Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Interview with Yoga Guru Kino MacGregor

I recently interviewed Kino MacGregor on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today is one of the top yoga influencers in the world, with over a million followers on Instagram and over 140 million views on her YouTube channel since its inception. Kino MacGregor has become an invaluable resource for those interested in living more mindful lives, improving their yoga form, or simply admiring yoga poses most of us could even dream of doing. Kino leads, classes, workshops and retreats around the world and has written four books on yoga with a fifth book on the way. Kino, thank you for joining us.

Kino: Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure to join you on this podcast.

Adam: Thank you. So Kino, when I first saw your Instagram page, my jaw literally dropped the same way it does every time I go into a yoga class and see some of the things that some of the people in the room do, but my jaw dropped exponentially lower. How do you decide what superhuman pose to post each day?

Kino: Well, I think the first thing that I'm always interested in doing is inspiring people to practice. So I will share a posture often that I'm working on or something that is just a part of my everyday normal practice and I will always qualify, you know, anything that looks kind of extraordinary with a write up in the caption, to really share people that it's a journey, and it's a process that I've been practicing for over 20 years. And it's really easy to look at something and see oh, wow, that's a really beautiful pose and see the success. But I really encourage people to look for the failure, to look for the effort that I've put in over all those years. I wasn't born naturally strong or flexible. I was never a dancer, I was never a gymnast. I was never anything athletic before yoga. So really, my intention was to really encourage people who are inspired to practice to put in the work, to believe in themselves and to really go beyond what the limited notion of what they believe their bodies or their minds can or cannot do.

Adam: What are some of the other things that you think about strategically as a large social influencer and content creator?

Kino: Well, I think there's a responsibility that goes into having many, many people read and participate in a community that you are making and are a leader in. And so that's something I'm very, very conscious of. Whereas, you know, I think in the past when I first started my Instagram account, when I first started my YouTube account, I used to be kind of egocentric, and that I was interested in like, what do I think is cool to share? And then as the community around me has really grown, I started to really change the paradigm into what is most valuable to this community? What am I sharing that can really help people where they are rather than just what I think is cool, you know, so I've sort of changed the paradigm and I think that's a really important thing for anybody that sees themselves or finds himself in any sort of leadership position, whether it's an influence or leadership position or the leadership position in in say, a corporate or business world is that that is that there's a responsibility that comes in leadership that people are looking up to you for guidance, and you'll never be perfect, you know, and I think that that's that that's also important to include the imperfections, the struggles, the times when you stumble and fall and then people are watching to see, you know, well, what's gonna happen now? You know, what's going to happen after the mistake, what's going to happen after the failure? So there are two kinds of interesting things that I think about, which is the the notion that's kind of really popular now about that I'm sure many people have heard referred to as scaling up, which is that you use, you know, you use your failures as the mother of your success, and you continue to fail quicker and smarter until you actually succeed. And that happens in business circumstances, it happens in yoga poses, it happens in interpersonal relations. But then there's also kind of like the learning that you take away from your successes. And I think that's equally as important. And I don't think that people understand that when you achieve, whether it's a posture or you publish a book or you have a business success that can either lead you to personal growth, or it can be due to personal stagnation, or can lead you into a type of failure. So I feel like it's extremely important to share kind of the full process And, you know, with everyone who's a part of my community.

Adam: That's actually the first time I've heard the term failing up used as something positive and it's really interesting to me. Usually you hear failing up as something that’s said derisively, like a football coach who keeps getting fired and keeps failing up. But it's really interesting to learn how I think it's a great insight, for example, talking about how you do yoga, and I know for me personally, when I first started doing yoga, I could barely do anything. And I'm by no means a yoga model, but just every time you go, you get better and better and better. So I think it's a great example.

Kino: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. And when you know, when you see an outside image of something, you see perfection, but what you don't see is how many times that person has fallen out of a posture, how many times that person has had an idea, struggled with it and failed. You know, you give your attention to what's working and other people, but you don't realize that, you know, they're struggling just like you are. So I think it's extremely important to just kind of level the playing field and I think there's some statistics that I've read recently that said that actually, there's not that much of a difference between people who attain long term success in business and in life in terms of you know, the metrics between the people who have long term success versus the people who have near miss failures. And there's actually not that much difference in terms of their capacity, their, you know, their their level of achievement, it's just that we focus on the winners and what over a period of say 10 or 20 years and what happens is the people who fail early and learn to fail up actually join that circle of winners and the people who are in the circle of winners that don't take their winning as impetus for personal growth are actually losing ground so I don't feel that life or yoga or poses are as simple as kind of win or lose and you know, one of the promises of yoga is to kind of change the paradigm of how we value and how we achieve so that we can kind of move beyond, you know that we're in it to win it, you know, we're, we're here for kind of like a bigger, broader picture that you know that that's kind of more communal oriented and more interpersonal relation oriented.

Adam: You talk about some of the most significant failures along your journey and how you were able to bounce back from them. What roadmap do you provide for the people who look up to you on how they can recover from the setbacks that they have to face?

Kino: So the first thing that I think any yoga student experiences is how hard the yoga poses are, you know, you come to yoga with you know, big wide eyes, and you think it's gonna change your life and yeah, I want to be more peaceful. I want to be like that person I see on Instagram, you know, on a beautiful beach with the wind blowing in their hair and looking like they're in that state of kind of, you know, liberated peace and sign me up for that. Then you go to class and you try to balance and headstand and it's really hard and it's scary. And you want to cry because you feel like a failure. And in that moment, it's kind of like, that's where your yoga starts. And what I mean, I remember my very first class, I tried to do a headstand and I was completely floored. I remember falling and toppling over and making some loud sounds when I toppled over. I did it every day for a year before I balanced. When I progressed to try to do handstands, I failed every day for five years. And before I was able to achieve the posture, and those life lessons- I've taken them off the mat into my life. When I wanted to write my first book, I created a manuscript. I sent it to over 100 different book agents. I heard back from a very few select of them, all of the ones I hear back from turned me down and wrote me scathing reviews about why I shouldn't write a book. Then I apply it and then I sent it out to another batch of like 50 or 60 book agents. I had one right in the back that said that they might be willing to take it on and I, you know, went with that. When I wanted to make yoga videos, I contacted some of the larger production companies that were filming with other yoga teachers and said I wanted to make videos and they flat out turned me down. But I kept going, I decided to make my own videos. When I wanted to found Omstars as the world's first yoga TV channel. Online, I approached other online yoga providers and asked if they would allow or would be interested in partnering with me. And they all laughed me off the table and just said that there was no market for that. And that, you know, I didn't have the skills to run this and I didn't understand the industry. So I turned to Kickstarter, and bootstrap, founding my own company. So I know what it's like to face failure. I know what it's like to have the door slammed in your face both in terms of what the postures are, and in terms of life. And what I can say is you have to pick yourself back up and try again. No matter how many times that door gets slammed in your face, no matter how many times you feel like I stumbled I fell I made a mistake here. I took on more than I could handle, pick yourself back up, learn what you can learn. Don't beat yourself up about it, try again, you know? Fail faster so that you can learn the lesson, you know. So if it took you two years, you know, to find out what was the problem with your approach, whether it's a yoga pose or with business the next time if it takes you a year, that's progress. Even if you fail, you failed faster, you found out the mistake sooner, you know, great. So this is something that I think we can really understand in the spiritual path that we call or has been likened to taking five steps forward, and then those five steps forward, you feel like, yeah, life is beautiful. I feel myself getting stronger and you know, feeling better and headstand and then all of a sudden you take five steps back and everybody gets so dejected during those five steps back and I just constantly tell people, those five steps back, they're there to keep you humble. They're there to give you grit so that you don't just continually make a, you know, a relentless upward trajectory. It's you know, life isn't like that. You go forward, you go back, you go forward, you go back. But those backwards steps are part of the growth process. And I think it's so important for people to understand that.

Adam: To members of our audience who are first learning about you or may not know your story. How did you get here? How did you go from a New York party girl to a leader in the health, wellness and mindfulness space?

Kino: I have just kept practicing, I think is really the essence of it. I at some moment, woke up and I remember the pivotal moment. I think I was around 19 years old, maybe 20 years old, and I was 19 when I did my first yoga class. And then there was a pivotal moment when I was 21 and I had been partying with kind of like a professional sort of level of vengeance you could say and I'm so glad I did. It was so much fun and you know, if I hadn't actually I haven't got that out of my system I would probably be doing it now as the midlife crisis. So I'm grateful for that. So I I did all this experience one day where I, first of all, no matter how much you know, mind altering stuff as I was doing, it just stopped being fun. Then my health seriously deteriorated. I started to have serious health problems, you know, not like inability to sleep, I started to have all sorts of skin things that were coming up. I had serious indigestion. I had acute compartment syndrome in my ankles. So I had hugely swollen ankles. That doctor advised me to have operated, I started to have dental problems, a whole host of medical things started coming up. And then I saw people that had lived in that party community for years. So I met people that were in their 50s or 60s, they're still partying, and they would talk about the glory days of the 1980s. And I just saw my future and I thought I gotta get out of this world. That's when I started practicing yoga more, the more yoga I did, it wasn't like I didn't work a 12 step program or anything like that, but I was definitely addicted to that whole lifestyle and world of sort of the you know, the false glamour of endless parties and losing yourself and you know, those kind of like electronic dance music beats and all of that. And the more yoga I did, the more I just naturally let go of that. I spent numerous trips to India. I went to India for the first time for two months. And then I started to go for the maximum allotted time for my visa, which was six months. And they did that for a period of time, I began a daily meditation practice as well as the daily yoga practice. And I just kept practicing. And the practice itself has led me into a series of life lessons that I can only describe as on tying the deepest core knots inside of my psyche inside of my soul that were driving the whole force of my life without me being consciously aware of it, that those have been brought up to the surface. And I'm free of them now. And I know that there's so many people out there that are suffering and miserable, and they don't know why they're suffering and they're miserable. They may not even realize how miserable and how suffering they are. I know this practice can help them

Adam: What are those life lessons in personal development, self improvement, total life transformation? Those are the key themes of your workshop, so what are the main messages that you have to listeners? And what are some of the tangible practical things that listeners can do to really take their lives to that next level?

Kino: Well, the first thing I think to understand is that the vast majority of our thoughts are being thought by the subconscious mind, and we're unaware of those thoughts. You know, contemporary neuroscience has documented that by the time an individual is 35 years old, the vast majority of our thinking is automated and subconscious. So this means, essentially we have an operating system that's just running full force without our conscious awareness of it. Yoga practice, meditation practice allows you to enter the operating system and see with your own eyes with clarity what kind of thoughts are in there. So you look inside and so one of the first major life changing realizations that happened for me was on my second trip to India. It was the morning after a very, very intense practice. And I just felt extremely introspective. So I withdrew into, you know, my own space and entered just into kind of a very, very long meditation that kept me up until the middle of the night. And then there I was in the middle of the night and I could immediately- I had this vision or I could immediately see how every single decision that I've taken in terms of interpersonal skills in my life up until then, I was still quite young I was you know, 25 at the time, but I saw that every every friendship, every romantic relationship, every interaction had always been based in kind of a transactional nature. It was always like, well, this person is interesting and I could benefit from them. So therefore, it's an exchange, it was kind of like, you know, the notion of a transaction. It had that feeling kind of almost like an unspoken subliminal, kind of quid pro quo, you know, like you come into my life, and you have this benefit, and I come into your life and I have this benefit, and I saw that this was not freedom. So it was like a knot and as soon as I saw it, it dissipated, and I realized thatt foundation was a flawed foundation for friendship, it would always lead to suffering. That foundation is a flawed foundation for romantic relationships, always leading to suffering. That foundation of a transaction will always lead to flawed business relations because it was honest. So I was living with the fundamental dishonor but in the process of seeing that, as the yoga poses brought it up, my meditation practice allowed it to come through. And then I was able to see the pattern and watch it unfold in a way that I can only describe as a knot untying into free space. And then it was up to me in my life, to then actually embody that new person and not take the same type of decisions that I had made in the past now that I had new knowledge. So this is where you know, the practice gives you the discipline, that determination, once you see that this is the way you literally turn away from the old way. And you become that person that you now see as a potential. And I've had realizations like that again, and again and again and again. And each time it feels like I'm just that little bit more liberated from the bonds of, you know, the chains of the mind. And I see it in the students that the more that they practice, those sort of chains that obstruct the natural state of happiness, they just fall away. And this is you know, this is what keeps everyone coming back to the practice,

Adam: What does the typical day look like for you and what are some tips that you have for listeners around how they can optimize their performance on a daily basis?

Kino: So the typical day for me at home will be that I wake up and I drink water. That’s the first thing I do because I feel like, I don't know if it's just me, I'm extremely thirsty. I need to drink water first thing in the morning and I've noticed that like the people who don't drink water first thing in the morning generally tend to have a hard time drinking water throughout the day. So I would recommend drinking water first thing in the morning, particularly if you have an intense physical practice. I recommend that for everyone. Then I drink a small cup of tea, and then I sit. I do my seated meditation practice which takes an hour and then I do my asana practice which takes an hour, hour and a half, depending on the day. And then after that, usually what happens next is dependent on the day. I'm either teaching all day if I'm leading a seminar, or a training or workshop or class, or I'll be filming, if I'm filming content for my online channel for Omstars, or if I have a writing project that I'm working on, then I will, you know, do that for the majority of the day. And before, before I go teach, I also eat breakfast, right after, you know right after practice, right after practice and, at the end of the day, my husband and I usually eat dinner together and depending on what time of year, I really enjoy going for a walk at the beach. I live near the beach, so it's a huge blessing. And if I'm somewhere else I'd like to be outside at the end of the day. If there's time for it, even if it's just for five or 10 minutes. The thing I can recommend for people the most is two things: ritualize and make routine, as many things in your life as possible so it's not a constant decision. Should I meditate? Should I not meditate? Should I drink water? Should I not drink water? Should I take e vitamins, should I not take vitamins? It's overwhelming. You know, you'll waste so much of your energy, that valuable energy that you should be applying into high level, you know, business decisions, life decisions, you know, interpersonal relationship decisions, you're wasting that on small casual, you know, casual things which you could just automate, you know, get up in the morning, drink a bottle of water, make this tea, it's already there for you. But, you know, you sit for an hour now, you know, meditating is just routine and ritualized as many things as possible to minimize the kind of superego expenditure on small decisions. Then the second thing I can recommend is do not multitask. Do whatever it is you're doing. So when you're eating, don't eat and read a book and try to get this done. You know, when you're speaking on the phone, don't speak on the phone and enter emails and this and that, do what you're doing. When you're eating, eat. When you're packing, pack. When you're walking, walk, you know? When you're driving, drive, I mean, sure there's music or something else in the background, but I feel that we have this culture of multitasking, and we all kind of, you know, run around juggling 10,000 things, we think that we think it's increasing our efficiency, but it's not. It only decreases our efficiency, it's exhausting us. So you know, if you can do what you're doing completely and 100% of your, you know, your energy, you're more efficient. And then somehow I feel like there's actually more time in the day.

Adam: What are some of your best tips on how to effectively manage and combat stress?

Kino: So stress comes, usually, I believe, from one of two sources. We're either rehashing the past or we're ruminating on the past, and we're beating ourselves up about it, you know? We're thinking about that bad decision we made and, you know, how we should have made it better. And I'm so dumb and all that as we beat ourselves up about it, or we're projecting and worrying about the future. So this is what's called in sort of brain science, the default neural mode, where you know, the majority of our thoughts ping pong between these two, and when they accelerate, that's what we identify as stress. So one of the best tips to combat stress is meditation to actually cultivate the concentrated power of awareness to remain fully present. So you can do this with five minutes a day. You know, many people are scared of meditation because they think you know, they visualized Shaolin monks and you know, a remote monastery in Bhutan or something like this. And you'll notice actually two different places in the world but so you know, we have this vision of someone that we're not, and with as little as five minutes a day, seated in a chair, lying on the floor, seated on the floor, even on an airplane on a train, you can begin to do the work of meditation. Everyone can do this. You don't need to be young, fit, able bodied, twist your body in different shapes. You just need to close your eyes for five minutes and, you know, do something as simple as try to focus on the breath. The second thing that I think is extremely important, is to cultivate kind of a direct experience of faith. And in Sanskrit we have this word called Shahada, which means faith but it's not faith born blindly, it's faith born of direct experience. So you kind of investigate your life and look for empirical evidence. Oh, did it always work out? All right, maybe not how I wanted but I'm here, I'm alive. Okay, cool. Even when I was really terrified I was gonna miss the flight, it worked out. It was fine, they upgraded me. So to constantly practice a sense of faithfulness, grounded and direct experience to work with those thoughts. When you find yourself accelerating into anxiety about the future, ruminating on the past, develop a meditation practice number one. Number two, train the mind to operate within a faithful paradigm.

Adam: You've given a lot of great advice about how people who are not currently meditating or who might be afraid to start their yoga journey can get started. What are your tips for those who are meditating or who are practicing yoga on how they can take their practices to the next level?

Kino: The thing that happens when you've been practicing for a long time, is the shiny newness of the practice wears off. You know, like any relationship. We go through a honeymoon period, you start meditating, and it's like you drink the meditation Kool Aid. So you're like meditation, you should meditate, Mom, you should meditate. You know, Dad, you should meditate and then like, you come around Grandma, so you should meditate and you're just like a meditation ambassador. So years later, you're like, man, you know, you're while you're like meditation, time to go to the cushion. Same thing with yoga, you know. So a long term practitioner’s biggest obstacle is to keep the inspiration, stay fresh, you know, to keep it alive, to rediscover it every single day. And this is a great lesson. I feel if you can train the mind to be fresh and spontaneous about this for me, what is now a more than 20 year relationship, then you can train the mind to be fresh and spontaneous for long term life relationships like marriages, you know? Parent child relationships, these sorts of things can remain fresh and spontaneous as well. Because you can train yourself to do that now, to practice to rekindle that sort of inspiration. It's really useful to take a workshop, take a retreat, to read books that you find inspiring by people that inspire you to be around other practitioners and, and to constantly look for that kind of emotional support.

Adam: So you're in the process of writing book number five. Can you tell us about it?

Kino: So the next book that's coming out, I'm super excited about it's gonna be called Get Your Yoga On. And it's a 30 pose journey that anyone can do in five minutes a day. Unlike all of my other books, I have about a dozen different models spanning all different shapes and ages and ethnicities to demonstrate the poses and how those poses can be adjusted to every single body. So this is really important. Because as you mentioned, you know, the jaw dropping “wow” impact of Instagram yoga mix can have two effects. You know, it can either inspire someone, or it can be or can feel really, really defeating. So I believe in the necessity of representation. And so it's, you know, people can look at me doing a posture, but unless they can see a body of a similar size, shape and ethnicity, doing the pose in a way that they can relate to, they won't believe they can do it, too. So this book is so exciting because it honors India's historic route as the historic route of yoga, while at the same time making it broadly accessible to people of all different levels of ability.

Adam: I love it. I'm excited to get a copy. So I'm counting down. One final question from me. You touched upon it a little bit in the beginning of the conversation. And you actually once told me that the best advice you ever received was, and I'm gonna quote you here, instead of hiding what you see as your faults, flaunt them. Can you expand upon that?

Kino: Yeah, my friend Francis called Jones. She's a business coach and she has a book called How to Wow. We were talking, I think, around like something like 16 or 17 years ago on and we were, you know, we were in India and we were chatting and just talking and you know, I was talking about my insecurities and she said that to me, she said, you know, well, rather than hide your insecurities, you got to flaunt it, you've got to lead with that very part that you want to keep secret because a the truth of that comes out anyway. So you want to own it you know, you don't want, for example, people in job interviews sometimes are really, really ashamed that they didn't go to college, didn't complete college and they want to hide that so they want to either just kind of somehow put a little bit of a lie or a fudge in there just kind of you know, just to the delete that part of the application. And you know, her advice was, own who you are. So if you didn't complete college and talk about it openly because it's part of your story, and what’s really taken to me is that here we are, and how I apply that is the notion that here we are in the society where we have all been changed, particularly in the United States of America, since the time we're little kids to try to be the best, be the best, be the best, be the best, you know, be the top percent of your class, be the best in sports. When we want to get some sort of an award to say, you're the best, you know, of something, you know, and we have this ingrained in our head. So it's like we're terrified of hiding. And we're terrified of people finding that we've hidden, where we're not the best, where we may be a little bit broken, where we feel like we failed. So when you flaunt your failures, your vulnerabilities, your weaknesses, you embody wholeness. It's as though you're saying I am light and I am shadow and I'm not afraid of the shadow anymore. This isn't a demon that has dominion over me. This is just the shadow, and I'm at peace with folks. So this is an important sort of testaments of wholeness, the more that you can bring those shadows to the light, the more you disarm them and deprive them of the ability to kind of run you from those repetitive thoughts of the subconscious mind. So you can become more free to the extent that you're more whole.

Adam: I love it. How can listeners follow you on social?

Kino: You can find me @KinoYoga across all platforms on Instagram, on YouTube, on Facebook, and all the like. And you can also find my practice online at Omstars. All my online content is there, everything from online classes, to philosophy discussions to interesting interviews with people from the yoga world, and everything in between.

Adam: Kino thank you for joining us.

Kino: You're so welcome. Thanks for having me.