“The hardest part is showing up daily,” says Adriene Mishler, the cofounder and host of ten-million-subscribed YouTube channel Yoga With Adriene. She’s well placed to say so, having helped steer millions of people through the chaos and stress of global lockdowns over the past two years, with her calm, unpretentious at-home instructional yoga videos – which have now amassed more than a billion total views.
Born and raised in Austin, Texas, 37-year-old Mishler trained as an actor before founding Yoga With Adriene in 2012 with her business partner, Chris Sharpe, and her blue heeler, Benji, who often joins her on screen as the channel’s unofficial mascot. Yoga With Adriene’s explosive growth in popularity has led to live tours, TV appearances and, in 2015, a wellness video subscription service called Find What Feels Good. And yet it hasn’t always been a story of total serenity: in early 2021, Mishler acknowledged she was suffering burnout and took time to reassess and rebalance her work and practice. She spoke to GQ about the wellness boom, making yoga accessible and why more men than ever are -taking up the practice.
Tell us about the motivation and the origins of your channel and its early days.
I grew up in Austin and the older I get, and the more I mature, the more grateful I feel towards my upbringing. Back then, Austin was a really creative smaller city. Not that it’s not now, [but] it had an incredible influence on the way I chose to be. I grew up in theatre, in a household of actors, directors – both my parents were and are interdisciplinary people – so I never wanted to be cornered into one career path. Austin’s a cool city today, but especially back then it was just very creative. Everybody did everything and knew everyone. That gave me a lot of freedom to think about wearing many different hats.
I grew up as an actor: I moved from theatre to film and commercial and voice-over work. But I still consider myself an actor; I still want to perform. My business partner and I met on the set of an indie film. I knew I wanted to teach yoga professionally, to share that with as many people as possible, and I spent a lot of time in training [as an actor]. A lot of my training focused on vocal work, so there were ties, always, between the physicality of that training and vocal work, [which] is all about breath, and the yoga. Looking back now, I’m certainly able to see the beautiful cross-connect.
What was the yoga scene like in 2012?
When I first was starting to teach in my twenties, and also when Chris and I started the YouTube channel in 2012, there were not a lot of opportunities to practice yoga here in Austin. [It was] a very special scene – a beautiful, spiritual, but small, yoga community. I think around 2015 is when things started to change. This fun little creative project that we did, Yoga With Adriene, started to pick up. I also started to notice, here in my hometown, that the opportunities to practise yoga were growing, but they were getting more expensive. To put it quite frankly, only the affluent in my city were able to show up. I was mopping the floors [of yoga studios] and sweeping and washing mats in exchange to be able to go to class. So it’s not like I had this philanthropic idea... Chris and I had the channel going and I started to notice what was going on, and then I was like, “Well, damn. Let’s commit to this, then, because free yoga for all is something I’m really standing behind.” We crystallised the mission of Yoga With Adriene then, which is to provide as much high-quality, free yoga to as many people as possible. It’s the same mission still.
You saw huge growth in 2020, too, with millions of new viewers and subscribers during lockdown. How did that feel?
Before the lockdown I was feeling this beautiful, satisfying energy about the growth. In January 2020 [I was] flying on New Year’s Day to New York to talk about the 30-day yoga journey [released daily every January] with the Today show. It was just like, “Wow, this has really become a beautiful thing that I feel proud of.” And then lockdown hit. It started to become really evident that people were sharing the videos. That was really beautiful and we could see that was going on all over the world. I was just in the zone. I think we all were searching for things to really anchor on, in a time that felt chaotic, confused. I went all in, put my head down – I was pouring in everything. And, to be honest, later on, in 2021, I had a moment where I was like, “Oh, my goodness. I have to pause. I need to practise what I preach and take care of myself. Reset.”
So even yoga teachers can get burned out?
I totally got burned out. The 2020 expansion was a crazy thing – beautiful, in terms of getting to serve up a library of practices that help people not just physically but emotionally and mentally – but then there was this flipside, which is that the business tripled, quadrupled, and we weren’t really set up for that. We’ve definitely had to do a lot of hard foundational work since the big 2020 growth so that we can have a sustainable business and keep moving forward.
Is there a pressure to keep producing new content on YouTube?
Yeah. I always struggle with identifying as a YouTuber, but I relate so much to that pressure for content rollout: the fight to not care about the algorithm, but also to understand that without awareness of the algorithm all the hard shit you’ve been working on may never get seen. It becomes a real battle. Prior to the 2020 lockdown, I was still doing a new YouTube video every single week of the year and running a business and we were travelling, doing world tours and I was still acting. It was a big and hilariously emotional decision for me to move to release one YouTube video a month, starting in 2020. That was the first year I’ve ever done that.
We have a subscription app now called Find What Feels Good; my end goal, pre-pandemic, was to foster a place where our community can receive training and leadership from voices other than mine. That was going to take me out of the bottleneck and allow me to perform more or write my book or have a family – who knows? I had teachers and, in a lot of cases, friends lined up to come and be guests on the Find What Feels Good app and that got stunted because of the pandemic, so then we were back to square one, where there was a lot of pressure on me.
When did you decide you needed a break?
The body doesn’t lie and “mind, body, soul” isn’t something we just paint on the wall; it’s a framework for practice. But I started to notice in my body weird shit, like my fingers and toes going numb. I was waking up on Sundays with my heart pounding in my chest and I couldn’t really point to one reason why. We had a big snowstorm here in Austin in early 2021 and it was almost like the straw that broke the camel’s back. I started to feel full-blown anxiety and I’m thinking in my head, like, “Me? Adriene? There’s no way! I’m doing my practice and moving my body. I’m taking my salt bath. I have so much to be thankful for. I have meaningful work.” But my body was signalling to me that something was really, really off, so I decided I needed a very symbolic break. I booked a month-long stay in the Pacific Northwest. And I drove with my dog, Benji, from Texas to Washington State.
That’s more than 2,000 miles...
The drive itself was a healing moment. I listened to podcasts and music. I laughed and cried. It was great. I’m a Texas girl, so I love a good road trip. It’s a vacation or a road trip just to get out of the state here, living in central Texas. I went and I spent some time among the trees. I wasn’t performing. I wasn’t having to show up and lead. I was getting to listen and digest. We all deserve to take those moments, to be still. The hilarious thing is the universe was like, “OK, little lady. That’s enough.” I got a call: my mum had a stroke. I had to leave Benji in Washington and I was lucky: my partner had just arrived the same day. I picked him up at 9am and then I ended up unfortunately having to take the 6pm [flight] back to Austin to be with my mum. [She’s recovering now, but] the point is if we think we can plan these breaks and these healing moments within an inch of our lives, we’re wrong. Make sure to be present with what is.
And how is Benji? He’s a huge part of the channel.
It’s so nice to have Benji in my life, being appreciative of the companionship and the unconditional love a pet can bring. I love to use Benji rather strategically, to make the whole thing more homely and grounded and divert the attention from me and everyone’s – thankfully, I think, retired – obsession with tight yoga pants. There’s a lot going on, but I think Benji is a great tool in keeping the project real. We spent some time this year creating short animated projects, including a 12-minute cartoon where Benji gets to star. He’s helping young people, but really all ages, learn techniques to combat anxiety and uneasiness and fear. We’re going to be working on another episode, I’m happy to say. I think Benji has a bright future ahead of him leading mindfulness.
There’s very little visible influencing or product placement on your channel. You must have had lots of offers of sponsorship.
It was never a hard decision. I was always conscious of this icky feeling in the back of my chest, seeing people like myself get pushed out of yoga because we couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t really that I was virtuous in saying no to brand deals: when we were focusing on free yoga, it was an obvious no for Chris and me to try to sell people shit during their practice. I will say, obviously, we’re human. There were moments in the early days when we didn’t have any money. We were using borrowed cameras. Around 2015, I lost my voice entirely and I had to have vocal surgery. I couldn’t pay for the surgery. I borrowed money from Hilah Cooking, Chris’ other YouTube channel, to pay for the surgery and then when I made the money back, through the YouTube channel, I repaid them. That’s where we were. It would have been easy to really make some money. It might sound like I’m on my high horse, like, “Oh, she can afford to not have brand deals.” No. I do think there are ways to work with brands that are harmonious. I have worked with Adidas for half a decade now and, honestly, I’m open to harmonious brand deals moving forward, particularly for the Find What Feels Good app, because I want to be able to support other voices and grow something.
Are more men taking up yoga now?
It’s a topic I have always been really excited and vocal about. I’m 37 and I’ve watched the scene change my whole adult life. I can without a doubt say that when I started the channel, I received countless messages asking if yoga was good for men or if men could “do” yoga. The funny thing about that is the roots of yoga are steeped in moments of males only being allowed to practise yoga, but, without a big, dramatic history lesson, it’s been so exciting. Seeing men show up for practice is so helpful in my mission. Every time a man shows up, it’s one point to the Yoga With Adriene mission of creating accessibility and a pathway for everyone to practice.
I taught in a studio for a long time, too, and I currently co-own a yoga studio here in Austin with two men, which is really cool. When the big, Western, capitalistic wellness boom was happening, every time a man would show up at one of our events I’d be like, “Yes! Yes!” It wasn’t that long ago that you were not seeing that even in classes. To see, in particular, men practising with women just makes me smile. Because what a great toolset for us to share as people. At-home yoga practice is great for all of us.
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