Thursday, January 21, 2010

Community-based yoga

My mentor and I talked today about this idea of partnering with a community organization in Philadelphia to offer yoga to cancer patients. While it would be nice to have a dedicated space at the cancer center for yoga, turning this into a community initiative is better in many ways (not to mention the fact that the “politics” at the cancer center may have us waiting a long time for it to actually happen there).

I think patients may even prefer to have yoga in a space and community that is separate from where they get their medical treatment.

If we do a clinical study on yoga, it has to be scientific, rigorous, and provide useful and new information. Right now, I want to focus on improving access. A criticism I’ve had with yoga is that people who could really benefit from the practice are not doing it (for many reasons including time, money, and availability of classes). But at the same time, I’m still drawn to yoga for its potential to be accessible, inexpensive, and provide a new dimension to communities.

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