Rachel Wilkinson, CYC Founder & Yoga Therapist

Having worked in drug and alcohol services from 2008 to 2018 and been a services user from 1995 to 2007 I’ve experienced both sides and seen many changes in the way people are supported. Working in services gave me insight into the workings of the voluntary sector, statutory services and the increasing demands on not so readily available funding.

In 2008 I was introduced to yoga as a means to support my own recovery from poor mental health and drug and alcohol addiction, I had such a profound change and when my mother died in 2009 it was a big support alongside talking therapy. I decided I would love to share my findings with people who may not find themselves on a yoga mat quite so easily. In 2014 I qualified as a yoga teacher and did subsequent training in trauma based yoga. My aim was to bring yoga to people and create safe space for people to begin the journey from head to heart. To support people in to bodies that had previously been shut down due to life’s circumstances. I approached the project where I worked and proposed a yoga pilot. We were awarded a year’s worth of funding and alongside my support worker role I encouraged my clients to access yoga. The results were staggering and I soon began to see the impact a combination of yoga and talking therapy was having on our service users. Greater awareness came for these individuals and prolonged periods of abstinence were achieved. At this time services were undergoing many changes due to funding limitations and the pilot did not get renewed funding.

In the meantime I set up cOMMunity yoga class as a stepping stone for those in the yoga pilot to access, and for those people who had expressed challenges to accessing yoga studios. Community class started in 2016 and is still going strong. The premise has alway been that the class is on a donation bases with no obligation. It soon became clear that people wanted to invest in their well being and people had authority over their health. By paying a small contribution people gained agency and valued the class.

The idea of creating our own funding so as not to be waiting on anyone else’s authority was always in the back of my mind. A self supporting project stepping away from government funding was being realised. If I’m honest I believed and still do that the people in their community know what their community needs. That the people could in fact guide themselves rather than be governed.

With services changing and feeling ever more pressured by the increasing demands of my job I took the risk on something I believe in wholeheartedly and in 2018 I left mental health services to dedicate the time to develop CYC community yoga collective.

As the project continued to grow and we expanded our reach by offering access to an array of wellbeing sessions not just yoga we took the leap In 2023 and embraced a more expansive and forever evolving name CYC Create Your Community.

As we continue to grow so do you … TBC