The musician is teaching yoga from her Grangetown back garden
TARA Bethan is a shapeshifter.
She’s been a ballerina, TV presenter, actress and a podcast host. These days, she is best known for her eccentric musical alter-ego Tara Bandito, who shimmered onto the Welsh music scene in 2022.
Three years later, Tara has shifted again, but this time she is returning to something that has helped her cope with life for over a decade.
Tara qualified as a yoga teacher nine years ago. After 200 hours of intense tuition in India she returned to the UK and taught intermittently until her music career took off.
Her musical success meant the makeshift yoga studio in her back garden had to be transformed into a rehearsal space full of instruments. Now, after a major clear-out operation, she has reopened it as a yoga studio and is running classes every Wednesday.
Over the years, Tara has been admirably open about her struggles with mental health and says yoga and meditation have played a “huge” role in helping her deal with panic attacks and depression.
While she was first drawn to yoga as a form of stretching – something which she needed after her teenage years as a ballerina – she soon realised its power in helping to calm her nervous system and work through difficult emotions.
In the wake of the death of her father, the professional wrestler Orig ‘El Bandito’ Williams, Tara says there was a time when her anxiety could have derailed her entire career.
“My job was performing and for years I couldn’t go on stage because of the panic attacks and the anxiety of it all,” she said.
“My dad had died when I was doing a big touring show as the narrator for Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. I took a week off to deal with everything and then went back on stage, and it created a barrier between me and my ability to perform.”
It was meditation – which she did “hard-core” for half an hour before going on stage – that eventually helped bring her back round. The practice remains an essential part of her ability to perform. Without yoga, she says, there would be no music.
“There is absolutely no way I would be anywhere near a stage or writing music or working as an artist unless I had yoga in my life. I have to have both. One can’t exist without the other.
“I have suffered depression, I have been dark. I still have days of despair, but I have this toolbox now. And in that toolbox is Indian music, meditation and the memories of the wellest I’d ever been, which was the month I spent in India. No matter how stressful our lives get, if you’ve got this tool box it really helps.”
Her experience in India has had a direct influence on the sound of her music, too. One of her songs, Drama Queen, even features a Sanskrit chorus.
“You know that thing when you smell a perfume or hear a song and it catapults you back to something? There is something about Indian instruments that immediately soothes me. So when I’m writing I will often bring in elements of that.”
It might be hard to reconcile her high-voltage music performances with the serenity of a yoga instructor, but Tara says that to her they are two sides of the same coin.
“I’m a real extremist, which is why on one end I’m this very calm yoga teacher and bringing calm to other people. And on the other side I’m on the stage being this wild human being.
“In a way, performing is like a really high-energy version of a yoga class. It’s everyone doing something together at the same time in order to release something. I hope that I will always have those two extremities.”
Through her new classes in Grangetown she hopes to help others catch a break from the dizzying pace of modern life.
“Everyone is running around like a headless chicken,” she said.
“The things you learn in yoga teacher training is all about the more you can put on your own oxygen mask first, the more you can look after other people. And no one’s got time to do that now. So I just want people, if they can spare an hour for themselves, to feel after that hour that they’ve had a little break.”
In contrast to the extravagant costumes she wears on stage, her yoga attire is usually a baggy t-shirt and bottoms.
The classes focus on the relaxation element of the practice and Tara says she wants them to be as inclusive and supportive as possible.
“I hate the idea of yoga only being for women in bikinis with their legs round their head.”
- Classes are an hour long and run every Wednesday at 7.30pm. You can book a class here.
