From the Military to Mental Health Yoga with Cindy Beers
In this episode, I talk with Cindy Beers, a veteran of the US Armed Forces, educator, and expert on mental health yoga. You’ll be inspired by her passion for self-applied healing modalities like yoga and meditation, rooted in her own journey of trauma recovery.
Episode Details:
Towards the beginning of the interview Cindy briefly shares about two trauma incidents she experienced during her 18 years in the military. We did not talk about these experiences in great detail here, but it’s worth giving a heads up for any listeners that might be sensitive to this kind of story. You might want to skip ahead to about the 12-minute mark of the podcast, where you’ll be well past that part of Cindy’s story and able to hear more about her incredible work and new mental health yoga program.
Cindy talks about how she turned to yoga for help with fibromyalgia and physical pain, and found it also gave her a space to let go of painful thoughts and emotions. She describes what it was like to be a practitioner with a trauma history, attending group classes long before “trauma-informed” training was part of our yoga culture.
Mental Health Yoga Tools We Discuss:
Cindy explains how discovering certain meditation techniques, particularly Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Transcendental Meditation (TM) helped her with anxiety and an over-active mind (or what she called “the hamsters in the brain”). Cindy shares a whole host of modalities that are part of her wellness toolbox, including Havening, Self-EMDR, affirmations, and Yoga Nidra, and how they’ve supported her alongside Western medicine.
You’ll hear how she handles it when a student exhibits strong emotions during class, and what she suggests every yoga teacher should do to support mental health, regardless of the type or style of class they teach.
I think you’ll come away with a great deal of appreciation for Cindy’s pioneering work advocating for mental health and wellness, utilizing the tools of yoga and meditation.
Guest Bio:
Cindy Beers, MS, E-RYT 500 is a mission-minded entrepreneur responsible for founding, designing, and establishing a successful yoga business that creates a place for people of all ages and body types to practice yoga and mental health techniques in a safe, inviting, and authentic environment. She seeks to help her clients to grow through their own experiences and guides them to challenge existing self limitations by teaching them to make the familiar strange and to question how they have come to know what they believe about what is possible for their own wellbeing.
Cindy spent 18 years in the US Armed Forces and has a special understanding for teaching yoga and mental health practices to veterans, teens, and adults living with anxiety, depression, trauma and stress. She is also a dedicated educator with over 13 years of teaching experience at the university level. She is a skilled spokesperson, corporate liaison, and mediator with extensive experience working on hundreds of private and public sector contracts and is adept at taking projects from concept to completion.
After having experienced a near death episode, Cindy views life as a gift and unabashedly lives it with zest, love and quirkiness. She has published two books, Mindful Yoga for Teen Anxiety and Mindful Yoga for Adult Anxiety and is currently working on her third title, Yoga for Mental Health. She has created signature yoga & mental health training programs for both individuals and professionals, the Mental Health Toolbox and Yoga for Mental Health. Cindy travels the country leading these training programs as well as speaking publicly on Mental Health.
Resources & Links from this episode:
- Cindy’s new Mental Health Yoga classes and programs: https://cindybeers.com/mental-health-yoga/
- The American Mental Wellness Association: https://www.americanmentalwellness.org/
- Havening Techniques: https://www.havening.org/
- Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR): https://mbsrtraining.com/jon-kabat-zinn/
- Transcendental Meditation: tm.org
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing): https://www.emdr.com/what-is-emdr/
- Louise Hay affirmations – You Can Heal Your Life
- iRest Yoga Nidra: https://www.irest.org/
To connect with Cindy, you can visit her website at https://cindybeers.com/
or follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/mentalhealthyogaandwellness/
Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thecindybeers
and TikTok at https://www.tiktok.com/@mentalhealthtoolbox
You can also practice with your podcast host (Addie) in the Moved To Meditate Class Library! Sign up for your MTM Library Card to access this month’s FREE practices.
Or find info on upcoming Moved To Meditate Yin Yoga Teacher Trainings and Mindful Movement Teacher Trainings at movedtomeditate.yoga/trainings