Rob Schware and Chelsea Roff are doing so many interesting things in yoga that I don't know where to start in these show notes. First, they are disruptors in an industry that since its modern inception has served a small group of suburban and urban women and the cultural elite. Give Back Yoga Foundation, the organization they run together as Co-Executive Directors, is in the business of serving people in need: those working with addiction, cancer, eating disorders, and those in prison. Schware says, in fact, that he thinks yoga is only about service.
Second, before she started working with Schware, Roff went on a yoga strike to raise money for her first organization, Eat Breathe Thrive. She did this to raise $50K to fund a research study on a yoga intervention for eating disorders. This speaks to the heart of Give Back Yoga: Disrupting a marketplace with care and a family-based approach to service those in need, but also, with scientific research. Those at Give Back wake up every day aiming to deliver more yoga services to those in need with interventions backed by research, and Roff's Eat Breath Thrive is just one of several organizations that Give Back fiscally sponsors to do their work. The organization also has donated more than 35,000 mats to teachers to help get the communities they serve practicing.
Finally, Give Back has launched a university for teachers all over the world to educate them on best practices for teaching the communities their sponsees have taught them how to work with. Schware says they are drawn to teachers and professionals with a “fire in the belly;” that phrase could well have been the title to this episode. Enjoy! Check out all the links from Give Back below, and I hope you consider working with them!
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Terms:
1. Randomized Control Trials (RCTs): prospective studies that measure the effectiveness of a new intervention or treatment
2. Maitri: Sanskrit word meaning friendliness
3. Ahimsa: Sanskrit word meaning non-harming or non-violence
4. Bhakti yoga: yoga of devotion or love that unites the practioner with the divine
5. Samskara: Sanskrit word meaning mental impression
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References:
6. Yoga4cancer
7. The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute
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Episode credits:
Original music by Kim's band Governess.
Produced by Alyssa Yeroshefsky and Kim Weeks.
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