Jivana Heyman Has a Revolutionary Idea: Make Yoga Accessible to Everyone

For the Accessible Yoga co-founder, "anyone can do yoga” isn’t a feel-good social media slogan—it’s a lifelong mission.

- By Dakota Kim, Photography by Ian Spanier

In the soft 7:30 a.m. Santa Barbara sun, Jivana Heyman walks down the green wooden steps into his backyard garden. He admires the herb bed where lavender, oregano, and thyme flourish. Scratching his short auburn beard and adjusting his glasses, he moves on to what he calls his “three favorite Ws”: watering, weeding, and wandering. Many living things in his personal oasis call for his attention: prolific lemon and orange trees, an eggplant-and-pepper patch, an itinerant inedible fig tree that he can’t seem to bring himself to cut down. As he tends to them, he takes time to think. This space for reflection is part of what Heyman, co-founder of the nonprofit organization Accessible Yoga Association and author of Accessible Yoga, loves so much about gardening.

Heyman sits down at the table on his back porch. He pulls up some old snapshots on his phone and laughs wistfully at one, taken at a 1990 march associated with the New York City Gay Pride Parade. In it, Heyman, in his mid-20s, clad in white and wearing sunglasses, marches behind a banner. His hands are lifted enthusiastically in mid-clap.

In some ways, the calm yoga teacher and father of two grown children bears little resemblance to the fiery activist in the photo. But Heyman is still passionate about making change, and the fire that stoked the ardent young demonstrator still burns brightly. The focus of the flame has just shifted. Now, he is committed to making yoga accessible to everyone.

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