I began by asking where Nardini’s look came from.
I don’t know if I ever wore a colour lighter than black my
entire high school career. When I started doing yoga and
teaching, I felt like a real black sheep because everyone
else was wearing white and beige and floating around
with their mala beads, their long hair and no makeup.
I thought that if I loved yoga, maybe I had to become
more of what I thought a yogi should look like. I was that
way for many years. As I got successful, I started having
the courage to begin to reveal my true self even more.
The more I became my rock and roll loving, wine-drinking
self, the more I attracted a tribe that was unique to me,
loved music and being irreverently reverent.Was that a game plan?
No! I was very afraid at the beginning. I thought I
would lose all my followers. But I was unhappy acting
like someone I wasn’t. It turned out that me being
authentically me is very, very magnetic. People were
drawn to me as a symbol of how they could become
more genuinely themselves. I gave myself a Mohican on
the beach in Mexico after drinking Mezcal and gained a
massive audience because of it. Who’d have thought?Who is your audience?
The bulk of it is women between the ages of 35 and 55
who just want to be free. They like a free woman doing
what she wants to do.Do you think that reflects a general need in yoga?
Absolutely. What we often see in the yoga community is
people who go polar. They put everything into one practice,
one teacher, and feel that’s the true yoga. They’re running
around with this kind of fake bliss but treating others as
somehow less than them. They become more yogi than
thou. But, as we know, yoga means unity, not polarity.
I think there’s been a huge need all along for teachers
who can help students who want to add yoga to their
lives and do a little better – maybe have more of a
spiritual practice or plant-based diet, for instance – but
not become too extreme. These are the people who want
to be spoken to in real-world terms and not be judged
for what some might deem non-yogic behaviour.
I mean, I don’t want to get all classical on your ass,
but in the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali or whoever wrote them- let’s call him Pat because it’s gender-neutral – said
trust no other authority over your own truth. No external
om body