Urban Zen Foundation

Approximately one year ago, Colleen and I helped chair the Urban Zen Initiative with Donna Karan and Sonja Nuttall. This was a 10-day forum exploring the future of integrative medicine and the new healthcare paradigm. One of our immediate concerns in the Initiative was to train about 100 yoga teachers, mainly from the New York area, in some basic yoga therapy techniques that would address common symptoms of many diseases. These symptoms include pain, anxiety, nausea, insomnia, and constipation. Colleen and I led these trainings, along with a number of other senior yoga teachers, every morning during the initiative. The Initiative was not only a marvelous success in this training, but there was tremendous ground covered in pioneering the future of healthcare by some of the most prominent doctors and nurses of our time.

Now, one year later, the Urban Zen Initiative has become a foundation. The three initiatives being fostered under the foundation are: Health and Wellness, Spiritual Education for Kids, and Cultural Education and Sustainability.

In the Health and Wellness Initiative, we are launching a national program to train Urban Zen Integrative Therapists and then to implement them to serve in hospitals throughout the nation. These therapists will have a strong background as yoga teachers and will be further trained in massage, aromatherapy, death & dying, and nutrition.

Gaiam has been instrumental in funding and filming many of the Urban Zen events to date.

This May 16 at the Boston Yoga Journal Conference, there will be an Urban Zen day where we will start some of the necessary yoga therapy training that will move toward certification for Urban Zen Integrative Therapists.

For more information, you can follow the links below:

Urban Zen Foundation: A Patient Advocacy Intensive at Boston Yoga Journal Conference, May 16: http://www.yjevents.com/yjevents/boston08/urban_zen.cfm

For more info on Urban Zen Foundation and its Initiatives, go to: http://www.urbanzen.org/