:: July/August 2006 Volume 5/Number 5

Teacher Profile: Jessica Jennings

Exercising your Rights to a more Natural Pregnancy

By Marie Black

Often painful life choices - and “I’ve had enough of them” Jessica Jennings has said - propel a person into their dharma.

Jessica Jennings is completing her Master’s thesis research at Kaiser Permanente, investigating a group visit program that integrates yoga into each woman’s check-up. The program began when Dr. Tina Navarez, Kaiser’s chief of obstetrics in Los Angeles, and Kaiser’s regional chief of obstetrics in Southern California, also a colleague of one of Jessica’s professors at Cal State, had just taken her first yoga class. Dr. Navarez was smitten and wanted to know Jennings’s thoughts on combining yoga with Western delivery methods. Jennings respectfully-with-ahimsa (non-harming) told the chief that stirrups used during delivery closed off the pelvic outlet and that prenatal yoga and breathing kept this vital area open. The doctor was sold - prenatal yoga and Jennings were in at Kaiser.

A yoga teacher in the Anusara tradition, Jennings has traveled the not-so-unknown path of yoga teacher, and is here now, as she says, to “make something.” If you glance at the bio page on her yogagroundwork.com website - one of three - where those very words appear, you’ll notice her desire to create has always been with her. Ten years in independent film fed her creativity and even introduced her to her husband. Despite the positive creative and personal aspects of her life, she felt drained and unhealthy.

Jessica Jennings (right) supports a pregnant student to open the heart and make space for baby.

“I was smoking, eating unhealthy foods and had constant neck pain.” One day, a concerned friend asked her to turn her head: she did and began to weep from the pain.

Jennings had seen first-hand the devastating effects of chronic pain in her family; her father suffered from back pain most of his life without the tools needed to relieve suffering. His subsequent deterioration led to his death. Her desire to learn tools to relieve her own and other’s pain led her to yoga.
Jennings studied with many teachers. She learned how to focus on the breath with Gary Kraftsow and benefited from Jasmine Lieb’s knowledge of therapeutics. Ultimately, she was drawn to Anusara and the Universal Principles of Alignment (UPA), which she felt offered her specific methods for helping people out of pain. In 2001, she completed the City Yoga teacher training with Sue Elkind, Naime Jezzeny and Anthony Benenati. A pregnant Elkind then approached Jennings about developing a pre-natal class for City Yoga.

Since then, Jennings has amassed impressive credentials: she’s a Certified Personal Trainer and has completed coursework for her M.S. in Exercise Science with a specialization in Rehabilitation and Pregnancy Exercise at Cal State Los Angeles.
Through her creative work at Kaiser, Jennings is making a huge something. The Kaiser HMO, while granting members medical coverage at affordable rates, is not known for its personalized care. Often pregnant women don’t even see the same provider - either an OB/Gyn or midwife - each time they go for a checkup. Jessica has crafted a program that allows pregnant women to work with the same provider each time they visit. The program also gives them more time with their providers, group support and teachings in the philosophy and practice of yoga as it relates to pregnancy and childbirth. Through the yoga practice, Jennings shows the women how to gently engage their muscles and gain stability during a time marked by the body’s constant change.

Jennings still finds time to teach prenatal classes at City Yoga and a monthly therapeutics clinic at Mission Street Yoga in Pasadena where she also teaches basic and intermediate yoga.
Combining experience, erudition and compassion - essential qualities for a great yoga teacher - Jennings’ soft-spoken, gentle manner (she is a Pisces) and petite frame belie her strong determination and focus to create. Add these qualities to a drive to bring yoga to here-to-fore HMO meccas and you have the makings of a yoga activist. And it is working: the OB program is expanding to other facilities in the L.A. area.
Where will Jennings’s next attempt to make something lead her? She says it will be on the most creative journey possible - that of motherhood.

For more information see
www.yogagroundwork.com

Marie Black is a writer, yoga teacher and actress living in L.A.

 

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