When Judy Weaver connected her passion for yoga with a commitment to support those bearing the invisible scars of service, Connected Warriors was born. Hear Judy's remarkable tale of overcoming her own health challenges with yoga and how it ignited a mission to bring healing to veterans. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of the organization's evolution, the restorative power of trauma-conscious yoga, and the critical need for safe spaces that foster resilience in the face of adversity.
Collaboration is the heartbeat of expansive support networks, and this episode highlights how partnerships amplify the impact of nonprofits like Connected Warriors. I converse with Judy about the synergy with organizations such as 22 Project, which extends the reach of essential services like yoga to our veteran's. This narrative isn't just about growth; it's a testament to the collective strength found in diverse nonprofit alliances, working together to envelop our nation's heroes in the comprehensive care they deserve.
When Judy Weaver connected her passion for yoga with a commitment to support those bearing the invisible scars of service, Connected Warriors was born. Hear Judy's remarkable tale of overcoming her own health challenges with yoga and how it ignited a mission to bring healing to veterans. This episode is a heartfelt exploration of the organization's evolution, the restorative power of trauma-conscious yoga, and the critical need for safe spaces that foster resilience in the face of adversity.
Collaboration is the heartbeat of expansive support networks, and this episode highlights how partnerships amplify the impact of nonprofits like Connected Warriors. I converse with Judy about the synergy with organizations such as 22 Project, which extends the reach of essential services like yoga to our veteran's. This narrative isn't just about growth; it's a testament to the collective strength found in diverse nonprofit alliances, working together to envelop our nation's heroes in the comprehensive care they deserve.
Welcome to the podcast. I'm Scott McLean. My guest this week is Judy Weaver, co-founder of Connected Warriors in Boca Raton, florida. This interview was conducted in my kitchen studio. Enjoy, how are you, Judy.
Judy Weaver:Hi Scott, I'm doing. Great Thanks for having me.
Scott McLean:Welcome to the kitchen studio.
Judy Weaver:I love that.
Scott McLean:Yeah, and it is. I've had people tell me, oh, you should do a kitchen studio. I love that and it is. I've had people tell me, oh, you should do a cooking podcast. I said that would be good, but podcasting is an audio platform. Cooking is visual. So the thought was good, but it's not going to work. So, judy, tell us a little about yourself and how you got into all this.
Judy Weaver:Well for me. I started yoga in late 1990s so it was quite some time ago and I had a bacterial infection and I was it was a parasite actually. So in my recovery my girlfriend drug me to a yoga class and that's kind of how I started in it and I found that it was very beneficial for healing. And coming back to myself, so when Bo McVane came to me in 2007, an army ranger had five tours in the Middle East and he came home and was diagnosed at the miami va hospital with als, his doctor there, was very forward thinking and said go learn yoga, breathe and move.
Judy Weaver:And so I worked with him for over two and a half years and his family until he passed and what I saw was the softer sides of yoga was so beneficial for him and his family to keep him out of depression and his family believed it helped extend a little bit of his life. So after that and seeing the movie the Hurt Locker and noticing that, um, that our military service members are more present in chaos and they are in peace, I left the movie with my husband and said you know, that's really effed up and I can fix that. And that was kind of how it started. I reached out to Ralph Iovino, a Vietnam veteran, a Marine who served in the Vietnam war, and Ralph said yes, he would bring me veterans from the VA, and that's how we started in 2010.
Scott McLean:And that's where Connected Warriors came into play.
Judy Weaver:Yes, I wanted to give back into the community. I grew up my family was very philanthropic and it was always kind of we did that. That's what you did is you always gave back what you could and you served what you could.
Scott McLean:I'm going to ask you now to give us the who, what, where and why about Connected Warriors.
Judy Weaver:Right. So Connected Warriors. It really did come from that my passion to provide this practice to our military active duty veterans and family members. We've added first responders in time and it really started with one class where no one came except Ralph and I, and then another veteran came. What I learned was my first thought was that get vets on mats. That was kind of our slogan, and then I realized you can't get a vet on a mat, you got to take the mat to the vet and that's what we ended up doing. So we started to expand in the VA hospitals and the vet centers. We were one of the first veteran service organizations in the United States to have an agreement with Washington DC Veterans Administration to provide yoga programming throughout the Vizens and those are the main hospitals, and at that time of growing somebody would call from somewhere else and say, hey, we want Connected Warriors in our community.
Judy Weaver:So I would get on a plane and I would take my crew and we would go and we would start classes. And we did that in 25 states. We were in 35 VA hospitals and vet centers and we had 16 active duty military installations where we were providing regular classes. And, don't forget, this started in 2010. So we were dealing with a war going on. We had international locations Kuwait, Qatar, Afghanistan, Iraq and it was pretty remarkable to be able to have these classes for our men and women who are actively serving.
Scott McLean:That must have been quite an undertaking.
Judy Weaver:It really was. One of my most prized possessions was we had Captain Schwepp in Afghanistan, in Bagram, and he was teaching our class for us. I trained him through we have a trauma conscious yoga training specifically and we trained him to facilitate the classes and in time he sent or the group sent me the flag that flew over Bagram and a picture of all of them. So that's probably one of my most prized possessions that I have.
Scott McLean:So when you were over there, were you teaching trauma conscious yoga there, or was it just straight yoga classes? And that's what I think we should probably want to know the difference between, or is there a difference between?
Judy Weaver:Yes, absolutely. There is a difference between that regular yoga. But you know, here's the thing Trauma conscious yoga is regular yoga. It's just delivered in a way that supports the demographic, the person who we're in front of. So, for a first responder, for a veteran, for active duty, for a family member, for somebody who might be dealing with what we call MST military sexual trauma, we will cater the class in the delivery of either the content or how we deliver it, based upon who's in the class, and that's really what the specialty portion of trauma-conscious yoga is.
Judy Weaver:It's simply about meeting your student, where they are reducing triggers, providing them a safe, secure, predictable environment, environment. And then there's specificities. I guess is the word which would be specifically what postures you would be doing, what breath teaching you would be teaching, and then how you deliver this in what manner, because everybody's a little bit different and the biggest goal of a trauma conscious yoga class is to minimize the triggers. We tell our teachers when they go through the program nobody's broken here and you're not trying to fix anybody. They simply need more tools because the military train them or first responders in their training. They're trained to be vigilant, they're trained to be on, and they don't yet understand how to be present in the peacetime side of it, when they are in between deployments, when they're back home, if they're first responder, because a first responder is on 24-7, 365 in their community and it's really hard for them to downregulate.
Judy Weaver:So this purpose of the practice is twofold Community engagement, especially for our veterans, because we find the civilian gap is whatfold. Community engagement, especially for our veterans, because we find the civilian gap is what we call it is the issue with our veterans and why we are dealing with so much suicide and we're part of the suicide prevention team because they feel like they don't have a community anymore and they don't have a purpose. So all of this kind of plays and they don't have a purpose. So all of this kind of plays. The trauma conscious yoga class provides a community for them. They're in presence of other veterans, active duty or family members and they're experiencing tools and techniques in this practice that allows them to down-regulate. It also gives them the ability to learn how to understand when they're upregulating before and they can maybe soften that. So instead of having the anger issues or having where they don't feel safe in their environment, these are tools.
Scott McLean:How often are the classes? So, is it a group of veterans that you bring in? Is it one veteran? Is it do you? Do you bring them through a program? How does that work? If the veteran says, hey, I want to try this. What's my schedule? How does it go?
Judy Weaver:Right. So on our website we have the classes that we currently have is. You know, we all know the pandemic was hurt everybody in a lot of different ways and one of the biggest things for us is because we're so community-based, we were not able to be in person and we shifted, and the VA asked us to shift to create a pilot program online, and we did that successfully. However, the veterans weren't really keen on going to online Zoom classes and they are doing it, but it just wasn't well attended. Long-term they just it wasn't their thing. So for us we have had weekly classes and in some locations you could go to a class six days a week, believe it or not.
Judy Weaver:My mission was initially is that wherever a yoga teacher, a veteran, a family member or active duty or first responder lives, we will have a class. And if you understand, in the veteran world, so much of the time in military service they were treated like guinea pigs, so to speak. They had programs that were promised that never started. They had programs that started and then never finished, and that was one of our missions is that we keep a class going. So that's why we were hit pretty hard with the pandemic, because we literally had to shut them down, both on base and different, you know, military installations where we were. We had to shut down entirely. We weren't actually allowed to be in the VA hospitals or the vet centers for probably three years, so that was pretty significant for us.
Scott McLean:How many locations do you have?
Judy Weaver:Currently we have I think we have 30 classes running. We're in New York, we have them in Florida, we're in California and then there are a few others that have come back. I know we have a class in New Orleans, we have a couple in a few other states, so we're slowly coming back online.
Scott McLean:These are all veteran programs, correct?
Judy Weaver:Correct Veteran active duty. We're also in still active duty. We're in South Com, we have classes in Southcom, we're in Fort Campbell and 160 is SOAR and we have a couple of classes out in Pendleton.
Scott McLean:Correct me on my nomenclature. Is it a yoga teacher or yoga instructor?
Judy Weaver:So they're called yoga teachers and we. One of our goals is how do we get more active duty involved? Because that's really important, and one of our goals is to have active duty service members become yoga instructors. The certification is much shorter, so for a full-on yoga teacher, your 200 hours is the program, and for a yoga instructor, we put together a program that's 40 hours, and for a yoga instructor, we put together a program that's 40 hours because our goal was to actually embed yoga teachers in our active duty military so that they deploy when their service member deploys.
Scott McLean:You mentioned your website. What is that?
Judy Weaver:Connectedwarriorsorg and we've just updated it and it always has the class schedules on there and also including that we do have some virtual classes, so those are also on there.
Scott McLean:Connected Warriors. Do you have fundraisers during the year?
Judy Weaver:Right. So we used to have an annual gala veterans gala very well attended here in Boca, and since, again, pandemic we haven't done that and for those who know a gala, it requires a huge amount of volunteers, assets and time and so we've chosen not to go that route. So in the past we would have a few other small one-off fundraisers. So this year we're shifting and we're doing a big veterans comedy show in November. It'll be on the 9th at BRIC Boca Raton Innovation Campus, which we are a tenant. Graciously, the space has been donated by BRIC for the past six, seven years, for a long time. So that'll be a nice fun event. It'll be a family friendly comedy show and we do grants, we apply for grants, we have donor, local donors and probably do a couple other small fundraising events throughout the year. We have one.
Judy Weaver:I'm actually going to California on the 18th of May. It's actually Bo's high school girlfriend. She has been close to the family forever and wants to support Connected Warriors, but more than that, wants to do something in memory of Bo and she wants to do an annual it's called Warriors Walk. So we're doing that in San Leandro, marina. Both his dad and myself are going out there to be there and we hope that it becomes a nice event on the West Coast to help support the organization. We did this differently than a lot of other non-profits because I did not take any funding funds from the organization. I volunteer. The majority of all of our teachers are volunteers and the locations donate their spaces. So for us we had only administrative and oversight staff members until we branched out into behavioral health and then we did have a location, a physical location, clinical director, the whole kaboom, you know everything to support a complete behavioral health center.
Scott McLean:You're a California girl.
Judy Weaver:I am.
Scott McLean:Right, so it should be nice going back out there.
Judy Weaver:It really is, and I haven't been there since pretty much, well, maybe once since the pandemic. We're starting to travel again.
Scott McLean:So you talking donated locations, now you guys have a relationship with 22 Project, correct, we do, we love them. They're great.
Judy Weaver:I've known Alex for pretty much since he started the organization and because we have graciously been donated the space to have our administrative staff. We share that space with 22 Project because they needed some space. They do some really cool things, so we're very complimentary to one another. Their participants attend a weekly yoga class at the space and for us we are moving forward with when they go back home, because our program is the long-term we want everybody who practices to continue to practice for as long as they want and to bring it into their community and because 22 Project as well as several other of the VSOs around the United States, they're very specific event-driven programs and they don't have anything when they go back home. So with 22 Project we're working to see how we can make sure that when those participants go back to home that there will be a class there and that will give both organizations more support to one another and mostly for the veteran.
Scott McLean:And that's the goal is to connect other nonprofits with each other, and I know we all have our little connections and I noticed, as I'm doing this and I talk to more people and more nonprofits, this clusters, but it would be better if the clusters were bigger.
Judy Weaver:You know, that's so true. I spoke with I did an interview for elephant journal way back it must have been like 2011, just as I started, and the question then was well, what about your competition? And I'm like, well, I get that, but to me, there's 22 million veterans, there's 1 million first responders, there's 2 million active duty and there's 60 to 80 million family members. That's almost a third of the US population. I'm pretty sure there's plenty to go around and if we actually all work together and collaborated, we could provide much broader range of services and meet more veterans, first responders, family and active duty where they are, and that, to me, is the real goal. I don't look at it as competition.
Scott McLean:I had just done an episode with the Panhandle Warrior Project. They were up in the panhandle of Florida and Dan Henderson, and they're a very unique organization. They do a lot of stuff. But one of the things he said during that interview is basically what we were just talking about Collaboration over competition. Collaboration over competition. There should never be a competition. I can speak for Herd Foundation. There's more than a few equine assisted services programs, non-profits in this area. If they want to go to the one in broward, we're not going to stop them, we will invite them. We will let them know down there. Hey, scott's coming down there, can you guys take care of them? I think when it gets into a competition, it starts to get into that. It's about the revenue.
Scott McLean:Well and that's part of it, but it shouldn't be all of it.
Judy Weaver:And that's true, scott, and that's why you know for us we will. We have collaborated with fundraisers and it's. You don't see that a lot in the nonprofit world and it is and it is sad to say it is a competition for revenue because, you know, in our current times donor dollars are smaller. It's it's just different, it's a different environment than it used to be for donor dollars. So it does look and feel like it's a competition, but for me, in my opinion, if I have no dollars and there's somebody who wants to do a joint event and it will bring me $1, that's $1 more than I have now. So I don't look at it as a competitor, I look at it as a broadening of awareness, because this is what is super important is to broaden awareness.
Scott McLean:So share with me a testimony as a Connected Warrior teacher.
Judy Weaver:So this came. This text came to me two, maybe less than three, months ago. This is a retired Sergeant Major from the Marines, and so if you understand a Marines and you understand a Sergeant Major, he's the dude. So this is the text I got. One of my Lubbock Marines was contemplating suicide six days ago. I was alerted by another Marine from our Afghanistan deployment. He refused to respond to them and was, as I was told, pacing around his Jeep with a handgun. I reached out and was both surprised and relieved when he answered. Although I was 325 miles away, I was able to talk him off the ledge and have him walk into his local VA for help. Last night I drove to Lubbock and organized a yoga session which he participated with his fellow combat veterans. What a win.
Judy Weaver:We always hear about those we lost, but I wanted you to know about one we saved. Thanks for teaching me. Can you tell Judy? So this came to me from our field operations manager, felicia Robinson, and yeah, it was pretty amazing when I see that it tells me that, a the program is working and, b we need more of these teachers and that's why our focus has been to get into the first responders. So maybe you know there are about 25% 30% of first responders are veterans 25, 30% of first responders are veterans and to keep expanding our reach into the active duty, to get them trained so they can keep teaching this.
Judy Weaver:You know, in order for a military member to do yoga, it's not as easy to just say cause, scott, would you do yoga? Probably not so much. But if I were to tell you this is your own growth and awareness, and if you can be aware of what's happening inside of you, that you can feel those feelings ratchet up when you can feel you're being upregulated and you want to downregulate, that's yoga. So it's just. These are methods to get you to understand that in your physical body because, honestly, the issues are in your tissues. It is a body, trauma sits in the cells of the body. It's not something that's psychological, but if you have trauma, significant trauma, long enough, it turns into PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, which then can become a psychological event. But it doesn't start that way. It starts out physiologically and as soon as we can get as many of our service members, veterans, to feel that and understand that, then they can get that there are pathways so they feel more at home in their body, because otherwise the body is the enemy.
Scott McLean:The issues are in the tissues.
Judy Weaver:Yes, sir.
Scott McLean:I love that. I love that. I just learned something and I'm going to use that.
Judy Weaver:Okay, can I? Can I use it Absolutely, trust me, it's not mine, I stole it somewhere.
Scott McLean:Well, according to me, it's yours. You gave it to me, so I love that.
Judy Weaver:And that's why I made an acronym of yoga, because you know, think about what the stereotype of yoga is. You sit, you see somebody, probably a female. Think about what the stereotype of yoga is. You sit, you see somebody, probably a female, probably slender, wearing Lululemon pants, doing yoga. You know yoga. They're sitting in Lotus, they're doing OM. Right, that's what everybody sees, especially guys, but that's not what it is. It is your own growth and awareness, and these are strategies that have been around for thousands of years and they're actually science-based, and that's what I find cool. My husband's an engineer, he's a scientist, so I ask him questions and he gives me the answers to from a science side. So it's like, you know, something can't live five thousand, four or five thousand years without it not being effective and working.
Scott McLean:So you have Commander. Commander is.
Judy Weaver:So, commander Bingham, I met him in probably the year after Connected Warriors started and his story is really cool and I hope you have him on the podcast sometime I will. But he's a retired Navy fighter pilot 32 years and this is what I see with veterans as soon as they get out, they want to go back in because that, believe it or not, is their safe place and they feel they're at home back in the military. So he tried to figure out a way to go back in. He couldn't figure it out, but an opportunity came to start the JROTC program at Boca High. So he did that and he did that for 32 years.
Judy Weaver:I came into his world towards his end of his career there and he had never won nationals. They do the competition and there was an opportunity to bring that to bring yoga to his cadets, and I taught that was my favorite class. I did it for free for almost three years, seven o'clock in the morning and I taught cadets and they won nationals that year. So two years later I think it was his third year out they won nationals again and that's the year he retired. So I told him.
Judy Weaver:I said, commander, you know how you felt when you got out of the Navy to start with, you just wanted to get back. I know that's going to happen again. You're going to leave this job and have nothing to do, and then what are you going to do? You need to be a yoga teacher. He goes, I don't know. So eventually he became a yoga teacher and he teaches for us, but now he's also the executive director of the organization and he's really going to take us to a different place where we're going to be shifting to. More of our leadership is more active duty or veterans and first responders, because their voices are what we need now as we move forward and continue to evolve to support the needs.
Scott McLean:I think that it's it's hard to get them into. It's hard to get them in because, especially when they're still on the job, so to speak.
Judy Weaver:To that you know. Think about act um, the active duty in afghanistan and iraq when we were at war. So that is exactly especially the special ops guys and gals. They don't ever want to feel like they're down regulating because they need to be on, and what they found was that they were more effective when they could down-regulate and then their body-mind knew immediately back to up-regulate. The problem is not the up-regulation, the problem is the down-regulation, because this is what they know is the up-regulation they know how to be on, they don't know how to be off, and if you don't go off, it's like the Energizer bunny. And this is one of the analogies I use for training. Think of the Energizer bunny. You just keep going, going, going and EverReady wants you to think that battery's gonna last forever. But I'm sorry, the battery doesn't last forever. And if you get stuck in a corner and you keep hitting the wall, bunny parts start falling off and the bunny stops moving.
Scott McLean:That's what PTSD is. Long term Down regulation could be considered a weakness in those situations to that individual 100% To that individual and I can speak on that, because what I did after the military was also kind of high speed and you think if I get down there I have to get back up there. Well, evidently you're here to tell me that is not the case.
Judy Weaver:A hundred percent. You know what is one of the things that I'm sure first responders, as well as military resilience, they want a resilient staff, because that's what they need. Well, in order to get resilient, you have to be able to be from the high end upregulated to the down end of low regulated and everything in the middle, and go effortlessly, transition from one to the other, and that's what this practice gives you that ability to do effortlessly, without skipping a beat. So what we have found and what we've heard from our spec ops is snipers are more effective, and if you think about a sniper already being the most effective at their job, can you be more effective?
Judy Weaver:Yeah, can you control your senses more? Yes, can you make it effortlessly? Yes, can you make those decisions in a split second their life and death effortlessly? Yes, can you make those decisions in a split second their life and death effortlessly, with more accuracy, yes. So, yes, it all plays into the ability of their effectiveness. And then it gives in my mind, if you look at now, because there's so many studies about how down-regulating, being in that space of your parasympathetic nervous system the benefits of that, because that's where we want to live. We don't want to live in our sympathetic fight flight. We don't want to live there. We want to go visit there when we need it.
Scott McLean:Well, judy, as my mentor, Rhonda Fritchall from Herd Foundation, I love giving her a shout out. Rich Hall from Herd Foundation, I love giving her a shout out said to me, judy is a wealth of knowledge and you really are, and I appreciate your time. I appreciate you coming on the podcast. I look forward to having you on again because everybody that comes on will definitely be back again and probably again, because this podcast isn't going anywhere. This isn't going to be a 20 and done podcast. Uh, and I will have commander on. Absolutely. I'll leave that to you to set that up for me. How's that?
Judy Weaver:you got it all right.
Scott McLean:Thanks for having me, scott absolutely well, there you have it, judy weaver, co-founder of connected warriors Warriors, located in Boca Raton, florida. You can find the website at wwwconnectedwarriorsorg. And well, we built another bridge today and we'll do it again next week. So if you like the podcast, share it. If you're watching it on YouTube, hit that like button, hit the subscribe button. I post an episode every Monday. If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can reach me at vetsconnectpodcast at gmailcom. If you think you might want to come on the podcast, you can reach me at vetsconnectpodcast at gmailcom. I will answer your email and with that you will hear me next Monday.