Tamara Lynn Cole

I was born in Houston, Texas, in 1975. My birth certificate listed my father’s race as “white” and my mother’s as “yellow.” Gotta love Texas.
At Mayde Creek High School, I graduated with honors, though by the end I was more interested in marijuana, psychedelics (especially the free ones growing in the nearby cow pastures), and avoiding athletics. I wasn’t flexible—every year I failed the sit-and-reach test, and I’d walk the mile in 15 minutes just to frustrate my PE coaches. I mention this because people often tell me they “can’t do yoga” since they’re not flexible. Neither was I when I started, and thank goodness I wasn’t on social media at the time or I might have believed the lie of what a yogi was “supposed” to look like.
In 1998, I graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio with a degree in biology. Not ready for more schooling, I joined the Student Conservation Association and spent a season protecting sea turtle nests on Cape Lookout National Seashore. That led to a paid role with the National Marine Fisheries Service, working alongside pound-net fishermen in North Carolina, tagging turtles and collecting samples. From there, I contracted with NOAA, monitoring bycatch on commercial vessels—shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico, longliners in Hawaii and the Northeast. For weeks at a time, I lived at sea, weighing, measuring, and recording both catch and bycatch.
After four years in fisheries and no more patience to watch amazing animals perish, I shifted into tourism. I started as a deckhand on a snorkel boat in Koʻolina, then earned my 100-ton US Coast Guard Captain’s License in 2004. I captained scuba boats out of Honolulu before moving to Destin, Florida, with my then-partner in 2006. Together we launched a parasailing business that grew to three boats running full during high season. After three years of success, we sold the business in 2009.
During an off-season in Tucson in 2008, I stumbled into my first yoga class at an LA Fitness. Curious and skeptical, I was surprised by how good I felt afterward. More than surprised, I had a revelation that maybe I didn’t hate myself!? Seeking consistency, I joined the nearby Bikram studio. The heated sequence and structure hooked me, and soon I was practicing five days a week. In 2010, I attended Bikram teacher training in San Diego: nine intense weeks of twice-daily classes, long lectures, and strict rules among hundreds of trainees from around the world. It was demanding and boot camp-ish, but it gave me certification and a foundation for teaching.
From there my yoga path expanded. I trained in power yoga and Ashtanga, and completed a yearlong Mysore apprenticeship with Cathy-Louise Broda in Honolulu. Around the same time, I began sitting in on graduate seminars in Indian religions at the University of Hawaiʻi. Encouraged by a professor, I enrolled in the master’s program and was accepted to the program and was also hired as a graduate assistant. Though I didn’t finish the degree, I valued the academic depth it brought to my practice and teaching.
For more than a decade, I taught yoga full-time in Honolulu—12 to 15 classes a week across studios, gyms, and hotels. Then came 2020. COVID shut everything down, and I pivoted to tutoring children one-on-one. Later that year, my partner was offered a job in the Galápagos. With everything upended, I embraced the change, and we moved in March 2021.
Here I found a vibrant yoga community and inspiring spaces to teach, from ocean-view studios to local gyms. After four years of living and practicing on these islands, I feel called to share their wild, grounding energy more widely. That’s why I’m now hosting a Galápagos yoga retreat—an opportunity to move, breathe, and reconnect with nature in one of the most extraordinary places on earth.