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, 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 inclusive approach 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 what it means to be healthy in today's modern world
What Is Seva Yoga Therapy?
Although all yoga is potentially therapeutic and healing, Seva Yoga Therapy 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 health and 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 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 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 non-opioid 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 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 can complement a person's usual health care.
How Does Seva Yoga Therapy 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
About Our Yoga Therapist
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
Healthy Living | YMCA of Greater Seattle
Hi, I'm Rebecca. Thank you for visiting the Seva Yoga Therapy website.
I’m a Certified Yoga Therapist, a Sivananda Yoga Health Education Provider, and a trauma-informed yoga instructor. I've been teaching yoga for over 20 years in a wide variety of settings, both locally and abroad.
My approach is biopsychosocial-spiritual. I blend the ancient wisdom of yoga and Ayurveda with current research and insights from our scientific and behavioral health care community. This balanced combination of east and west creates the powerful, accessible tools that I use in my Seva Yoga Therapy program in order to reduce pain and stress, ease inflammation and support healing in today's modern world. It also cultivates greater peace, clarity, and resilience within the heart and the mind.
As part of my clinical training, I had the honor of serving at the Seattle VA Medical Center. Working alongside an incredible team of Integrated Healthcare professionals, I gained valuable experience supporting individuals living with chronic pain, PTSD, TBI, anxiety, depression, and major illness. My experience integrating yoga into a clinical hospital setting taught me so much. But some of the deepest lessons came from the veterans themselves, who continually reminded me of the strength, vulnerability, and shared humanity within us all.
Today, I offer private yoga therapy sessions by appointment at my office in Pioneer Square, Seattle and online. I also teach group classes at the YMCA of Greater Seattle - Northshore branch. You can find me there on Mondays and Fridays as a part of the Healthy Living Program. My group classes are open to all regardless of age, experience, background or ability and are designed to be accessible, supportive, and uplifting. You can view my open class schedule here.
If you're curious about yoga in general, or about using yoga therapy as a healing modality, please schedule a free consultation using the button below...Or stay and chat with me before or after an open yoga class at the Y. I’d love to meet you!