I’m excited to announce that I’ve invited Jivana Heyman to join our staff and he has accepted. That means you’ll be hearing from him regularly from now on, probably once a month. And from now on, he’ll write under the name “Jivana.” He will be listed on our About Us page and has a special page for his workshops and Accessible Yoga trainings at Jivana's Workshops and Accessible Yoga Trainings.
I invited Jivana to join us both because we’re big fans of the writing he’s done for us recently and because he has some expertise in areas that we don’t have, including making yoga accessible for people with serious disabilities and illnesses. I also think his message about how everyone deserves yoga is so important that I want to help him spread the word.
Jivana’s grandmother was a serious yoga practitioner, and he spent a lot of time with her with her when he was little. Some of his earliest memories are of watching her practice each morning, which had a strong influence on him, even though he didn’t come back to yoga until after he graduated from college in the 90s. At that time, he was an AIDS activist in San Francisco, slightly lost and very angry. When he rediscovered yoga, it became his personal sanctuary from the challenges of being in the middle of the AIDS crisis.
He initially studied Integral Yoga with Kazuko Onodera in Berkeley, California, who took him under her wing. He apprenticed with her for four years, which was a transformative experience because she taught him how to practice yoga and how to bring the teachings into his life. Because he knew all along that he wanted to bring yoga to the HIV/AIDS community in 1995 he took a teacher training program at the Integral Yoga Institute in San Francisco. There he was able to study with all of the senior monks in Integral Yoga, including Swami Satchidananda, the founder of Integral Yoga, and Swami Karunananda, Swami Ramananda, and Swami Asokanandas. He also sought out teachers who were specializing in bringing yoga to people with disabilities and chronic illness, such as Nischala Joy Devi, Jnani Chapman (who were both Integral Yoga teachers) as well as Eric Small and Cheri Clampett.
During that time, he started classes for people affected by HIV/AIDS at California Pacific Medical Center’s Institute for Health and Healing. He also started teaching for Dean Ornish’s Heart Disease Prevention program, on retreats and at UCSF. He learned so much from the Ornish program, particularly about the way they were integrating yoga into the medical system. As he incorporated what he learned from the Ornish program into his own teaching, he saw the incredible benefits that people were getting from practicing. It wasn’t that they always experienced physical healing, but they experienced a profound healing of the mind and heart that is at the basis of yoga practice.
His students were his teachers, and he followed them on an incredible journey. Because he always tried to create opportunities for his students to expand their understanding and practice, he sometimes had to create new programs and even a new organization! In 2007, he was trying to encourage, Priya, a student with multiple sclerosis, to become a yoga teacher. She didn’t have the stamina to take a regular teacher training program, so he had the idea of creating an accessible program for her—and that is how Accessible Yoga started. He had already been leading an adaptive yoga training for many years, as well as 200-hour programs, so he brought those two worlds together.
Then in 2014, when he and his family moved Santa Barbara and he felt disconnected from his yoga community, he created the first Accessible Yoga Conference to build an alternative yoga community that would support him and all the other teachers who were bringing yoga to populations who are typically excluded from most classes at yoga studios and gyms. Since then, Accessible Yoga has grown into an international nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making the practice of yoga available to anyone who seeks it, and to supporting teachers and students who are striving to bring yoga to populations who have been underserved. The highlight of his career came in 2015, when he was invited to teach Accessible Yoga at the United Nations in Geneva as part a celebration of people with disabilities around the world.
These days Jivana spends most of his time organizing the two annual Accessible Yoga Conferences (coming up in Toronto, June 22-24, 2018, and Berlin, October 19-21, 2018) and leading the Accessible Yoga Trainings, a 30-hour program focused on how the essential teachings of yoga can and should be available to everyone. His goal is to help yoga teachers learn how to integrate students with disabilities into their classes, so that we can create a more inclusive and democratic yoga culture. He’s also working on an Accessible Yoga book, which he hopes will provide people with another way into these invaluable practices.
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Follow Jivana Heyman on Facebook and Instagram and see Jivana's Workshops and Trainings for upcoming workshops and trainings. For information on Accessible Yoga, see accessibleyoga.org and follow Accessible Yoga on Facebook and Instagram
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