We recently connected with Kira McCarthy and have shared our conversation below.
Kira , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was the most important lesson/experience you had in a job that has helped you in your professional career?
Have you ever heard that quote from Steve Jobs? “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
He said this, I believe, at a commencement speech. He explained that he had taken Calligraphy in college simply because it interested him. Not knowing at the time that this experience would inspire the distinctive fonts that set Apple apart from all the rest. Back when I was struggling to see how all of my varied and seemingly disconnected creative endeavors would align, these words were a beacon.
My 20’s were spent acting in plays and musicals around the country and independent films. I eventually created several of my own short films and web series. I loved the moments that I was working, but those stretches in between when I was waiting tables, auditioning, and waiting for the next creative project really weighed on me. I wanted to be doing what I loved every day not just when I could book a show or enlist a small creative army to produce a film I had written. There had to be another way to live a creative life!
I had always felt called to teach yoga, but I envisioned it as my third act. I’d retire to a seaside town somewhere in New England. Wear paint-splattered jeans, grow my hair out wild and grey, and at last, teach yoga. I had practiced since I was 9 years old when I discovered a VHS tape in my basement of a woman in a pink unitard leading yoga on the beach in Maui. She seemed so… calm. Someday I thought. After I had lived my tumultuous artistic life I would settle down and teach yoga.
Fortunately, that day came sooner than I thought. I enrolled in a yoga teacher training, excited but fearful that teaching might be just another pursuit that was difficult to build into a full-time career. But I felt called to do it. At the time, I could not see how the dots would align, that teaching yoga would become an integration of all of my creative endeavors. These are the ways that I most see my experience and perspective from my career as an actor and a screenwriter at play in my yoga teaching:
*Every class is an opportunity to shift the energy in the room. When you’re performing in a play, you feel the energy of the audience, this collective energy almost takes on a personality of its own as you move through the story and hear the audience react. Teaching yoga is the same. I could plan the same class, but it will be different depending on who receives it and where they are at that day. I love the challenge of meeting the group where they are and embarking on this energy exchange together.
*I love teaching in front of the camera! I landed a job teaching for a fitness app for older adults called Balanced. And after teaching people in person, it felt odd to deliver a class to an inanimate object. But I drew on my acting training to imagine WHO exactly I was teaching the class for and it changed everything. This year I started a yoga YouTube channel so that I could keep sharing yoga with more people and creating classes for them based on requests. It is so fulfilling to me and I love imagining who might find the class useful and teaching it for them.
*When I sequence my yoga classes, I think a lot about storytelling. I will choose a theme and build the class around it in the same way I’d structure a screenplay around a theme. I read a lot of poetry in my classes and quotes from artists or thinkers who I admire. The practice of yoga can clear some of the banal “stuff” of everyday living (the aches and pains of the body that distract us, the endless chatter of the mind) and create space to connect with our innermost layers. I love being able to guide people through an experience that expands their hearts and minds. This is the experience I have when I am guided either as an audience member seeing an inspiring piece of theater or art or as a student in a yoga class and being able to facilitate it for others is so fulfilling
Kira , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I’m a Brooklyn-based yoga teacher, actor, and screenwriter. Some of my favorite things are poems, pastries, and pitbulls.
I began my career as an actor but my professional focus currently is teaching yoga and screenwriting. The throughline of my professional career has been telling stories. We tell stories to connect, to inspire, to expand our minds and hearts, and to FEEL something.
Every yoga class that I teach feels like a story that I get to share with my students. I teach group and private yoga classes and my overarching goal is to cultivate self-compassion and functional mobility. My teaching style features creative sequencing, but will always stay grounded in alignment-based technique so that practitioners feel supported and steady in their practice. I’ll also remind everyone not to take themselves too seriously along the way. I’m currently studying yoga therapy and am very passionate about applying yoga in a therapeutic sense to help folks develop a practice that supports them on a physical and an emotional level, whether they are working with an injury, managing an illness, or applying yoga to address another condition.
As a screenwriter, I frequently write and advise on thesis films for the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan in the MFA Directing program. I created an award-winning comedy web series called Living Thru the Lens, about our often problematic relationship with technology, and I have penned and produced several short films as well. Currently I am co-writing a comedy feature with my husband about the more ridiculous aspects of the self-help industry. We must be able to laugh at ourselves! Yoga teachers or not;)
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I got my yoga certification in December of 2019. I had just landed my first job at an amazing (but sadly now closed) yoga studio in Harlem called Shaktibarre. I was READY to full on dive into this new role and career. And then the pandemic happened. I had only taught two classes in person before NYC shut down completely. At the time, I had a survival job in a restaurant and obviously, that business was very affected. As with so many other people, overnight, every avenue of professional work and income that I had previously pursued disappeared. There was no knowing what would be on the other end of this for actors, creatives, yoga teachers, hospitality workers, and so many other in-person service-oriented careers.
About 3 days into the NYC shutdown, already going stir-crazy in my apartment, my now husband suggested that I record a class on Facebook Live. We had no idea how to set it up, I don’t even think I could see myself on the screen, but I relied on my years of self-tape training as an actress, took a deep breath, and imagined everyone that might be watching, and could really benefit from a yoga class at that dark and scary time.
The beautiful thing about teaching yoga is your own body will sometimes give you clues as to what your student’s bodies, collectively, are feeling. I was experiencing so much fear at that time as sirens blared constantly in my neighborhood all day and night. I felt tightness in my chest with a constant barrage of news about this respiratory virus that had upended our world, so I created a short class with lots of heart-opening shapes and side bending to create a more spacious feeling in the lungs and an experience of breath. People seemed to like it so I kept going.
Throughout the entire shutdown in New York, I taught on Zoom 3 times a week, mainly to friends and friends of friends and we built this incredible little yoga community as the months ticked by. This group helped me learn how to teach, and I am so grateful to them not just for that, but for our camaraderie. Yoga is about community after all.
I could have easily just not even tried. Every time I read the news, it was all so depressing and I saw nearly every yoga studio I had practiced at and loved over the past 15 years close. Even some of the biggies, like YogaWorks. I didn’t know if there would be such a thing as yoga studios after this pandemic, whenever that might be. It was all so unknown. I felt kind of awkward posting about my yoga classes every week on social media, like where is this all going? Yet I felt inspired to connect with others and keep honing my teaching even if I couldn’t see bodies moving and breathing in front of me. When I did get to practice with students in person, I found my verbal cues were pretty sharp because I had to be so specific when teaching online.
And to this day, I’m still moved hearing the sound of my students breathing as they practice, together, in the same room. We didn’t have that for so long.
If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?
Yes. I spoke earlier about Steve Jobs’ words about how you “can’t connect the dots looking forwards.” I felt called to teach yoga since my early 20’s, but back when I was constantly auditioning and fully committed to acting, it seemed inconceivable to teach. Teaching to me meant commitment: being there for your students, building something. And at the time, I wanted to be on stage, connecting with people in that way. Later, when I started writing and producing my own film projects, it was a whole other type of all encompassing passion driven work. All my time and resources had to go into those projects in order to pull them off. And I was never happier than after a great day on set, or seeing that final edit where the story finally clicked, going to film festivals, I loved it.
But I felt very off balance. I often had to work a day job to make ends meet in between gigs and I got really burned out. I am a very passionate person and I wanted desperately to do something I loved for work, to feel extreme focus, passion, and presence in my career each day. But my experience in the arts was that these highs were often far between and I felt bogged down by the day-to-day getting by.
I also entered my 30s and realized that all the yoga teachers I knew seemed very healthy, glowing, and buoyant. Annoyingly so, Ha! They knew something I didn’t. Selfishly, I wanted to dedicate more of my time to my own wellness. And I wanted to do meaningful work. Guiding people in a practice that can lift their mood and give them space to expand answered that call for me.
When I took the plunge to become a yoga teacher, I was ready for commitment. I wanted to stay in one place and grow with my community and build a new one with my students. If I had started teaching in my 20’s, I know that I would have gotten burned out and quit. I also think the yoga industry had shifted so much when I entered it in a way that aligned with my goals as a teacher. I was very lucky to begin when I did.
Ironically, since I started focusing on teaching, more acting and writing opportunities continue to crop up. I feel much more balance and joy because when I decide to say yes to a creative project, it’s because I really want to do it, not because I need to take it.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kiramccarthyyoga.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mskiramccarthy/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kira-mccarthy-56295319/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@kiramccarthyyoga4926/videos
- Other: Acting Website: https://www.kiramccarthy.com/
Image Credits
Renee Choi Kourosh Sotoodeh