TRIBE YOGA MOBILE STUDIO

TRIBE (We Teach Resilience, Increase Balance and Endurance) is a non-profit founded in the West Point, New York region by two Army combat veterans, an Active Duty Army officer, and the daughter of a combat veteran who suffered from severe PTS. Each year since 2019, TRIBE has hosted one or two weekend training events for military members, cadets from the United States Military Academy, veterans, military family members, and yoga teachers who support the military community.
The goal of these training sessions is two-fold. The first goal is to teach active-duty service members how to bring the tools of yoga to their units and to teach individual self-care practices to improve the individual’s mental, physical, and emotional health. The overall aim is to improve service member health, resilience, and retainability, and to provide lifetime tools that can be used beyond the military.
The second goal is to empower those who lead yoga, movement, or mindfulness classes for military members and veterans to best present these tools to their populations. For individuals who have no military experience, we explain the physical and mental demands of a military lifestyle. Feedback from our previous participants tells us this provides greater empathy for the military population in addition to hands-on knowledge when crafting physical sequences or guided meditation for this population.
Our TRIBE YTT is a unique program that brings the tools of yoga to the military community in a way that is specially tailored to their needs in order to:
- Build resilience within this population
- Give military members tools to manage the physical, emotional, and mental stresses of their jobs
- Prevent severe mental and emotional injury should potentially injurious events occur
TRIBE’s YTT teaches participants to bring these tools to the military community. While we find our participants regularly discuss their military experiences throughout our training, specific course objectives that link military training and philosophy include:
- Within the physical practice, we link yoga postures to movements in military training manuals and provide explicit instruction on considerations for teaching a physical yoga practice to a military audience.
- To build physical resilience and balance the physical demands of the military environment, we study trends in physical injuries sustained by military members and explore ways to manage these through a physical yoga practice. We also look at the most current pain science research in order to empower our participants to overcome physical profiles and to empower leaders to motivate service members who may be dealing with physical profiles that result from chronic pain or injuries.
- We compare yogic concepts (including service, duty to others, finding a balance of work and rest) to the values of each military service component and to the creeds of officers and enlisted personnel.
- We focus on balancing the demanding, and often stressful, military lifestyle by working with individuals to create their own self-care routines throughout our course to see which methods work best for them and will be most sustainable beyond the completion of the YTT.
- A focused study of moral injury. Moral injury can be thought of as the lasting emotional, psychological, social, behavioral, and spiritual impacts resulting from the involvement in some sort of tragedy where moral concern is beyond moral control.
- Additionally, TRIBE’s YTT builds emotional resilience through meditation and breathwork instruction. We teach a variety of breathwork and meditation practices. These are for our participants to practice within their own self-care routines, but also for them to teach to others within their units, hospitals, veterans’ service organizations, or wherever else they choose to serve.