Amy Weintraub

Amy Weintraub, MFA, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT, YACEP, is a pioneer in the field of yoga and mental health and the founder of the LifeForce Yoga Healing Institute. She grew up in Pittsburgh and worked in television broadcasting, writing and producing documentaries that won national and regional awards. Through those years she lived with chronic depression. After she began practicing yoga daily in the late 1980s, with supervision, she was able to come off medication with her doctor's guidance and find joy again.

Her own recovery led her to research and write about yoga and mental health. Her article "Yoga the Natural Prozac" appeared on the cover of Yoga Journal in 1999. She is the author of Yoga for Depression, Yoga Skills for Therapists and the card deck Yoga for Your Mood: 52 Ways to Shift Depression and Anxiety. In 2004 she founded the LifeForce Yoga Healing Institute, which trains yoga teachers and health care providers in practices suited to clinical and yoga therapy settings. Her evidence-based protocol for managing mood is used in health care settings around the world.

Amy earned an MFA in literary fiction from Bennington College Writing Seminars in 2000, and she returned to writing fiction in 2016. Her first published novel is Temple Dancer. In 2010 she began Internal Family Systems training at Bastyr University, and she now weaves IFS together with LifeForce Yoga in her teaching.