Making Yoga Therapy Accessible with De Jur Jones
In this week’s podcast episode, we have a conversation with De Jur Jones, a yoga teacher and yoga therapist who’s known for her work making the therapeutic benefits of yoga accessible to marginalized communities.
Episode Details:
De Jur talks about teaching where she feels yoga is “necessary but not always available,” and how her students – from incarcerated adults, to low-income individuals, sex trafficking survivors, and foster youth – use the breathing and simple movements they learn in yoga classes. You’ll hear some of her strategies for offering therapeutic yoga teachings that are appropriate for the specific students, as well as sensitive to their context and environment. And, I think you’ll also enjoy De Jur’s examples of bringing yoga practice into everyday life, and even onto airplanes in her role as a flight attendant!
Listen to expand your ideas of yoga and to find out how you can support greater access to yoga therapy for many more like De Jur’s students. Whether you’re a teacher or a practitioner, you’ll come away from this conversation with some inspiration.
Guest Bio:
De Jur Jones practiced yoga for a decade, and then the teaching bug bit her. She wanted to share the healing benefits of the practice with those around her, or who didn’t have access to the practice. She connected with the Prison Yoga Project and learned how to work in the prison system. She later got involved with several non-profit organizations that were doing outreach and landed with UpRising Yoga. She realized early on that it was more important to her to teach to under-resourced populations, where she feels yoga is really necessary but not always available.
She currently teaches trauma-informed yoga to underserved communities, seniors, and in jails and institutions. She is certified to teach through Accessible Yoga, Yoga for All, Loyola Marymount University’s Yoga Therapy program, and Yoga for Trauma with Hala Khouri. She is also proud to be a community partner with the Yoga and Body Image Coalition.
De Jur is honored and humbled to be able to share her yoga practice with the people who come to the mat, chair, or bed willing to do something new and healing for their bodies and minds. Yoga is for Every Body. Every Race. Every Size. Every Shape. Every gender.
Links & Resources from this episode:
- UpRising Yoga https://www.uprisingyoga.org/
- Prison Yoga Project https://prisonyoga.org/
- Prison Yoga and Meditation https://prisonyogaandmeditation.org/
- Accessible Yoga https://accessibleyoga.org/
To connect with De Jur, you can visit her website https://www.idreaminyoga.com/
or follow her on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/mzdejur/
or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/de.jur.9
To connect further with Addie, check out her website movedtomeditate.yoga
and/or follow me her Instagram @addie_movedtomeditate.