It is not uncommon for yoga teachers to juggle side hustle or full-time careers that seemingly have nothing to do with yoga. Office manager. Doctor. Kindergarten teacher. Murder mystery novelist.
Murder mystery novelist? That’s the latest outing from an experienced yoga teacher and debut author Kandi Nealwho published independently Behind the studio doors last year. The novel explores a cast of characters with big personalities and complicated relationship dynamics against the backdrop of a yoga studio.
“It’s about love, lies and betrayal,” says Neal. This also includes “forbidden romance” and “spiritual con artists,” she explains. And of course murder.
The book follows Trina, the main character Neal based on herself and a friend who owns a yoga studio, as she navigates “quirky studio drama” and “the unspoken reality of wellness culture.” In doing so, the book reveals “the messy, relatable human stories hidden beneath the serene facade,” Neal said.
“I just thought it was fun and different because it’s the yoga room,” Neal says. “It’s behind the scenes.” Early in the book, Neal sets the tone for the book through Trina’s musings: “At age thirty, I’ve been teaching yoga for a third of my life. In my corner of the world, it’s almost a clique. Everyone knows who’s who, and what’s even more threatening is that everyone seems to know each other’s business. Sure, there are pluses and minuses, but for the most part it feels more like a popularity contest than a viable career.”
Neal aspired to be a writer as a child and began a freelance writing career at the age of twenty. A few years later she started practicing yoga and in 2012 she enrolled in a yoga teacher training course. Given Neal’s enthusiasm for thrillers and her experience teaching yoga for more than a decade, her decision to use a yoga studio and its cast of characters as the backdrop to her story seems like the least mysterious part of her process.
Behind the studio doors is definitely not your typical yoga book – and that’s a big part of its appeal. Writing about deception and death can be surprising for someone who teaches strength and self-awareness. Yet the book’s underlying message, Neal explains, is consistent with the broader message of the practice: “finding peace amid the chaos of life.”
Q&A with yoga teacher and murder mystery writer Kandi Neal
Neal took a break from teaching classes to talk about what her debut book says about the yoga community and how she brings the same quiet confidence to her writing and teaching.
The overlap between writing fiction and teaching yoga
Yoga diary: Writing a book is a significant commitment, even if you don’t combine other jobs. How did you find time to write during your already busy days?
Kandi Neal: I started writing 500 words here and there. But over Memorial Day weekend I decided I wanted to finish it before Labor Day. So I would do writing sprints. I put my phone on Do Not Disturb, set an alarm—sometimes for an hour and sometimes two—and I just wrote. Whether or not I had planned or plotted something for the day, it didn’t matter. I didn’t care if there were typos or edits I had to make. I would just write. I feel like this process has mostly helped me get words on the page. That’s the best advice I can give anyone. Set a timer and just write. Worry about later edits.
JJ: Okay, I have a seemingly random question. How do you come up with sequences for the lessons you teach?
KN: To some extent I just do it. But I always try to have at least one thing that I know I want to center. Earlier today I thought, “What do I want to learn tonight?” I thought about Figure Four and focused on all the things I could do with that pose. I decided to do some Figure-four Bridge and Figure Fours in Down Dog.
JJ: That’s similar to the way you wrote your book. You had an idea of where you were going, but you didn’t have too much control over the process. A good friend who is also a yoga teacher likes to say, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” It’s interesting that the same creative process you use in teaching also plays out in your writing.
KN: That’s a very good point! I’m working on book number two now, and I stopped before I even started because I thought, “I have to outline it. I have to do it differently this time.” And then I didn’t make time for that. So instead I just sat down and started writing, like I did with the first book, and then the story started to come out.
The lesser known side of yoga studios
JJ: Let’s explore how your characters were created. Are these based on personalities you know IRL?
KN: The main character, Trina, is loosely based on a combination of me and the owner of one of the studios where I teach. Lillian is based on someone I will never say. Mark and Malia are based on people I know too, but they’re such stereotypes that they could actually be based on anyone who subscribes to that overly spiritual guru type.
Many of the stereotypes in the book are exaggerated to show the danger of not questioning things. For example, is this integrity? Is this spirituality? Is this yoga? Is this a cult? What is this? So the exaggeration is meant to point out how easy it can be to fall into deception and to warn readers that you still need to have discernment even when people seem wonderful.
Most of the other characters are just fragments of my imagination. And that was really fun. It reminded me of my childhood and making up short stories.
The reality of being human
JJ: Has the process of putting into words what you’ve observed in yoga studios for over a decade made you perceive the yoga space or the people in it differently? What was behind the way you chose to portray your characters?
KN: The thing I was thinking about most when I wrote the book was, if people read it, would they be concerned that I was talking about them? Like, the book contains things that have actually happened to guys I’ve dated, and I thought, “Oh, if they ever read this…”
I thought a lot about character development when I was creating the first book and the characters. I was really inspired by the season of The Handmaid’s Tale where viewers were guided through all the characters’ stories and learned how they became who they were. For example, Aunt Lydia is terrible. Although, after you find out how she got like this, you almost feel sorry for her. And June, even though she’s so obnoxious, you still support her. I appreciate the dynamic writing and opposition in that series. That’s why I kept so much of the backstory in the book. Because I want people to really support these characters, even when they’re terrible.
Self-publishing as detachment
JJ: You’ve decided to self-publish your murder mystery novel. Can you tell us more about that process?
KN: I was really determined to get a book deal, and when I realized that wasn’t going to happen, I was like, “Okay, I’ll self-publish it.”
I learned so much while pitching the book to publishers and hearing their feedback, including what I could have done differently or better, so I feel like I’m super-equipped to write a really good second book.
JJ: Is there anything else we should know about your first book?
KN: Not to spoil the mystery, but it’s not really a murder. It looks like an accidental homicide.
JJ: And you’re currently working on the sequel?
Yes. One thing I’ve been told by a few people who have read the book is that they really like how much I developed these characters. So I feel like it might not take as long to write because the characters are already known so I can focus more on the story and not the character development.
What’s next for the author
While Neal doesn’t reveal what happens in her sequel, we may find a clue on the cover of Behind the studio doors. It seems she had the sequel in mind when she titled it “A Yoga Murders Novel” on the cover. As in multiple murders.
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