Rachel Brathen is a hugely popular yoga teacher and one of the pioneers of “paddleboard yoga”. Known across social media as simply “Yoga Girl”, she continues to inspire her millions of fans and followers and is widely recognised as one of the world’s most influential yoga practitioners. Her first book, 2015’s Yoga Girl, became a New York Times bestseller and was followed in 2019 by her autobiography, To Love and Let Go. She is the host of the long-running and highly popular From the Heart and Daily Practice podcasts and runs a yoga business on the Caribbean island of Aruba where she lives with her husband and young children. She believes in using yoga as both exercise and as a tool to connect us with ourselves and those around us.

Brathen was born in Sweden in March 1988. She has a lifelong passion for yoga, and after graduating from secondary school, she moved to Costa Rica to immerse herself in a daily yoga practice, remaining there for three years. She was one of the first people to begin popularising stand-up paddleboard yoga (SUP yoga) in 2009, and it remains a core part of her classes to this day.

On social media, Brathen is incredibly popular, with 2 million followers on her personal Instagram account as well as hundreds of thousands of followers on her podcast and business accounts. She leads classes at festivals and conferences all over the world and has become one of the most successful influencers to emerge from the yoga boom of recent years.