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" Sadie Nardini is one of the most recognizable names (and faces) in yoga. Her emphasis on alignment, social-media savvy, and cool-girl brand \u2014 short bangs, bright lipstick, blasting D&amp;#039;Angelo \u2014 make her stand out in a sea of bunheads practicing to Bon Iver. She made a name for herself online with instructional videos and now travels the world training teachers and working with students. But Sadie didn&amp;#039;t come to yoga easily. A childhood illness left her barely able to walk, and only with decades of dedication did she land on her feet. She spoke to Cosmopolitan.com about cultivating a happy life, how she built a career teaching yoga on the Internet, and her plans to become the Martha Stewart of wellness.  I was born Iowa and had a nearly classic Americana upbringing. But when I was 13, I had a seizure in school and all of a sudden couldn&amp;#039;t walk or move very well for two weeks. The doctors told me I had stage-four leukemia and I had about two months to live. I walked around in total shock. Then doctors realized I actually had spinal meningitis, but it had gone untreated for so long that my central nervous system had basically melted itself and I was left partially paralyzed internally and externally for two years. I could barely stand up. I couldn&amp;#039;t breathe properly, and I had panic attacks all day long. I was out of school, and the doctors told me to invest in a wheelchair. They said, &amp;quot;She may walk, but she will never run, she&amp;#039;ll never be strong, and exercise is out of the question.&amp;quot; I refused to believe that was my destiny. My mom is that way too \u2014 she&amp;#039;s very open to the possibility of greatness. She got out this dusty old yoga book called Richard Hittleman&amp;#039;s Yoga: 28 Day Exercise Plan. I couldn&amp;#039;t do any of the movements because they were too intensive. Even a knee-down lunge. I was a rag doll. I started doing the restorative poses \u2014 goddess pose or legs up the wall or anything where my mom could help me get into the position. I would be there for an hour. I only had that one book, and looking back at it, it&amp;#039;s horrifying. The model is in a flesh-colored unitard. The alignment is crazy. But it had breath, positive thinking, meditation, and restorative postures. After two more years of doing only that, I had fewer panic attacks, and I was starting to be able to press myself up to seated postures. After a year of that, I could get up onto my legs better.  I finished high school and moved out of my childhood home. Because I thought I was not going to ever be in the world, I became voracious, wanting to see everything. I was like a little James Dean. I wanted to eat the world. I moved into a doublewide trailer with a friend. That was the most amazing, independent freedom-fest ever. I&amp;#039;d come home and listen to Prince and pet the cats. I was also a bit of a wild child. I&amp;#039;d drive to Minneapolis and make fake IDs or act like I was French. Then I went to college at the University of Northern Iowa for three years, where I studied journalism. One day when it felt like 88 below zero with the wind chill, I realized that I was insane being there. My mom and I spun a globe and I shut my eyes and put my finger down, and we decided I would finish college wherever it landed. It landed on Seattle, and I enrolled in the University of Washington and got a journalism degree along with a degree in 16th-century French literature. I became the editor of the UW paper and wrote for the Oregonian and the AP. But something was missing. It took me 10 years from my diagnosis to be able to go into a gym and try to exercise. I walk into my first actual yoga class and see this beautiful women with this lean, muscular yoga body, and I&amp;#039;m like, &amp;quot;How do you look like that? I&amp;#039;m weak, and I have no muscle tone.&amp;quot; She said, &amp;quot;I do yoga, and I&amp;#039;m teaching the class.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;m thinking, &amp;quot;How do you get to that from lying around on the ground?&amp;quot; I went from doing the kind of yoga that a sickly 85-year-old would do and jumped into an Ashtanga class. The first pose was a chair pose. I could do it for about three seconds. I would shake uncontrollably in every pose. I would take a walk around the room every time I couldn&amp;#039;t do something, and I was talking to people while we were all in downward dog being like, &amp;quot;ISN&amp;#039;T THIS SO HARD?&amp;quot; Then the teacher said I could rest in child&amp;#039;s pose as much as I wanted. I rested probably 100 times. But the next class I rested 99 times, and then the next class, 98 times. It took me three years before I could do the kind of yoga that we think of as &amp;quot;yoga&amp;quot; today.  Yoga was starting to infuse me, but the woman I was working with moved to India, so she certified me in Ashtanga and Vinyasa yoga and handed me her class. She shoved me into teaching. The only reason I started teaching yoga is because I needed a class in that particular style to go to. I was horrible. I had big laminated pages in front of me with the sequences on it. But after classes people would say how much they loved it. I was like, &amp;quot;Why?&amp;quot; That feedback was probably the first time I felt like I had positive recognition of something that I offered. It fueled something in me that I didn&amp;#039;t realize was there: This desire to help my fellow beings in their evolution. I&amp;#039;m a rock and roll chick from Iowa who just liked to drive around in my Buick Skylark and listen to Lynard Skynard. I didn&amp;#039;t know that other part of me existed until I interacted with yoga students. Ever since I was a little girl watching the lights of Times Square on New Year&amp;#039;s Eve broadcasts, I knew New York City was somewhere I wanted to end up. So when I got a job at the New York Post, I relocated to New York. I was a journalist by day and a yoga teacher by night. There was already a big yoga scene here with a ton of established instructors. I chose a few prime-time classes at smaller studios and a couple of not-so-great times at larger studios so I could become more established in bigger communities. I made space in my schedule to sub for popular teachers and almost always said yes to them, so I became their first choice whenever they&amp;#039;d leave town.  Soon enough, students were seeking me out. I started with eight people in a class, then 12, then 15, then I would max out classes and started getting requests to do retreats. And students paid me for that. I realized it was a win-win. I am going to give you this, and you will give me the material form of my energetic offering, which is money \u2014 because my landlord doesn&amp;#039;t take karma. Now it&amp;#039;s a half-a-million-dollar business.   The first time I ever put a YouTube video up was in 2009. It doesn&amp;#039;t seem that long ago, but people weren&amp;#039;t thinking about it as a yoga space yet. I didn&amp;#039;t even know what YouTube was. But I saw these kids jumping off a roof onto trampolines and hurting themselves, and I was like, &amp;quot;That is ridiculous, but if someone can make a video about that, why can&amp;#039;t someone make a video about yoga for people who don&amp;#039;t have money for classes?&amp;quot; I went to some electronics store and said, &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s what I want to do. How do I do that?&amp;quot; An employee sold me this $200 camcorder, so I took it back to my apartment, set up a tripod, and recorded. My apartment was so small that I had to turn my couch up on one end and put it in the kitchen. I had no idea how to edit, so I would start out really close to the camera to turn it on and give a little intro, and then you would see me walk back to the mat. The lighting was terrible, and the production was amateur. It looks like bad &amp;#039;70s porn. One day I was reading PerezHilton.com to get to my happy sugar donut place when I&amp;#039;m sick of thinking about universal concepts, and I saw that he was trying to lose weight. So I made a video being like, &amp;quot;Hey Perez, what&amp;#039;s up, here&amp;#039;s a sequence for you based on celebrity culture.&amp;quot; Like eagle pose was &amp;quot;rehab&amp;quot; because it looks like a straightjacket. Warrior Three was &amp;quot;Becks&amp;quot; like David Beckham, because that&amp;#039;s the only way you or I are going to be able to get his ass. I checked YouTube maybe 20 minutes after I emailed the video to him, and I had 3,000 views compared to the hundred or so I was used to. I went to his website, and he had posted it and said, &amp;quot;THIS is ferosh!&amp;quot; I got 300,000 views and 9,000 subscribers in 24 hours.  Now I have more than 86,000 subscribers and 17 million real views from real people. To borrow from Field of Dreams, &amp;quot;If you build it, they will come.&amp;quot; Most people think they need to figure the whole process of creating their dreams from start to finish. I say, just begin. Create. Put your message out there, even if the method or vehicle is imperfect. Start before you&amp;#039;re ready and learn as you go.  Now Udemy and PowHow sell my videos, and much of my income comes from those sites. At Udemy, I house my longer, multiple-video and written courses, including 14-Day Detox and the Yoga of Success. At PowHow, people pay $8 a month and get 25 super-effective classes with me. PowHow is the closest we can get to having a yoga studio online, since it houses existing videos as well as live classes. We can see our students and interact with them. Students from anywhere in the world can join me, and I can say, &amp;quot;Greta, lift your leg higher in your Warrior Three.&amp;quot; I post four 15- to 60-minute videos to PowHow every week. I use a variety of social media platforms. The ones that work best for me are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. I center most of my energy on Facebook and YouTube, because they&amp;#039;re the biggest. On Facebook, I post empowering memes, links to my YouTube videos, sales I put on regularly on Udemy and PowHow, and moments in my life. I post about an hour a day total. I use Instagram the least, but when I do post photos, I push them to Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is where I connect with people who tweet about me, and also my Facebook posts are pushed there. I still post four short videos a week on YouTube \u2014 five-minute tutorials \u2014 and if folks want more, they can get it at PowHow or Udemy. I did absolutely no advertising for about four years; I just kept making videos of anything that inspired me, from how to rock the splits to yoga for weight loss. The word spread organically online. Now I do advertise lightly. Facebook just made a switch where they&amp;#039;ve cinched down the percentage of your followers who&amp;#039;ll see any business (fan) page \u2014 unless you pay for some of your posts and to advertise your page. Well played, Facebook! I do both now, promoting important posts for about $5 (around $20 to $30 a day total), and $5 a day to promote my whole page.  I do outreach to new clients by using my journalism degree for a new purpose: writing copy and filming short, interesting, and fresh yoga fitness and lifestyle videos and offering them to media outlets, including Yoga Journal, Glamour, Self, The Huffington Post, Perez Hilton, ELLE, Runner&amp;#039;s World, and Martha Stewart&amp;#039;s Living. People seem to stream in from those efforts. As I grew, angels came into my life offering their expertise and help. I dropped my control issues enough to let them. I encourage everyone aiming to meet their goals to ask for help. Barter, give a small percentage of sales, pay outright for it. I have an agent, Ava Taylor of YAMA Talent. I also have a personal booking agent and a liaison, who speaks to events and studios on my behalf when needed. I&amp;#039;ve got a personal organizer and an accountant. I&amp;#039;ve discovered the joys of delegation. It frees me to concentrate on things that nourish me and share my core message with the world.  Other opportunities have come about by happenstance. I sat in cafes and pubs all over the world writing my first book, the Road Trip Guide to the Soul. In one of the pubs, a guy asked me what I was writing. He gave me his literary agency card, and three days later, I had a contract with them. A few months later, they facilitated a book deal. I had an idea for a yoga TV show and jotted down some ideas. Two years later, my agent was meeting with someone about something totally unrelated, and the woman mentioned that her friend, a producer, was looking for a yoga TV personality. Ava suggested me, and Rock Your Yoga on Al Jazeera America was born. I&amp;#039;m currently taking pen to paper about a TV show I want to do next \u2014 a sexy, No Reservations-esque romp through the farm-to-table, cocktail-centric, mechanical-bull-riding America, focused on fitness and health. I expect that will materialize too.   My question for myself now is, how do I evolve? As a person, as a businesswoman, as a yogini? I know I want to make things. I want to create a clearinghouse \u2014 one-stop shopping for the coolest wellness stuff, fashion stuff, stuff for the home and bath, and stuff for a yoga practice. So I&amp;#039;m going to start to curate a really cool online store. I want to be the wellness equivalent of GOOP or the Martha Stewart of yoga \u2014 without the jail time and the tax evasion. A lot of people come to my classes and think I&amp;#039;m naturally good at this, and nothing could be further from the truth. I built it from scratch. People say all the time, &amp;quot;If I can do it, so can you.&amp;quot; But really. I was freaking paralyzed. If I can do it, so can you. My childhood paralysis does not limit my yoga practice. I have to watch my energy, and I seem to need a daily nap more than most people. Other than that, I&amp;#039;m free of adverse effects.  The advice I give is this: Start by completely overviewing where you are right now. Start with acceptance. You aren&amp;#039;t bad for the things that aren&amp;#039;t working. Make a list of the things you love about your life and the things you don&amp;#039;t love as much. The things that are going well: Put them to the side for a moment. The things that aren&amp;#039;t going well: Start targeting the obstacles to your happiness and freedom. Start finding any possible action you can take away from those things. Maybe your mom is causing you a lot of drama. Do you have to talk to her for an hour? No. You can talk to her for five minutes, and when she starts to get crazy, drop the props and get off the stage. &amp;quot;I really love you, Mom, but this is going to a place that is causing me stress, so I am going to go to a bar now and sing karaoke with my friends and flirt with the bartender.&amp;quot; Then you look at the things you love and figure out, with the extra time and energy you have from moving away from the negative, what new actions can you take to help develop these things? Ask, &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s my wish list?&amp;quot; What are you not doing that you could do? You know how that feels when you find that place in you, that living, breathing, shining happy place; when that happens, you begin to collect opportunities almost by magic. Don&amp;#039;t worry so much about where the money is coming from or how you&amp;#039;re going to survive. Just keep moving forward. That will bring you where you need to go. Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview. RELATED: Get That Life: I&amp;#039;m a Professional Cheese Eater Get That Life: How I Founded Jezebel and Became a New York Times Columnist Follow Jill on Twitter. Photos by Kathleen Kamphausen for Cosmopolitan.com, featuring Sadie Nardini and Man\u00E9 Rayne.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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