Tara Stiles became a yoga teacher by accident, rejecting the guru model that intimidates people. She teaches yoga as a practical skill, not a spiritual hierarchy, and worked with Deepak to make it accessible without preaching.
Bulletproof radio, a state of high performance says, you're the coolest yoga instructor ever. How did you keep that from going to your head? I mean, I don't know if I have, but I just. I. I just feel like I never wanted to. To. To teach yoga. I thought I would dance and have this whole different life. And the reason why I. I started sharing yoga was because I saw all the problems. I think that's why so many of us in wellness that stay in it for so long, we got sucked in. Nobody, you know, in the 70s and 80s grew up and said, I want to be a wellness leader. You know, there just wasn't that industry. But I started learning about yoga in my early teens through my dance program. And my second thought was, why doesn't everybody do this? So I started going around to the institutions that existed and started very quickly learning, okay, yeah, there's a lot of people doing it, but there's a lot of people not. And the people that I was talking to that weren't. Were not doing it because they felt intimidated or they had a bad experience. All of these misconceptions that are actually true. So I just started, in my own way, kind of standing up for yoga and saying, I'm not a guru. You can do this. It's just like learning anything. You learn it. You need a teacher to show you, but the teacher isn't all that and a bag of whatever. So I think that having that mindset of, yeah, I know yoga enough to show you how to do it, but I also know that yoga isn't saying, I'm awesome and you're not, and that's sort of the formula right there. So even when I met Deepak and he said, you know, we started doing some projects together, and then he asked me, you know, on one of his projects, will you come over and be my yoga teacher? And I just started laughing at him. I said, you know, Deepak, like, you know everything about yoga. And he said, yeah, I know, but you're the only one that I've met so far that will take me through yoga and not try to teach me about yoga. And I said, well, yeah, of course. So I think that's how we got along. You know, I'd go over to his home and do yoga with him and his wife and help him feel better and then just leave, you know, and then that would be it. And. And it would be on him. And, you know, for me, that was always my experience of yoga. And any teacher that tried to say, oh, no, no, I did that for you. I'm the guru. You know, that's sort of what. What I was calling out the whole time and still continue to. Because that's just. It doesn't work if you have that kind of dynamic. So, you know, I think by default then I started getting these labels of, you know, the rebel and the cool one or whatever. But it was really just like, hey, yeah, I can show you this, but you're cool, you know, you've got the right stuff, but let me show you how to organize your body and do the moves and whatever. But if somebody's going to come to me and be a little unbalanced after that and say, oh, you did this for me, you know, that doesn't feel good for me. That feels unbalanced. So just like everything else. No, no, you did that for yourself. I showed you some things. I can show you some more. But ultimately it's working because you're doing it. So to me, that's just, you know, how it works. If I started to get, you know, a strange idea of myself, it wouldn't work anymore for me or for anybody else.
