We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Tara Morris. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Tara below.
Alright, Tara thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
My mother died after 27 years with Parkinson’s Disease, the student I was dating over COVID recently met a girl -in my class in front of me – and I had officially reached an emotional low heretofore unknown. It was time to make a dramatic change. It was time to save my own life.
With no job, no money in savings, and no way to know if I would survive I abruptly quit my job forcing myself into a new chapter.
‘Help is not on the way’ is a quote from one of my favorite yoga teachers which reminds me that no one can save my life but me. The time to do that had arrived.
I sat down at my computer and searched for commercial spaces in Providence. I saw a space for rent in a gorgeous work/live building around the corner from my house so without even calling the realtor I went down to peek through the windows, but when I got there the door was unlocked.
“Hello?” I opened the door slowly, but the place was empty.
One step inside and I knew I had found my studio. It had concrete floors and walls, a loft space upstairs, and it overlooked an absolutely gorgeous courtyard. The space was small, it wasn’t perfect, but it could work.
I called the realtor to ask if I could officially see the space.
It was September 13th, 2021 and at 12:05pm I pressed send on an email to the owners of the yoga studio where I taught which was 50 miles from my home. The email was simply titled: Letter of Resignation. I ripped the safety net out from under me and forced myself to jump.
“Ya, I’ll take it.” I said to the realtor as I stood in the middle of what would soon be the studio floor. I was in contract by 3pm.
“When you’re ready to build an empire let me know,” A yoga student once said to me years earlier. Over the previous six years so many of my students had encouraged me to open my own place and now it was time to ask them for their help to do just that. An hour after I signed the lease I opened a GoFundMe campaign asking for $50K.
I made a post on Instagram about my fundraising campaign, then wrote a newsletter, then held my breath.
Over the next two weeks I raised $85,000. Friends, students, and clients from my entire life pitched in. Every morning I would check my GoFundMe page and I’d absolutely sob in disbelief as I read the names of the people who donated. My friend, Lyn, gave me an amount so large that I thought it was a mistake so I texted her to make sure she didn’t accidentally add three zeros. She told me that she wanted to invest in female business owners who were making a real difference.
That sounded nice, I looked around the room for whoever that must be.
And then two of my best friends gave me a very large sum of money because they are insanely generous people who knew I could do it if I had enough of a tailwind. By late September I had the money I needed. In utter disbelief of my own audacity and now trapped in my own choices, I began building my own studio like I said I wanted to. Still way too fragile and sick to be doing something like this, the enormity of the task made me even more scared and sad than I already was. I wanted to get on a motorcycle, drive it to Miami, change my name, and never be seen again. Instead I stayed.
The day I got the keys to the place my friend, Shawna, drove to Providence to help me imagine the space as a yoga studio. She called her contractor friend, Sean Kiley, and asked him for a favor: would he drive 60 minutes to Providence and build out my entire studio. Like right now. On October 14th Sean and his two sons began. They laid the floors of the studio and the walls of the lobby in two days.
Aaron Santos, my friend who is a genius photographer, taught himself how to paint during covid. I asked if he would create a mural for the studio walls. Because of the lingering travel bans affecting his commercial photography business he had the free time and was excited for the challenge. Aaron arrived on October 17th, 2021 and began creating the floor to ceiling murals that are now synonymous with The Love Offensive. First he laid the base layers of paint, then he projected his own photographs on the walls and lightly traced them. Then, mostly with a one-inch brush, Aaron painted for 12 hours a day for the next 16 days. On November 4th he returned to Brooklyn leaving a masterpiece in his wake. I remember looking at the murals after he left thinking, fuck. Now I have to stay.
One of my best friends, Ben, who is always there for me when I need him the most, built out the upstairs in his signature craftsman style where urban meets country cottage. My plan was to live in the apartment above the studio and AirBnB the home I own to help get the studio off the ground.
Laura Ganci painted the now iconic Birds In Flight up the staircase which officially made the entire studio one huge art piece and Mike Habib insisted that if I planned to really stand out amongst the rest I needed interesting lighting and a killer sound system. Though he was a new father and a busy professional he came to Providence three different times to transform the space with lighting and sound.
Sean Kiley and his sons returned in early November to hang the ten infrared heaters as well as an endless amount of fans and lights and everything else I needed. Sean worked around the clock and even slept on the studio floor one night to get everything done in time. I cried in his arms more than twice and if there was a guardian angel in this endeavor it was Sean Kiley.
My best friend, Kristen, flew from Wisconsin for opening weekend just to support me knowing how scared and sick I was.
And my friend, Lily, worked as my manager, marketer, therapist, confidant, web designer and moral support.
And on November 13th, 2021 eight weeks after I quit my job via email I opened The Love Offensive Hot Power Yoga. The room was filled with my best friends and favorite students and I did it. I fucking did it. My hardest days were behind me.
And then the heaters didn’t work. And the humidifier didn’t work. And the place flooded on day three. And I forgot to put a front desk in the place. And I didn’t know how to work the software. Living at the studio was a nightmare; it was dark and lonely and I listened to a guy have sex every night at like 2am directly over my head. Classes were practically empty and the people who tried my class hated it: too hard, way too hot, way too emotional, way too intense, way too confronting. People would roll up their mats right in front of my face and walk out the door in the middle of class. One girl told me that she didn’t appreciate having a spell cast on her during yoga class. I told her if I could cast spells I wouldn’t be living in Providence. I didn’t make it through a single day without hysterically crying in anxiety and regret. I emptied my 401k, I took out a home equity line, I did everything I could to keep this thing above water that first year. I knocked on the door of every business owner in the area, I hung flyers at every shop in town, I gave classes away for free. I tried everything. I hated this so much. What had I done?
Though I opened the studio as the sole teacher I was incredibly lucky to have people join the teaching staff in the first six months. They are all strong and talented teachers and I am forever grateful that they wanted to be a part of it so soon. My ship was sinking -no, my ship wasn’t even in the water – and they all got on board and helped me paddle. We built that place together and I could never have done it without each of them.
The first year of the studio feels like it must have been a nightmare. Nothing could possibly go that badly. I made the wrong decisions and said the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time. I thought I was going to be the success I was in Boston, but it was the opposite. And the people who didn’t like me? I wasn’t just not liked, I was hated.
I returned to the ways I had healed myself in the past: daily journaling, meditating, visualization, affirmations, all of it. I didn’t listen to anything but podcasts and audio books on self help. I was obsessed with healing myself and staying alive. I had to remember what I knew because I genuinely felt that my life was on the line.
Every single day for months I tried to focus on the life that I wanted, not the reality of what I had. I wrote this sentence hundreds of times in my journal hoping that my thoughts would become things: This is a thriving and diverse community where people make friends, feel grateful, and heal themselves.
And then slowly, like a dripping faucet, students came. People who had been looking for classic hot power yoga found us. Those people told their friends. The Love Offensive slowly turned into the incredible community that it is today.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Exercising every day is truly my one good habit. I credit my mom who got me into dancing as a little kid mixed with the afterglow of anorexia for this. Of course coming of age in the 90s means that Step Aerobics is my first love, but as I got older I really wanted to be someone who liked yoga. I guess I thought it paired well with the fact that I shopped at CoOps and wore clogs. When I stumbled into Lisa Black’s Power Yoga class at 8 Limbs Yoga in Seattle in 2002 I was immediately hooked: sweaty, athletic, and dance-like – I could finally say that I loved yoga.
Soon after I found Lisa’s class in Seattle I learned that I was moving back to Boston. When we were saying goodbye to each other she told me that her teacher: Baron Baptiste, who invented the sequence she taught, had not one – but two – studios in Boston. I went to the Baptiste studio in Cambridge the first morning I arrived back home in Massachusetts and loved it immediately. No other yoga class anywhere compared to the ones I took at those two Baptiste studios and I practiced there almost every single day for a decade. So when it was time for me to find a community by way of yoga teaching, the only kind of yoga I wanted to teach was Baron Baptiste’s power yoga.
I signed up to take his iconic training: Level One: Journey Into Power in Hawaii in March 2012 and absolutely loved it. The whole week I chose to sit uncharacteristically quiet during the group sharing exercises as others got up to share their personal stories. The week before this training I had done ayahuasca for the first time and I was calm, steady, and observant for the first time…ever? but at the final gathering I finally stood at the mic. I explained how I was recently at a crossroad in my life and had asked my therapist which path I should take to cure the loneliness of professional photography: bartending or teaching yoga? I elaborated on how Harry practically fell out of his seat at the thought of me bartending and I’m sure I overdid it in every possible way because I got a standing ovation from the trainees. Baron asked from the stage, “Can everyone feel how much heart she has?” He told me to audition at his studio in Boston as soon as I got home. I was giddy at the thought of teaching there though I never got the chance to audition.
Over the next few years I eventually finished my 200 hr certification with Rolf Gates and knew I was on the right path. Rolf’s teachings on yoga and yoga’s intersection with Buddhism made me feel like I had found the answers to everything I had ever asked. There was something about both yoga and Buddhism’s acknowledgment of death that helped put the rest of my life in perspective. When I contemplate my own mortality every day nothing else matters but love. So, in a way, yoga teacher training felt like a religious experience for me.
To get my feet wet as an instructor I memorized Baron Baptiste’s Journey Into Power sequence and advertised free classes at our photography studio space in Boston in the summer of 2014. My incredible friends filled those classes as a show of support, and terrified but ready I taught my first yoga class.
From the moment the words left my mouth I loved teaching yoga. My years of personal training and teaching Spinning gave my teaching style a strong coaching vibe. My years taking dance lessons taught me rhythm and tempo, and my years as a yoga practitioner taught me what a good yoga class could offer someone. I vowed to teach a class that I would love to take which meant a strong, athletic flow that felt like a dance. I also wanted to be a better yoga teacher than I was a Spinning instructor. I was embarrassed at how I took my sadness out on those Spin classes and I wanted this chapter to be different.
By the time I taught my first public class in January of 2015 I had been all over the world just to learn what it meant to be human. I had met people along the way who had every right to suffer but found joy in just being alive. I had watched my mom’s life crumble around her in a relentlessly cruel way, but also watched her treat her fate as her personal mountain to climb. My heart had been broken and my worthiness tested countless times, but I had learned to stop my spiraling thoughts to save my own life. I had seen inside my own emotions through doing Ayahuasca 11 times – never mind the many years of therapy – to know that I wasn’t really mad about things, I was just really sad about things. I had danced in the dust until I felt beautiful far beyond the reality of my appearance, and took every self-help course, read every book on how to heal, and tried every path to ease my pain. I was ready to teach.
One of the first yoga studios I taught at was in a town – ranked #5 wealthiest town in the country as I write this – called Wellesley, Massachusetts. It’s a leafy suburb of Boston surrounded by other towns equally as beautiful so needless to say I hadn’t been there before.
I wanted to teach a challenging class – I knew folks in Wellesley would have it no other way – but I really wanted to relentlessly encourage people to understand – and be grateful for – how good they had it. I started with something we all had in common: everyone in the room had an extra $20, a car that started, and legs that worked well enough to walk down the stairs and into the studio. I talked about how grateful we should be for those things, but I also talked about being scared and being sad. My mom was quite sick in those years so I spoke often about the heartbreaking reality of watching her die. I tried to be as honest as I could be, no more being mad instead of being sad.
I often feel like my utter lack of personal boundaries is unhealthy, and no doubt it probably is. The word inappropriate has been used countless times to describe many facets of my personality and I couldn’t agree more. Maybe I do say too much, too loudly, at not the right time, but the bright side of not having boundaries is the freedom to be vulnerable. I am free to admit my pain and fear so that others who feel the same way feel less alone. We are all afraid. We all wonder if we’re enough. We all say shit we wish we hadn’t. I’ll go first. You join when you’re ready.
Vulnerability is the bridge across the chasm that lies between each of us. The more we admit our truths to each other the more we inspire others to do the same and the closer we feel. If people didn’t relate to this message or feel comfortable around someone so raw then they didn’t come back to my class. I closed my eyes so I could find the words but not lose the tempo of the class. I didn’t want to get distracted from what I wanted to do, which was to inspire people to be grateful and let them dance. It’s a terrible habit, but I still teach with my eyes shut. I recently overheard a girl tell her friend, ‘Tara closes her eyes to channel people in her class. I think she channels her mom.’ I’m from Marshfield, homie. I used to jump through my neighbor’s kitchen window to smoke her cigarettes. I don’t channel people, I don’t even know what that means.
Almost immediately my classes began to sell out. People came for a good sweat and got a reminder of how much they loved their lives. My students began to rely on me for something that made the rest of their lives work and I felt it. I wanted to make sure everyone who took my class – no matter how many times a week I taught or how far I drove to get there – got the same experience. I promised myself I would never drop the ball and in return my students gave me the confidence to teach in a raw and honest way. The love and support I received from my students at HYP in Needham and Wellesley, Massachusetts is unmatched. So many of my students asked how they could support me like I supported them so they filled my retreats, hired me for family photography, and became my friends.
Most of my students were mothers and I would start my classes encouraging them to let go of the white knuckled grip on their lives and trust me,
“I’m gonna drive for the next hour. All you have to do is breathe,” and I could hear people sob in relief. There were lines of women after class waiting to look me in the eyes to thank me. I don’t know where I’d be if I wasn’t immediately received with so much grace as a brand new teacher. Those first students gave me the confidence to do everything I have done in my yoga career. They were relentless in their appreciation and generosity. They were an army of support, they were truly a Love Offensive.
We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.
Yoga was my side hustle to my wedding and portrait photography business. This is a story of how I became a yoga teacher:
Exercising every day is truly my one good habit. I credit my mom who got me into dancing as a little kid mixed with the afterglow of anorexia for this. Of course coming of age in the 90s means that Step Aerobics is my first love, but as I got older I really wanted to be someone who liked yoga. I guess I thought it paired well with the fact that I shopped at CoOps and wore clogs. When I stumbled into Lisa Black’s Power Yoga class at 8 Limbs Yoga in Seattle in 2002 I was immediately hooked: sweaty, athletic, and dance-like – I could finally say that I loved yoga.
Soon after I found Lisa’s class in Seattle I learned that I was moving back to Boston. When we were saying goodbye to each other she told me that her teacher: Baron Baptiste, who invented the sequence she taught, had not one – but two – studios in Boston. I went to the Baptiste studio in Cambridge the first morning I arrived back home in Massachusetts and loved it immediately. No other yoga class anywhere compared to the ones I took at those two Baptiste studios and I practiced there almost every single day for a decade. So when it was time for me to find a community by way of yoga teaching, the only kind of yoga I wanted to teach was Baron Baptiste’s power yoga.
I signed up to take his iconic training: Level One: Journey Into Power in Hawaii in March 2012 and absolutely loved it. The whole week I chose to sit uncharacteristically quiet during the group sharing exercises as others got up to share their personal stories. The week before this training I had done ayahuasca for the first time and I was calm, steady, and observant for the first time…ever? but at the final gathering I finally stood at the mic. I explained how I was recently at a crossroad in my life and had asked my therapist which path I should take to cure the loneliness of professional photography: bartending or teaching yoga? I elaborated on how Harry practically fell out of his seat at the thought of me bartending and I’m sure I overdid it in every possible way because I got a standing ovation from the trainees. Baron asked from the stage, “Can everyone feel how much heart she has?” He told me to audition at his studio in Boston as soon as I got home. I was giddy at the thought of teaching there though I never got the chance to audition.
Over the next few years I eventually finished my 200 hr certification with Rolf Gates and knew I was on the right path. Rolf’s teachings on yoga and yoga’s intersection with Buddhism made me feel like I had found the answers to everything I had ever asked. There was something about both yoga and Buddhism’s acknowledgment of death that helped put the rest of my life in perspective. When I contemplate my own mortality every day nothing else matters but love. So, in a way, yoga teacher training felt like a religious experience for me.
To get my feet wet as an instructor I memorized Baron Baptiste’s Journey Into Power sequence and advertised free classes at our photography studio space in Boston in the summer of 2014. My incredible friends filled those classes as a show of support, and terrified but ready I taught my first yoga class.
From the moment the words left my mouth I loved teaching yoga. My years of personal training and teaching Spinning gave my teaching style a strong coaching vibe. My years taking dance lessons taught me rhythm and tempo, and my years as a yoga practitioner taught me what a good yoga class could offer someone. I vowed to teach a class that I would love to take which meant a strong, athletic flow that felt like a dance. I also wanted to be a better yoga teacher than I was a Spinning instructor. I was embarrassed at how I took my sadness out on those Spin classes and I wanted this chapter to be different.
By the time I taught my first public class in January of 2015 I had been all over the world just to learn what it meant to be human. I had met people along the way who had every right to suffer but found joy in just being alive. I had watched my mom’s life crumble around her in a relentlessly cruel way, but also watched her treat her fate as her personal mountain to climb. My heart had been broken and my worthiness tested countless times, but I had learned to stop my spiraling thoughts to save my own life. I had seen inside my own emotions through doing Ayahuasca 11 times – never mind the many years of therapy – to know that I wasn’t really mad about things, I was just really sad about things. I had danced in the dust until I felt beautiful far beyond the reality of my appearance, and took every self-help course, read every book on how to heal, and tried every path to ease my pain. I was ready to teach.
One of the first yoga studios I taught at was in a town – ranked #5 wealthiest town in the country as I write this – called Wellesley, Massachusetts. It’s a leafy suburb of Boston surrounded by other towns equally as beautiful so needless to say I hadn’t been there before.
I wanted to teach a challenging class – I knew folks in Wellesley would have it no other way – but I really wanted to relentlessly encourage people to understand – and be grateful for – how good they had it. I started with something we all had in common: everyone in the room had an extra $20, a car that started, and legs that worked well enough to walk down the stairs and into the studio. I talked about how grateful we should be for those things, but I also talked about being scared and being sad. My mom was quite sick in those years so I spoke often about the heartbreaking reality of watching her die. I tried to be as honest as I could be, no more being mad instead of being sad.
I often feel like my utter lack of personal boundaries is unhealthy, and no doubt it probably is. The word inappropriate has been used countless times to describe many facets of my personality and I couldn’t agree more. Maybe I do say too much, too loudly, at not the right time, but the bright side of not having boundaries is the freedom to be vulnerable. I am free to admit my pain and fear so that others who feel the same way feel less alone. We are all afraid. We all wonder if we’re enough. We all say shit we wish we hadn’t. I’ll go first. You join when you’re ready.
Vulnerability is the bridge across the chasm that lies between each of us. The more we admit our truths to each other the more we inspire others to do the same and the closer we feel. If people didn’t relate to this message or feel comfortable around someone so raw then they didn’t come back to my class. I closed my eyes so I could find the words but not lose the tempo of the class. I didn’t want to get distracted from what I wanted to do, which was to inspire people to be grateful and let them dance. It’s a terrible habit, but I still teach with my eyes shut. I recently overheard a girl tell her friend, ‘Tara closes her eyes to channel people in her class. I think she channels her mom.’ I’m from Marshfield, homie. I used to jump through my neighbor’s kitchen window to smoke her cigarettes. I don’t channel people, I don’t even know what that means.
Almost immediately my classes began to sell out. People came for a good sweat and got a reminder of how much they loved their lives. My students began to rely on me for something that made the rest of their lives work and I felt it. I wanted to make sure everyone who took my class – no matter how many times a week I taught or how far I drove to get there – got the same experience. I promised myself I would never drop the ball and in return my students gave me the confidence to teach in a raw and honest way. The love and support I received from my students at HYP in Needham and Wellesley, Massachusetts is unmatched. So many of my students asked how they could support me like I supported them so they filled my retreats, hired me for family photography, and became my friends.
Most of my students were mothers and I would start my classes encouraging them to let go of the white knuckled grip on their lives and trust me,
“I’m gonna drive for the next hour. All you have to do is breathe,” and I could hear people sob in relief. There were lines of women after class waiting to look me in the eyes to thank me. I don’t know where I’d be if I wasn’t immediately received with so much grace as a brand new teacher. Those first students gave me the confidence to do everything I have done in my yoga career. They were relentless in their appreciation and generosity. They were an army of support, they were truly a Love Offensive.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
This is my third business and I feel like the same rules apply in friendship as they do in business:
I do what I said I would do when I said I would do it. Period.
I never flake. I never call in sick. I’m never late. I never teach a half-ass class. I never say I’m going to do something and don’t do it. I show up. I’m honest. After years of that people trust me. Can’t build much without trust.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://theloveoffensive.com
- Instagram: @theloveoffensive
- Facebook: The Love Offensive
Image Credits
Aaron Santos