Yoga With Jake Podcast Jake Panasevich

Known for his love of donuts, dirt, and running with a massive smile, Tim Tollefson is a professional ultra-runner for CRAFT Sportswear that is facilitating difficult conversations around mental health in sports. Throughout his career he has won ultramarathons across the globe in distances from 50K to 100 miles. Tim is a 3 time USATF National Trail Champion, and a 2 time US Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier. While on the surface he carefully curated a balanced life of perfection, for more than 20 years he has battled body dysmorphia, OCD, general anxiety disorder, and an eating disorder. Tim is a licensed physical therapist at the Mammoth SPORT Center and founder and head crafter at Mammoth Trail Fest - a community oriented trail running event hosted in his home of Mammoth Lakes, CA every September.

Click here for the video that accompanies this podcast. 

Dr. Maren Nyer is the Director of Yoga Studies and the Associate Director of the Research Coordinator Program at the Depression Clinical and Research Program (DCRP), Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). She is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (HMS). Her research interests include the treatment of mood disorders and associated symptoms, specifically developing and evaluating innovative and complementary and integrative treatments for depression. She completed her pre-doctoral psychology internship at MGH/HMS. After that, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the DCRP, until obtaining a staff position in September, 2012. She holds a BA in Psychology from Cornell University and a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Virginia.

Click here to view Dr. Nyer’s research.

She was the principal investigator for the clinical trial on how hot yoga may reduce depression, which was published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Here's what Nyer said about the study: This study was a more rigorous follow up to an original, open study that we did with heated yoga. The results suggested antidepressant benefit, so the next step was to do a controlled study with a larger patient sample. We recruited 80 patients with depression, and randomly assigned half of them to heated yoga (which they could attend at any of two affiliated yoga studios that collaborated with our team) and the other half to a waiting list as a control intervention, both for 8 weeks. Patients were encouraged to attend at least twice weekly or more, depending on their schedule and availability of classes. We found that people who received the heated yoga intervention experienced a significantly greater improvement in depressive symptoms, compared to the patients who were assigned to the waiting list. They received these benefits attending only approximately one class per week.

Gil Hedley, Ph.D., has been teaching integral anatomy via dissection labs, keynote events and lecture tours since 1995. Gil has created an approach to anatomy coherent with the holistic body philosophies of body explorers from various treatment modalities, as well as teachers from the yoga, pilates, and fitness industries. He has documented this approach extensively through this website, gilhedley.com, which contains hundreds of hours of content explored from the Integral Anatomy perspective. Gil is committed to ensuring that Integral Anatomy education is accessible to all, worldwide, and offers free education through Easy Rider membership on his site as well as his YouTube channel to support his mission of "rebranding" the human body as a gift. In 2023-2024, he is embarking on his international "Nerve Tour" to bring his recent findings in the lab to communities across North America! Find out more at gilhedley.com.

Pallav Kosuri uses a physics-inspired approach to discover fundamental mechanisms in biology. Pallav was born in Sweden and studied physics at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.  After a short stint at CERN, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University in New York.  As a Ph.D. student in the lab of Dr. Julio M. Fernandez, Pallav co-invented an Atomic Force Microscope (US Patent 9,880,088) that can apply precisely calibrated forces to single protein molecules while measuring their mechanical response. Using this new microscope, he pioneered the use of mechanical force to study how disulfide bonds are formed during protein folding (Cell 2012).He also used this new microscope to investigate the molecular source of muscle elasticity and discovered a novel chemical mechanism for modulation of muscle stiffness (Cell 2014). After graduating, Pallav moved to Harvard University where he did a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Xiaowei Zhuang. At Harvard he invented ORBIT, a method that uses DNA origami to directly measure molecular rotation. Pallav used ORBIT to discover that RNA polymerase rotates in discrete ~35-degree steps during transcription (Nature 2019), and he is now building on this discovery to investigate transcriptional regulation at the single-molecule level.
As an Assistant Professor at the Salk Institute, Pallav leads a diverse team of researchers to investigate fundamental principles of function in biomechanical systems, ranging from molecular machines to muscles, and with a focus on the mammalian heart. His group takes a cross-disciplinary approach that relies on innovation in biophysical and computational methods and imaging techniques. As part of these efforts, he is pioneering the use of single-molecule microscopy to map the architecture of the heart. With these studies, his vision is to create a framework for understanding the connections between genetics, structure, and mechanical function of the human body.

Lesley Paterson has competed in over 400 triathlons, and she is a 5 x World Champion professional triathlete turned writer/producer, based in LosAngeles. Originally from Scotland, Lesley has undergraduate and graduate degrees in Film and, together with her psychologist-turned-screenwriter husband, Simon Marshall, own Brave Art Entertainment, a film production company in Los Angeles. Their first film was ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (Netflix, 2022), directed by Edward Berger, which went on to win seven BAFTA’s, including Best Adapted Screenplay and a National Board of Review win for Best Adapted Screenplay. In 2022, Lesley was nominated for an Academy Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay. The film went on to win four Academy Awards, including Best International Feature. Together with her  husband, she is the author of the best-selling book, The Brave Athlete: Calm the F*ck down and Rise to the Occasion.

Rachel combines thousands of hours of teacher training experience with her academic expertise (MSc Online Education) to help yoga teachers and studios create transformational educational experiences. She supports students, teachers, and trainers to share their passion, find their voice, and inspire others.  In addition to authoring five books, she has written for Yoga International, YogaUOnline, and the Huffington Post, and exuberantly shares her knowledge through her coaching, YouTube channel, online courses, and free online classes. Find her at rachelyoga.com or on social media at rachelscottyoga.