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Saturday 2 May 2020

I Love Yoga with Adriene


Oh man, Yoga with Adriene. Do you know it? Are you obsessed with it? You will be. I absolutely love her.

The unofficial Queen of Quarantine, Texan yoga shero Adriene Mischler is the person everyone but everyone is going to for their lockdown yoga and/or meditation fix. Especially me. 

I’m a relatively new convert. A friend mentioned Adriene to me and I eventually looked her up on YouTube and that was it, from my first video I was hooked. I now do an Adriene video pretty much every day. She’s so soothing, so calming, so reassuring… and Benji! Her gorgeous dog Benji, who sleeps through pretty much all of her videos, is *almost* as lovely as my own dog.

Adriene has been putting free yoga videos up on YouTube every week for almost ten years, she has more than seven million subscribers to her channel and her live yoga classes in London (on her rare visits across the pond) cost around £40 a ticket. She’s sponsored by Adidas so always wears lovely kit, yet she still seems so normal and down-to-earth. Her videos are shot in her Texas dining room, she leaves in her goofs and slip-ups, there is no annoying background music (sometimes you’ll hear a plane flying past the window, that’s how normal she is), she tells terrible jokes sometimes and all of her sessions are manageable whatever your yoga skills. 

Her YouTube channel (which hosts about 500 videos and counting) reads like a catalogue of potential ailments: Yoga for Writers, Yoga for Vertigo, Yoga for Feet, Yoga for Stress and so on. Seriously, Adriene is speaking to you. Each and every one of you.

I’ve been doing yoga on and off for about 25 years. But I’m but no means any good at it. I appreciate yoga for it’s breathing, it’s stretchiness, it’s mental health benefits, but I can’t do any of the more tricky poses like crow or headstands, even Hindi squat is beyond me (but then I'm a long distance runner so I don't bend). I’m not into power yoga or rocket yoga or hot yoga, I just want calm, normal, quiet yoga. And that’s what Adriene delivers. It’s yoga for the people. Yoga we can all relate to. You don’t need to be able to bend yourself in half and come back out the other side in order to complete an Adriene class. As she says, just showing up is half the battle. Yay. That’s an easy win. Adriene makes you feel good. 

She uses chilled out phrases like “rain your fingers down to the earth” or “kiss your knees” when you come to a sit up, and it’s not nauseating but endearing. I genuinely feel like Adriene cares about me even though she has no idea who I am. I am desperate for her online shop to re-open so I can buy some Adriene branded merch - that’s how much I love her. Her Instagram is a further insight into the lives of Adriene and Benji and their simple home, which feels both nourishing and normal. She just seems like somebody you’d know. 

I love Adriene. And Benji, obviously. Thank you, Adriene and Benji. PS - I'm busy trying to recreate Adriene's yoga studio in my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island. Like the obsessive I am.

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