Featuring Tiffany Cruikshank
Founder of Yoga Medicine and Seva Foundation
Tiffany Cruikshank is a unique combination of skills and passions. Through her skills and experience in yoga, medicine, and business, and her heart for advocacy, she has made an impact on promoting health and fighting human trafficking worldwide.
Tiffany is the Founder of Yoga Medicine, a community of teachers focused on fusing anatomy & western medicine with traditional yoga practices to serve the medical communities. She’s trained thousands of teachers around the world. Through this work, she has been featured in many publications, including the covers of over 15 magazines. She is a regularly featured expert in many major media outlets. And she has authored 2 books and has over 150 classes on various topics.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Tiffany’s early experiences in yoga and advocacy shaped her interests and current work. She has been passionate about yoga most of her life, and has served as a yoga teacher since age 16. She fell in love with holistic medicine in her early teens. She especially appreciated empowering patients and students with the innate tools of the body to support health & wellness. She also was influenced in advocacy by working in a homeless shelter directed by her mom in Phoenix.
Tiffany has intertwined her experiences in yoga instruction with a focus in the medicinal and therapeutic aspects of yoga. Tiffany’s undergraduate studies were in pre-med with an emphasis in medicinal plant biology. She also is an Acupuncturist & Chinese medicine practitioner with a specialty in sports medicine. Tiffany had a private practice in Portland, Seattle, and New York City.
With her background in Acupuncture & Sports Medicine, Tiffany has worked with professional athletes and celebrities and run her own clinics. She also created and directed the Acupuncture program at Nike WHQ in addition to teaching yoga there. She became interested in doing service work while at Nike when she was introduced to The Girl Effect.
That experience sparked her interest in nonprofit work addressing human trafficking and sex trafficking. The more she learned about this injustice, the more she felt she had to make it her work. As a yoga teacher, she felt so much gratitude for this practice, and as a woman, she couldn’t imagine any greater injustice.
In 2003, Tiffany started training yoga teachers out of her home and that eventually evolved into Yoga Medicine. Her trainings have reached all around the world with over 8500 teachers in their network worldwide. Through her work at Yoga Medicine, Tiffany also founded and runs two nonprofit organizations -- one conducts research on yoga’s therapeutic benefits and the other supports a shelter for women rescued from trafficking in Delhi, India.
Yoga Medicine’s Seva Foundation, is dedicated to fight human trafficking and sexual exploitation by empowering global, impoverished communities through efforts of education and entrepreneurship. Seva Foundation works with Her Future Coalition and Rescue Foundation, two NGOs based in India, to protect and empower those who are caught in the vicious cycle of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. By partnering with NGOs who operate on the ground, Seva is able to direct funds to exactly where it is needed the most – to the women and children rescued from these forms of modern slavery.
The many layers of intricacies, the growing research, the experience she has had personally with students and with teachers has kept Tiffany intrigued with yoga for over 25 years, and for many more decades to come. And, her passion for fighting human trafficking will continue to make an impact on vulnerable populations for even longer. G.L.O.B.A.L. Justice is pleased to sponsor Yoga for a Cause, a benefit event for the Seva Foundation, and also pleased to support Her Future Coalition through our GLBL MRKT. To learn more, visit www.globaljusticeonline.org/glbl-mrkt