Our Mission
It is our goal to provide a safe and open space to explore the highly effective tools of Yoga to find balance, gain a new perspective on pain care, and restore vibrant whole health. We believe staying anchored to our medical and scientific health care community is essential. Equally important, is a commitment to honoring our inner voice, our indigenous and cultural healing traditions, and our Earth as the original provider of holistic health.
Seva Yoga Therapy's holistic approach to pain care was modeled by experts in the rapidly evolving field of Integrated and Complementary Health Care. We can seamlessly incorporate evidence-based protocols and guidance from your primary care provider or mental health professional with traditional yoga techniques to create a new paradigm in pain care management and what it means to be healthy in today's modern world. Seva Yoga Therapy is an inclusive approach that makes room for all the unique combinations needed to empower each person to chart their own journey toward well-being
What Is Seva Yoga Therapy?
Although all yoga is potentially therapeutic and healing, Seva Yoga Therapy for pain care management specifically considers any medical conditions and/or health care provider guidance as well as a person's physical, mental, and emotional goals. This holistic, non-judgmental, whole-person approach is designed to empower the individual to gain greater clarity and insight into what their pain, their health and their wellness mean to them. A plan of care could include tailored postures/exercises, breathwork, meditation practices, lifestyle support, relaxation techniques, and more.
Many people first learn about yoga through its physical practices and a common misconception is that it is all about stretching or movement. While increasing mobility for pain support is a crucial step, Seva Yoga Therapy can help people who can't move at all, as well as less active individuals.
The Seva Yoga Therapy model of pain care management is unique because it addresses every aspect of life rather than considering a single symptom or body part separately.
What Are Some Conditions That Seva Yoga Therapy Can Help Support?
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Chronic pain
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Joint and back pain
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Anxiety depression
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Death and dying
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Major illness
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Sleep
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Stress relief
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Trauma/PTSD
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Fibromyalgia
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Long COVID
Seva Yoga Therapy can also offer support to people, working with their health care providers, as a nonopioid treatment integration for pain care management.
What's the Difference Between A Yoga Class & Seva Yoga Therapy?
In a typical yoga class, a dedicated yoga teacher will guide students through a series of postures that can certainly ease everyday aches, pains, and mood complaints. Our Seva Yoga Therapy sessions and groups go much further because they can be safely tailored to the individual or a specific pain condition. Whether one-to-one or in our small group classes, we access all the tools of yoga (not just the physical practices of asana) and initiate personalized assessment and goal setting in the context of a therapeutic relationship. Seva Yoga therapists are IAYT-certified and have in-depth training to help them assess and keep clients safe, and to interact with other healthcare professionals effectively.
Seva Yoga Therapy for pain care management can complement a person's usual health care.
How Does Seva Yoga Therapy For Pain Care Work?
Although yoga has been practiced in some form for millennia, we are just beginning to understand these mechanisms from a Western scientific perspective. A tool applied in one area, like a breathing practice, can profoundly affect pain in a completely different area of the body or the mind. Researchers think this works partly because of yoga's ability to regulate the nervous system and possibly affect the way the brain processes information. Another reason yoga therapy works so well for pain management is that it is not a treatment done to a patient - Seva Yoga therapists instead help clients to tap into their own innate healing capabilities,
Seva Yoga Therapy for pain care is a safe environment that offers tools that touch on the whole spectrum of human experience. It encourages integrated health and medical strategies which allows open forums for individuals and healthcare providers alike to discover the natural healing capacity within life itself.
What Is Integrated Health Care?
Integrative health brings conventional medicine and complementary health approaches together. It emphasizes multi modal interventions, which means using two or more types of practices combined. For example, medication, physical rehabilitation or psychotherapy combined with complementary health approaches like acupuncture, yoga or meditation. Seva Yoga Therapy for pain care support is a good example of a complementary health care approach that would frequently be used in integrated health care settings. In fact, a national survey found that, "over a 20-year period-from 2002 to 2022-U.S. adults not only increased their overall use of complementary health approaches, but were also more likely to use complementary health approaches specifically for managing pain..."-National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH)
What Is Complementary Health Care?
Seva Yoga Therapy for pain care management is Complementary Health Care. Many Americans—more than 30 percent of adults and about 12 percent of children—use health care approaches that are not typically part of conventional medical care or that may have origins outside of usual Western practice. When describing these approaches, people often use “alternative” and “complementary” interchangeably, but the two terms refer to different concepts:
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If a non-mainstream approach is used together with conventional medicine, it’s considered “complementary."
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If a non-mainstream approach is used in place of conventional medicine, it’s considered “alternative.”
What Is Whole Person Health Care?
Seva Yoga Therapy for pain care management is Whole Person Health Care. Whole person health refers to helping individuals, families, communities, and populations improve and restore their health in multiple interconnected domains—biological, behavioral, social, environmental—rather than just treating disease. Research on whole person health includes expanding the understanding of the connections between these various aspects of health, including connections between organs and body systems.
Our Yoga Team
Rebecca Boldin (she/her)
C-IAYT - Certified Yoga Therapist
E-RYT-500 - Certified Experienced Yoga Instructor 7000+ hours
YACEP - Certified Yoga Continuing Education Provider
Clinical - Seattle VA Hospital, Seattle, WA 2000 hours
Rebecca is a Certified Yoga Therapist, a Sivananda Yoga Health Education Provider, and an experienced, trauma-informed yoga instructor. She has been teaching yoga for over 20 years and has taught in various environments and locations all over the world from NYC yoga studios, and small neighborhood gyms to busy hospital clinics, international yoga teacher trainings, on television and even a monastery 3400m up in the Himalayas.
She uses the ancient teachings of yoga and Ayurveda, as well as, the modern concepts of Western science and psychology to initiate the innate healing capabilities available within all of us. She firmly believes that by using the very accessible tools of yoga we can begin to reduce pain, inflammation, and disease in the body while simultaneously creating peace and resilience in the mind.
Recently, she had the honor to serve and teach yoga at the Seattle VA Medical Center. There, as a part of a team of Integrated Healthcare professionals, she gained knowledge about chronic pain, major illness, PTSD, TBI, anxiety, and depression and how to approach these conditions using yoga practices as a holistic whole health solution. She also continues to retain a profound sense of gratitude and a deep understanding of our human condition learned from the veterans themselves.
Her treatment sessions, classes, and workshops are traditional, clear and simple, and will move you toward your greatest potential.