Lineage, Part 3: Yoga with Adriene
On a winding and unexpected road of connections.
I’m finding my way back to my yoga lineage (with a few other thoughts thrown in). No explanation of how I got to where I am would be complete without talking about Adriene Mishler.
A friend recommended the Yoga with Adriene YouTube channel circa 2015. I did a few videos while I still lived in Austin (without having any idea that she lived mere miles from where I did), but didn’t explore particularly deeply. Then I moved to North Carolina.
I have this rule about where I want to live: either cows or public transportation. Somewhere small enough to have cows, while it has its downsides, is familiar, quiet enough, and I know how to manage it. Somewhere with decent public transportation, while it has its downsides as well, offers convenience, diverse perspectives, and enough opportunities not to inspire fear in “what happens if the thing I came here to do doesn’t work out but I’m stuck here?”
The city I moved was neither; too big for cows, too small for those other factors. Mid-sized cities are great for lots of reasons, but I learned in the two years I lived there that they are not great for me (also a whole other conversation as to why). Most pertinent to this topic, I couldn’t find a convenient yoga studio with a schedule that worked, and I was sad to lose the semi-consistent practice I’d found in Austin.
So I found my way back to Yoga with Adriene. I had a small rotation of videos that I used to practice in the morning and before bed, and I started recording which videos I had liked the most and making playlists that I could access for specific purposes. By the beginning of 2019, I’d already decided that the location and my job weren’t a good fit. My husband and I had accepted a failure of rooting, which we had so desperately tried to achieve, and also the fact that we shouldn’t have written Texas off as quickly as we did. We knew that the new year was going to include a big transition.
Every January (since 2015), Adriene has released a new 30 Days of Yoga series, with one video a day, but with the gentle invitation to take the time you need to work your way through. At the beginning of 2019, I started Dedicate, and immediately felt something shift in my yoga practice and, quite frankly, in my engagement with the world. It offered challenging practices and postures that I’d never in a million years thought I’d be able to do well that, with scaffolded practice and a sense of humor, I discovered I could. I had never been able to achieve the simple act of committing to movement every day, and finding a structure that kept inviting me back without judgment helped me believe that change was possible. Dedicate was a potent theme for me, too, as a Gemini professional dilettante.
I started to think about what it meant to dedicate myself to a practice, dedicate myself to the right path, not just the path I thought I was supposed to be on.
When we moved back to Austin later that year, my friend Venmo’d me (I think, although maybe we didn’t use Venmo yet?) and told me to sign up for an in-person class Adriene was teaching at a space downtown. This was the same friend who, 18 months prior, had said, “This job is not working for you. Your three-year timeline is something you made up and it doesn’t matter as much as your happiness.” She’s literally never been wrong about anything that mattered. So I went to the class, which turned out to be a wild experience, an outdoor space in Texas summer heat, with less than 6 inches of space between mats, everyone decked out in YWA gear, and lots of free snacks from sponsors (thus beginning my love affair with Waterloo). It was my first experience of Adriene’s work as a commodity, sure, and that part was tricky, but it was also my first experience of what it meant to find a yoga community. I was surprised when I recognized Adriene, herself, asking me gently to shift my mat slightly to make additional space. She was welcoming, soft-spoken, and there was no pageantry beyond the microphone - just a yoga teacher helping to get the physical space set for a practice. The class was great - an all-levels practice with accessible choices. I didn’t know anyone, which meant I didn’t have to be self-conscious about what I did or didn’t do, and even so, I felt a spark of what it could be like to have a true community, a group of people (as we defined it when I was a teaching artist) who have something important in common.
That experience opened up the possibility of community outside of work, and it spurred me to look at the schedule for the studio I’d gone to before leaving Austin, and to go to my favorite teacher’s class. The transformation that emerged from that single class is a story for another day, but the warm embrace of Adriene’s in-person class when I was figuring out how to move back to a place, how to accept failure and move forward from it, how to admit that I’d been wrong about what I wanted and needed and had left exactly the place that could offer me those things was a lifeline I didn’t know I needed.
There are so many ways that Yoga with Adriene resonates for me. Adriene is originally from Austin (the unicorns, Austinites from birth rather than relocation!). The standard intro to her videos has the Austin skyline in the background. She’s an actor. She attended schools in the same vertical team where I teach. Her teaching style is grounded in alignment and invitation and includes philosophical components introduced gently so you learn them over time and space. She’s playful and funny, characteristics that I struggle to incorporate but aspire to.
What holds true the most from my experience of engaging with her work for almost a decade is the simple idea that you can come back to something again and again, wherever you are on your path, and take what resonates that day.
From a one-off video practice to the invitation to something more consistent to a connection to a home of my heart (before I knew it was) to considering the many ways that teaching can look at the multitudes of ways to reach people, YWA has been an important touchstone. Not every day, not even every month, but when I need it, it’s there as the reminder and the invitation to start again, start anew, see what emerges this time.
Since I’ve found a much more consistent in-person and online live practice the past few years, I haven’t known quite what to do with the 30-Day Yoga Journey. Last year, I tried to add it on top of my regular practice, but that was too much. This year, I’m trying a different tactic, which is not worrying about consecutive days; on any days I don’t have a scheduled class, I do the next class in the Flow sequence and that seems to be the sweet spot in this season of my practice.
If you’ve engaged with Yoga with Adriene, I’m curious to hear your thoughts and/or know your favorite videos! Some of mine are below; add yours in the comments!
Return
Gentle Morning Practice (in one of my favorite Austin spots)
Rainbow Yoga
Yoga Rinse
Soften
Rose Yoga
Expand
Rainy Day Yoga
A two-year project found its way to completion in this temperature afghan that I made for my husband for our seventh anniversary. The first picture is the blanket itself, and the others are of the sort of absurdly meticulous system I used to document the temperatures in the various places we were during our first year being married. There are a lot of thoughts I have about how a project of this magnitude holds lessons for marriage and beyond, but sharing it now was both timely and seemed related to this idea of returning to something many times, over time, to see what can eventually emerge, what happens when you stick with something, however imperfectly, over a long period of time. Also, I’m a good secret-keeper, but two years is a long time with something that’s as innocuous as this!
January’s calendar is below! You can click to register. Also feel free to let me know what days/times would work best for you and what kinds of classes and/or workshops you’d like to see.
That temperature afghan is INSANE! I am so impressed. I love it and the sentiment of coming back to things--what a lovely, gentle way to give ourselves permission to try again. <3
You introduced me to YWA in 2019 and I sporadically checked out her videos, and then committed to the 30 Day Yoga Challenge in 2020 (Home). It was the most consistent month of practice I'd had up to that point, and in the following two years of pandemic black hole, it was a space I could return to to find grounding and peace. I didn't do the full 30 days in 2022 or 2023, but I committed to doing Flow this year and am loving the regular practice 14 days in. I crave starting my mornings with movement and think I'll keep it as part of my routine after January ends, maybe by going back and visiting those years I skipped. :)