Everyday Encounters: A Tiburon yoga teacher urges others to find calm in chaos

Written by By TYLER CALLISTER

Published in the Tiburon Ark April 15, 2026

Tiburon's Robin Gueth founded the Stress Management Center of Marin, a yoga therapy practice. Her yoga work has included teaching stretches to high-school football teams, training Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff and creating a meditation practice for NewYork Yankees pitchers before they take the mound.

While training to become a classical pianist at 16, Tiburon resident Robin Gueth says she experienced debilitating pain, including chronic migraines. To fix it, she turned to yoga. She says the practice had transformative effects, realigning her spine and steadying her body and breath. She never became a concert pianist, but the experience pointed her to what she says is her true calling. Gueth founded the Stress Management Center of Marin, a yoga therapy practice.

Her work has included teaching stretches to high-school football teams, training Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff and creating a meditation practice for New York Yankees pitchers before they take the mound.

Still, as Gueth, 65, walks at Blackie's Pasture April 9, she laughs at the suggestion that teaching yoga must mean she's a calm person. "You teach best what you most need to learn," she says.

Born in Indiana and raised in a Quaker family, Gueth says yoga spoke to her spiritual side. "Quakers believe in an individual relationship," she says. "So it's you talking straight to a higher source. And the yogis are the same way." She says she focuses on simple, daily acts of quiet: finding a peaceful place inside, walking while the breath is steady, letting solutions arise unforced.

"When I'm walking, my breath is nice and even when I'm not talking. My breath matches my steps," she says. "And then, you know, solutions to problems that I might have just show up. Things just go there."

She met her husband, a financial manager, in Indiana, and the couple moved to Europe, Saudi Arabia and Phoenix for his job. When it was time to decide where to raise her daughter more than 20 years ago, Gueth chose the Bay Area. She moved to Larkspur, and her daughter attended Redwood High School.

Gueth founded the center in 2000, quickly gathering a clientele of athletes, lawyers, doctors and CEOs. She says her work with athletes focuses on reducing injury and managing pregame nerves. "I do full-on stretching to try to get them back to baseline," she says.

She says the approach has paid off for Marin Catholic High School's football squad, for whom she is the official yoga instructor. Goff, a Novato native, played at Marin Catholic before going on to star in the NFL.

"We have a lot fewer injuries on our football team because they stretch," Gueth says. She says the mental side of yoga is just as crucial as the physical for athletes playing at an elite level, where adrenaline management can be the difference between a win and a loss.

"The more they can settle their adrenaline, the more energy they have for the end of the game," she says. "The more they can calm themselves down, the more accurate." She points to basketball players who take deep breaths before shooting a free throw. "They're trying to blow out their adrenaline so they can make a nice clean shot," she says.

Gueth says the Stress Management Center was created as an alternative to hot yoga and power yoga. The center has sponsored three research studies with Harvard and the University of San Francisco and maintains long-term partnerships with the Schurig Center for Brain Injury Recovery, MarinHealth, Bon Air Cottage -which provides residential care for adults with chronic mental illness - and Kaiser Permanente, providing tailored classes including resilience and stress-management training for Kaiser physicians and support for chronic-pain patients.

In 2009, Gueth began training other teachers in her brand of yoga therapy and launched the SMC Educational Foundation to offer sliding-scale classes for youth athletes, people recovering from traumatic brain injury and stroke and veterans through the Free Yoga for Vets program, supported by community donations. She was an early member of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, and in 2015 the center became the first IAYT-accredited yoga therapy program in the Bay Area, making it one of the country's oldest accredited programs.

The many teachers she's taught have brought the center's philosophy to companies and organizations across the country. She says one of her students ended up working for sports-recovery technology company Hyperice. That connection led Gueth to consult for the Yankees, who asked her to write meditations for the players.

"The Yankees wanted some short meditations so that people could shift gears on the mound in the middle of a rough game," she says.

These days, Gueth says she guards two things fiercely: her sleep and her mind.

"Learn to watch your mind," she tells her students.

Most people, she explains, are burning up energy on mental chatter they barely notice - the traffic, the news, the small embarrassments of the day. "Once you notice that it's chattering about the fact that you wore two different colored socks this morning, you can tell it to knock it off," she says. Instead, she encourages people to redirect their attention to what they truly value.

"If we don't notice that we're (spinning) out on a thousand things, you don't see it. You can't change it," she says.