replace yoga.
We’re here to restore the experience of being seen, guided, and growing, even in a hybrid world.
It’s a reflection on how innovation is the result of asking the right questions, telling the right stories, and building for the future no one is yet brave enough to admit we need.
Let The Journey Begin.
In the heart of Nam Cat Tien Jungle, amidst lush greenery and the sounds of nature, Claire sat down for a podcast with a former student—a reunion that began their shared path as teacher and student once more. Twenty-four years ago, Claire taught Andy in their final year at the Humanities and Social Science University. Little did they know that their paths, which had diverged across decades and continents, would lead them back to each other in such a remarkable setting, united by a shared passion for yoga.
Today, Claire is the founder of The Yoga Nest in Norway, a sanctuary for yogis and a center for yoga teacher training. But her journey to this moment has been a tapestry woven from years of dedication, exploration, and the courage to pursue her calling.
The Beginnings: A Spark That Ignited a Lifelong Journey
Claire discovered yoga in 2000 while she was a student at the Diplomatic Academy in Hanoi. Though she wasn’t a yoga teacher then, her curiosity for the practice sparked a journey that would shape her future. As she continued her academic pursuits, yoga became a constant, offering both balance and a new lens through which to view life.
During her master’s studies in the U.S., Claire began practicing yoga more intensively, finding solace and balance amid her academic life. In 2010, she immersed herself in intensive yoga retreats, where her connection to the practice deepened even further. It was during these retreats that friends, peers, and community members began to recognize her dedication and knowledge, encouraging her to share her practice more formally. Slowly, Claire began teaching yoga to friends and her community, taking her first steps into a teaching role that would ultimately become her calling.
Embracing the Path of a Yoga Teacher
Claire’s journey to becoming a certified yoga teacher grew organically out of her intensive practice and love for the discipline. Over time, her classes became more than just sessions; they transformed into spaces for personal growth, mindfulness, and transformation. In each session, Claire brought her depth of experience and gentle approach, creating an inclusive atmosphere for all levels of practitioners.
Today, she leads The Yoga Nest in Norway—a space where students can immerse themselves in yoga’s transformative power. The Yoga Nest offers a range of classes, workshops, and teacher training programs, blending traditional yoga wisdom with modern understanding to meet students wherever they are on their journey.
Reflections on a Lifelong Journey of Learning
As Claire shared her story in the jungle setting—a place of mystery, beauty, and deep-rooted connection to nature—it became a reminder of the path she and Andy each took to get there and of the enduring bond between teacher and student. Though they took different paths in life, both found a shared purpose through yoga, reconnecting after decades with the same reverence for learning, teaching, and growth.
Tune In to Claire’s Story
In this podcast, Claire opens up about her journey from the classroom to the yoga studio, the challenges and triumphs she experienced along the way, and her vision for The Yoga Nest. She talks about her passion for guiding others through yoga and the fulfillment she finds in creating a supportive community for practitioners of all levels.
Whether you’re a seasoned yogi or new to the practice, Claire’s story offers a beautiful reminder of the lifelong journey of learning and the power of following one’s heart.
Listen to the full episode and be inspired by Claire’s journey from teacher to founder of The Yoga Nest, as she continues to impact lives through the art and discipline of yoga.
