The active ingredients of yoga, with Jennifer Webb
Dr. Jennifer Webb has been immersed in the study of psychology since her undergraduate days at Harvard in the 1990s. She got her Doctorate in Philosophy and Clinical Psychology from USC, and then she went on to Duke Integrative Health for her post-doc work. This is where she started intersecting professionally with yoga practice. At Duke, she learned how mindfulness is what she described as "the center of the wheel" for the work she was doing, which was to perform research and teach on weight loss and strategies for positive body image. This turned into a profound shift that she made—which she has been exploring for 17 years at UNC Charlotte where she is now an Associate Professor—around body positivity and loving and celebrating being the body you're in, versus trying to fix it and make it different.
I first met Dr. Webb through a research presentation she gave with Sat Bir Khalsa and me on media misperceptions of yoga. Seeing the numbers from Dr. Webb on how media has portrayed yoga as being either for loin-clothed men with long beards, or for thin, able-bodied white women in skin-tight athleisure wear is real. It's also encouraging to know that someone as smart as she is is contributing to so much change in the perception of yoga.
Dr. Webb has been diving ever deeper into the study of yoga and what component parts of it have efficacy for the populations she has been studying, so much so that she became a yoga teacher in 2021 through the first ever BIPOC-centered training through Integral Yoga. In this conversation, we talked about her past research studies, the most significant of which was with Curvyyoga.com. We also talked about how scientific literacy is one of the important aspects of society in today’s age of misinformation. Enjoy!
“Scientific literacy is so important.”