Published September 10, 2026 03:33AM
“Peace, y’all. You want to do some yoga real quick?”
That’s how yoga sessions led by teacher Blu Cauthen start. But what makes her call to the mat different than most is it’s shouted from the driver’s seat of her SUV and directed at folks lingering outside corner stores or lounging in front of apartment buildings in her hometown of Cincinnati.
It’s a simple concept. She drives around looking for folks hanging out. When she comes across a group she thinks might be receptive, she pulls up, rolls down her window, and invites them to do a short yoga session or a few slow breaths. She calls it “Pull Up n’ Yoga.”
Her sessions are free, no strings attached, and not everyone takes her up on them. But even Cauthen is surprised by how frequently people take her up on the offer.
“They don’t know me from a can of paint,” she says. Yet her energy is infectious—and she’s quite persuasive. Her Instagram posts chronicling the Pull Up n’ Yoga sessions show her teasing, cajoling, and bargaining with strangers.
The impromptu yoga classes take place on borrowed mats along sidewalks, in parks, and front yards. She welcomes anyone—teenagers hanging out, a gray-bearded man, a family with little ones, teenagers hanging out, young men handling what she calls “their street business.” A session might last only 10 minutes and include some poses, breathwork, maybe a mini-meditation and sound bath from the small gong she keeps in her truck. But in that time, the sights, sounds and pull of the street drop away.
Cauthen rarely uses Sanskrit terms or specific alignment cues. Her goal is to make yoga approachable for everyone.
“We’ll do it for like five minutes, that’s it,” she urges a group of reluctant young men. When they resist, she lowers the stakes. “We’re gonna take three deep breaths together.” Sometimes she tells them they can just sit on the mat and not do anything. Yet every time, then end up taking part. “It’s just so beautiful to see people get to experience peace that they haven’t had,” says Cauthen. “One time some kids looked like they were about to tussle a little bit before I pulled up. They were all walking together at the end.”
Inspiration for & Response to Pull Up n’ Yoga
Cauthen was preparing to become a firefighter when she first tried yoga. “Life was crazy. I was in paramedic school, taking care of my babies, and working,” says Cauthen. Needing stress relief, she started practicing along with YouTube yoga teachers and joined challenges on Instagram. Before long, she decided to sign up for yoga teacher training (YTT), but with an interest in learning, not teaching, she says.
That changed following the ceremony at the end of her training. “My cousins came and they were uncomfortable because we were the only Black people in the class,” explains Cauthen. She also recalls being the only Black person in most of the studio classes she attended. The yoga spaces around town just weren’t diverse, but the benefits of yoga were too valuable to keep to herself. She wanted her community—”my black and brown melanated loved ones”—to know that yoga was for them. So she made that her mission.
Cauthen’s calling was clearly to bring yoga to people in neighborhoods like the one she grew up in, places where yoga isn’t a household practice. But a welcoming space to practice was needed, so in 2019, she opened what she says was the first Black-owned studio in the city. It was a hub that offered yoga programs, African dance, and children’s events.
It was 2023 when she had the inspiration for Pull Up n’ Yoga. “I was like, Ooh, I can start pulling up on people who don’t have the resources to come to a yoga class, or who would not even walk into a yoga class,” explains Cauthen. “My goal was to make people see how easy it is to find peace. There’s no need to make it complex.”
Some of her Pull Up n’ Yogas students ask her to come back around, although at the moment, her focus is bringing yoga to as many different neighborhoods as possible. Eventually, she hopes to expand beyond her current one-off sessions in yoga deserts. Her ultimate dream is to have a mobile wellness bus that she can take to festivals, corporate events and neighborhoods. “When you need a safe space, you need to just step away, you need to decompress, come on this bus and I’ll get you together.”
The response to her work so far has been encouraging. Some who participate say they enjoy the physical workout—and the beneficial effect on their tight hips and bad backs. “I feel good. Feel like I could run a marathon,” says one man who gamely accepted a mat to take home.
Just as often, people cite calm as what they most appreciate. “I feel relaxed,” a young woman says after a street-corner yoga session. “It was a breath of fresh air.”
When asked to rate his mat time on a scale of one to ten, a man with long hair tucked under a yellow baseball cap responded, without hesitation, that it was an eleven.
Commenters on Instagram have expressed concern about her safety. “I feel safer in the hood than doing it in the suburbs,” says Cauthen. “I love being surrounded by my people. I love getting to see us in our environment. We don’t have to worry about code switching. I get to be who I am, and we all get to be who we are together.”
Cauthen is on to something important. But she keeps it humble. “I don’t bring people peace,” she says. “I show them how to find peace within themselves.”
