Adriene Mishler
Founder of the most popular yoga channel on YouTube, Adriene Mishler is an actor and yoga teacher based out of Austin, Texas. She is co-founder of Find What Feels Good opens in a new tab, a growing online library of yoga and yoga lifestyle tools to encourage you to be authentic, do your best and find what feels good. She also leads Yoga With Adriene opens in a new tab, a happy and successful online yoga community which creates free creative content to inspire people of all shapes and sizes to connect to their body daily.
As we begin to peek over into the new year, we cannot help but take a moment to look back at 2015.
How was it?
You start to consider what worked and what didn’t and what resolutions you kept and those that, well, you didn’t.
We all seek to be at our prime — and we deserve it. We all want to be healthy, to have energy, to live comfortably in our own skin. Most of us desire that promise of inner peace, and almost everyone can benefit from slowing down and connecting to what is inside. And yes, you can admit to yourself that yes, you want all of those things AND you want to feel good in a bathing suit.
You are not alone.
At the top of a bright new year we begin to perk up in order to buckle down on those resolutions once again. We revise, redesign, recommit! We seize the opportunity to lay down the new law, commit to the new wave of health that is going to loyally lead us to our vision of healthy and happy.
This time, game on. We are going to cultivate the healthy lifestyle we dream of — and by golly, we are going to sustain it.
With yoga?
Yes.
Kick your year off with an at-home yoga practice.
Yes, you can.
All levels welcome.
You don’t have to leave your home.
You can wear your favorite pair of comfy pants with a hole in them.
You can learn the foundations without feeling the pressure of a public class.
You can discover your body without feeling self-conscious.
It’s free.
It’s awesome.
It’s 2016.
I believe that the way to creating and maintaining a healthy lifestyle that looks good, tastes good, works GOOD — is one where you are in the driver seat. You are the director, the choreographer and the player. (Sorry, I was a theatre kid.)
A few years ago a film friend asked me if I had interest in doing a yoga channel on YouTube. I was comfortable on camera and already very committed to cultivating my practice and to teaching. I was a young teacher, an actress and determined to create something meaningful with my life.
Yoga With Adriene started as an experiment and really, we were just committed to learning and having fun. As the channel began to grow, I kept hearing requests for a 30-Day Yoga challenge. Pictures, videos. It didn’t matter. Everyone was asking for the same thing. 30-Day Challenge. “Give it to me, now!”
So I did. But I knew it had to be a journey — not a challenge. It had to have a strong focus on the process — not the completion of the product. The motivation and enthusiasm had to be cultivated from within.
It was my theory that if I was being true to the principles of yoga and to my beliefs of what it means to live healthy then this 30-Day Journey had to be one in which by the end you felt that you were in the driver’s seat — windows all the way down.
We share a mantra in the community: Find What Feels Good.
Find What Feels Good is about the listening. It’s not about mastering a diet or a move.
It’s about enjoying the ride.
And then, inevitability you end up showing up for yourself each day, with ease, alive and curious about that healthy version of you.
It’s not a far-fetched idea, and it doesn’t look like anyone else’s version of healthy.
It’s yours. And it’s unique. And it’s beautiful.
We use the tools of yoga to practice this mantra. The more discoveries made on the mat the better. When the journey is the reward we ride the wave of health and happiness — instead of chase it.
We open our minds to new discoveries on the mat to discern and practice balance.
It’s a dance we enjoy, and no song is a repeat.
In 2016 I invite you to the mat with me. Cultivate a home practice and watch your discoveries spill off the mat and into your everyday.
You don’t have to be flexible. You don’t have to be fit. And you don’t even have to leave your home.
Accept where you are today, and welcome curiosity.
Find what feels good.
Happy New Year!
See you on the mat!
Join Adriene’s free 2016 30 Days Of Yoga Camp opens in a new tab! A bootcamp for the mind body and soul!
