Online yoga finds new face
Adriene Mishler brings free classes into the homes of millions
Adriene Mishler’s eyes are shining with tears. We meet near the end of a six-week sell-out European roadshow that has taken in Berlin, Stockholm and Amsterdam.
In London, she has taught classes of more than 2,400 people packed into Alexandra Palace, complete with lighting, music and merchandise.
Next up, Paris. It’s been “gruelling”. These could rightly be tears of exhaustion. But no, it’s joy that she’s radiating. Because Mishler is grateful. Very grateful.
The Texan who wanted to be an actress has instead found global success as a yoga teacher. Hers is the name on every beginner’s lips. Try casually asking a friend where you might find a good online yoga class and prepare to be told with diehard seriousness: “Adriene changed my life.”
With more than four million people subscribed to her Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel and more than 18 million views for her Yoga for Complete Beginners video, her free classes — filmed in her dining room in downtown Austin, with her black and white blue heeler, Benji — have become a gateway for those unable, whether financially or physically, to get to a yoga class.
Yes, it might be her excellent
Google ranking that brings you to her page but it’s the mix of friendly encouragement and self-deprecating humour that makes you stay.
In an online yoga world full of perfect handstands and pretzel poses, she laughs at her creaky legs, forgets her words and reminds you that you don’t have to be an acrobat to practise yoga, you just need to “find what feels good”.
If the Green Goddess, VHS tapes and high-cut leotards characterised the at-home fitness craze of the Eighties, then Yoga with Adriene is the apogee of the 21st-century trend for logging on to YouTube to do downward dogs in the living room.
Yet even Mishler can’t quite comprehend what a phenomenon she is. “I get emotional just thinking about everyone because for years nobody knew or cared, even my parents were like, ‘Cool’... they didn’t get it. But now it’s a joyful thing. I think they’re proud and I’m proud of everyone — it’s not just me, it’s every single person who has ever subscribed and watched,” she says, all in one seamless, tearful flow.
The roadshow was a way for her to touch base with her online community, IRL (in real life). And for them to meet each other. Days after our interview I watch her take to the stage of London’s Oval Space to the sound of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good and guide 200 women and men in unison. The love for her would feel a little cultlike if she wasn’t so darned lovely. And yes, this sort of adulation does make her squirm. She prefers “roadshow” to “tour”, she says: “I’m no rock star. I’m not your guru.”
The irony is that having trained as an actress in New York, fame could well have come on the red carpet. But yoga was always part of her life. Growing up in Austin with actor parents, they would focus on body, breath and voice — “I think we even did sun salutations for warm-ups”
— and aged 17, she would drive her “clunker junker Volvo” to the only yoga studio in Austin. A year later, she qualified as a teacher. Besides being something she loved, it was a way to earn money on the side while she pursued acting.
It was on the set of an indie horror film that she met the director Chris Sharpe, who would eventually become her business partner. After the film fell apart in 2010, he suggested they collaborate on YouTube. Finally, in 2012, Yoga with Adriene was born.
Mishler says she was never trying to create her own brand of yoga, that all she ever wanted to do was teach. But it’s really hard to not like her style.