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Teaching American women to be bold and strong - to hold space.
Ginger is founder of the effective method of combining rehabilitation and medical therapeutic yoga, called Professional Yoga Therapy. She has been dedicated to improving women's health through both mainstream and alternative methods of healing since 1992.
Hold Space - v. to facilitate awareness and ownership of your body and health, especially for mothers during pregnancy and birth. v. to lay claim to your life & your space through an elemental approach, creating for yourself the kind of life you want to live.
Professional Yoga Therapy Studies is a grassroots effort to educate licensed heath care providers in therapeutic medical yoga application. .
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Trailblazing in Holistic Physical Therapy
In 2001 I opened one of the first yoga and physical therapy studios in the country. After years of experience in traditional physical therapy settings, starting an orthopaedic practice, developing a women's health PT practice, and multiple therapeutic yoga programs in eastern North Carolina, I embarked on lecturing to licensed health care professionals across the United States in Pilates and Yoga.
I have lectured at Universities, hospital systems, and schools across the country about my methods.
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Founder of a Grassroots Movement - A Woman with a Mission
My mission is for PYT™, the oldest program for medical yoga therapy in the US, to become a model for delivery of holistic rehabilitative health care in the United States.
Ginger has taught PYT in every region of the United States from Alaska to the Virgin Islands, including Canada.
Hundreds of clinicians and dozens of graduates from our program, practice PYT, some of whom are also currently involved in research in yoga, occupational therapy, physical therapy, nursing, and medicine. The quality of our students and their work is a testament to the effectiveness of the PYT method and to the model of medical yoga training it will become in the United States.
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Education
My studies began with yoga and progressed through a BA in Athletic Training, covering sports from high school to university level.
I have studied with numerous yoga teachers such as Aadil P., Yee, Shiva Rea, P. Jois, D. Stapleton, T. Little, D. Swenson, S. Blossom, S. Shrestha; however, I claim no specific lineage of yoga and believe that yoga is best used in a non-dogmatic way, combined with evidence based western rehabilitation methods.
After preparing for entry into graduate school, I spent a year as a high school athletic trainer and had a second full time job caring for 3 children under the age of 3. This may be where & who I learned the most from about living my yoga, up until I welcomed my own sons into my life!
After completing my Master of Physical Therapy at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and held a second job using my credentials of ATC, personal trainer, and yogini, I went into outpatient orthopaedics & women's health PT, where I practiced non-orthopaedic patient care in inpatient wound care, inpatient cardiopulmonary, neuromuscular, and obstetric therapies, & home health, as well as my clinical duties in orthopaedics and neuromuscular therapy.
Within a year I was able to start an outpatient orthopaedic practice in addition to the first PIlates and Medical therapeutic yoga programs in North Carolina.
During this time I contined my music studies and have performed across the United States and on radio, TV, and to small and large audiences alike - from local venues to the Lincoln Center in NYC - from 30-300,000 people.
I have completed a 350 hour course of study with Dr. David Frawley (Pandit Vamadeva Shastri) and also with Dr. Sarita Shrestha, mother of Ayurveda in the West & Nepal's first female Ayurvedic physician, female OB/GYN.
Since then, I have expanded my techniques for therapy to include music, feng shui, environmental analysis, and Ayurveda.
Specialization & Action
Healthy proactive lifestyles are what I promote, facilitate, speak, teach, sing, and live for...
The
methods I use define a very different delivery of physical therapy & wellness education - which nurtures a different slant on living healthy.
I use elements of gross and subtle body analysis, combined with my education, to develop holistic wellness and academic programming for individuals, groups, corporations, universities, and communities.
In 2004 I was appointed to the peer review editorial board of the International Association of Yoga Therapists. I am an active author, with eight books and multiple articles and quotes from other authors in print since 2004. In 2008 I served on the short term steering committee for IAYT which organized the first meeting of schools to discuss international educational standards for yoga therapy.
In 2009 I was selected to serve on the National Athletic Trainers Convention Advanced Track Seminar Committee for selection of speakers for NATA.
In 2009 I became Chairwoman for the non profit humanitarian aide organization, Haiti Initiative Service Mission. Since 1992 I have served as team lead, planner, and musician on multiple domestic aide missions all over the United States. Since May 2009 I have fundraising for women and child health and education initiatives in Haiti and Afghanistan.
read her standardization stance in IJYT
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Most recently...
My priority in clinical practice is women's health, especially the season of motherhood. Women and mothers deserve holistic health care, not disease care, in America today. The maternity system in America needs a Mother-Centered approach. Women need and should be in charge of their bodies and their birth.
See my blog about the crisis in women's health.
I am currently finishing a second edition of a certificate program in specialized professional yoga therapy for motherhood. Yoga Therapy for the Season of Motherhood & Beyond is a prenatal, childbirth, and postpartum yoga therapy certificate program for the serious yoga practitioner or health care professional specializing in maternal and child health who are advocated for natural childbirth.
Both PYT will continue to evolve as any art or science does, just as the individual and their society transcends barriers and glass ceilings.
I am currently working across the United States with Universities, hospital systems, and private practice clinics to incorporate PYT™ into their integrative medicine and wellness programs, and to begin the process of creating programs in specialized yoga & elemental therapy for medical professionals.
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2010 & Beyond
I am working to forge a more comprehensive approach than that of just one country's culture and medicine toward a more culturally global or unified manifesto.
elemental - Use of all the elements, fire, water, earth, air, and ether, in order to create balance in the body and spirit. The elements are in a constant state of flux, just like the human form. The word is represents of how an approach to identifying pre-disease and abnormal states will evolve, just as art & science evolves.
renewal - To rehabilitate, repair, and revitalize.
- Developing new, diverse programming for PYT™
- Launching the new not for profit musical venture for humanitarian aid to Haiti, M4M
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