The Sunday Times - UK (2021-11-28)

more than 200 people dying. She and her boyfriend

both hosted homeless friends, took food to neigh-

bours and even chopped up fallen trees to take to

homeless people in the park as firewood. Her elderly

mother, who didn’t have power, was sleeping in her

car to keep warm and had to move in with her.

Mishler says she was “knocked out by anxiety”: short-

ness of breath, pounding chest, tingling in her hands

and feet, and faintness. “I had gotten so far from

listening to my own needs and looking after myself.

I mean, this is what I teach. It’s the age-old ‘practise

what you preach’, and I wasn’t doing that,” she says.

Mishler grew up in Austin, Texas, with her parents

— “creative hippies” — who divorced when she was

young. She started to study yoga when she was 18

after crying “tears of joy” during her first class and has

been obsessed with it ever since. “I want people to

understand the magic of practising. The benefits of

yoga don’t come when you get into a single pose or

when you reach a certain level. It’s just showing up.”

During college in the early Noughties — when

yoga was very much a hippy hobby, rather than the

go-to wind-down for the Lululemon-clad wellness

brigade — Mishler paid for classes by sweeping

floors at her local studio. In her twenties she trained

to be an actress, although she never quite broke into

Hollywood. Her biggest role was appearing along-

side Nicolas Cage in the 2013 thriller Joe before she

left the industry to become a full-time yogi.

Despite now being one of the world’s most famous

yoga instructors, it seems Mishler is in no rush to

relocate to the solid-gold wellness mecca of LA. She

still lives in Austin — alone except for Benji — an

eight-minute walk from where her boyfriend lives,

whose name she skilfully avoids revealing. The pair met

two years ago at a local French restaurant, just before

the pandemic started. “I was without a doubt not in a

phase where I was looking [for a relationship]. I was

there to have dinner and wine with a friend, and he and

his friend introduced themselves. This magical thing

happened where the sun set and I stayed way past

closing, talking to this perfect stranger,” she gushes.

The world of wellness, Mishler tells me, is “capital

letter Weird”. A soft way of describing an industry that

has recently come under harsh criticism for cultivating

a global community of antivaxers, Covid deniers and

conspiracy theorists. The yoga industry alone is worth

more than $88 billion worldwide, and by 2025 that

number is expected to reach $215 billion. So how much

does Mishler earn? Not as much as you might expect,

she says. According to The New York Times, she turns

down between $250,000 and $500,000 in advertising

deals a year. “Obviously we make money from ads

before our videos on YouTube, but I don’t take on a lot

of brand deals. We’re not going out for profit yoga.”

There is spon-con on Mishler’s Instagram account —

she is an Adidas ambassador — but she “thinks very

carefully” about which brands she partners with.

She has big plans for her app, which she hopes will

one day be the main source of revenue for her and her

team of ten people. The goal for next year is to trans-

form it into a “Sesame Street for wellness”, through

which you can learn from instructors from a diverse

set of backgrounds with different skills. “We have all

these concepts of open mind and open heart in yoga,

but a lot of [other yoga] platforms are really bare,”

she says. “I would love to do a book, only because then

I could write a second and then do a recipe book, and

then a Benji book, and then a poetry book. I do want

an expansive life of opportunities.” Mishler is very

aware that, in the west, yoga is a wealthy white

woman’s space. “We need to do better,” she keeps

telling me. But diversity isn’t the only aim: “The other

goal is to get me out of the bottleneck of doing

everything. I am not helping anyone or myself if

I continue to try to be full-time everything.” It sounds

like Mishler has found what feels good. ■

30 Days of Yoga begins on January 1;

yogawithadriene.com

‘I was just saying

yes to everything ...

But I took on way

too much’

Mishler with Benji

20 • The Sunday Times Style