About

I started Yoga for Arthritis in 2010 after completing my PhD in public health at Johns Hopkins University.

During the previous 7 years, I had been conducting research on the effects of yoga for people living with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoarthritis, in collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Arthritis Center. The effects were profound, both in terms of what we were measuring as researchers and what I was observing as a yoga teacher. I realized that there was a growing interest in yoga among people with arthritis, but a lack of available yoga classes that would be safe and appropriate for them. My first impulse was to take what we had done in the study and train yoga teachers so that they could offer evidence-based classes for people with arthritis. I also knew that people with arthritis needed more information and guidance about how to find an appropriate class and how to build a home practice. And lastly, I knew that the clinicians serving these populations would need a better understanding of the differences between yoga offerings, so they could guide their patients about the use of yoga as part of arthritis management. What began as a one-woman show quickly grew to a more substantial operation and a single training evolved into three sequential levels for greater specialization. Around the same time, the field of yoga therapy was expanding and taking steps toward greater professionalization.

As a doctoral student, I envisioned a network of yoga professionals across the country and beyond who were qualified to safely and responsibly welcome people with any form of arthritis into their classes. The reality of how Yoga for Arthritis has become part of an international movement toward greater access to yoga teaching and yoga therapy is beyond what I could have imagined. I continue to conduct yoga research and am grateful that it can directly inform what happens in the fields of yoga teaching and yoga therapy. I suspect it is every researcher’s wish that our work touches the lives of the real people in the world for whom we are doing it in the first place.