The White Lotus Foundation has trained and certified hundreds of instructors of Yoga until 2018. White Lotus was founded in 1968 and is led by Ganga White and Tracey Rich, both practitioners of

Hatha Haṭha yoga is a branch of yoga which uses physical techniques to try to preserve and channel the vital force or energy. The Sanskrit word हठ ''haṭha'' literally means "force", alluding to a system of physical techniques. Some haṭha ...

-Flow Yoga, and the Yoga of Inquiry.

Organization, Public Service

The Board of Trustees and Advisory Board feature many individuals prominent in their fields, including professor David G. White, Ph.D., doctor Hyla Cass, MD, and the musician/songwriter

Sting Sting may refer to: * Stinger or sting, a structure of an animal to inject venom, or the injury produced by a stinger * Irritating hairs or prickles of a stinging plant, or the plant itself Fictional characters and entities * Sting (Middle-eart ...

. Sting wrote a foreword to White's book, ''Yoga Beyond Belief'', in 2007. Yoga Beyond Belief has become a standard text for Yoga courses and Yoga teacher trainings around the world. The Foundation holds two-week teacher training sessions each year with up to thirty attendees each, as well as retreats for yoga therapy, Thai yoga therapy, meditation and advanced training lasting from three to seven days. White and wife Tracey Rich have produced numerous best-selling videos, including Total Yoga, one of the top selling Yoga videos in the United States with total sales of more than 1.8 million copies. Its mountain retreat headquarters and instruction center is located a few miles outside

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning "Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West Coas ...

within the

Los Padres National Forest Los Padres National Forest is a United States national forest in Southern California, southern and central California. Administered by the United States Forest Service, Los Padres includes most of the mountainous land along the California coast ...

. The campus overlooks Santa Barbara, the

Pacific Ocean The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...

and Channel Islands of California. The foundation was housed in various locations in Los Angeles for about fifteen years, and then moved to its present site in 1983. The Foundation has made its facilities available to public service groups, for example teens-at-risk programs in cooperation with

The Art of Yoga Project The Art of Yoga Project's (AYP) mission is to bring mindfulness-based practices to system-involved and other marginalized youth for their healing and empowerment. The Art of Yoga Project recognizes that youth face the stress of inequity, injust ...

and self-esteem programs through the Academy of Healing Arts. It has donated books to libraries and correctional facilities. It has offered teacher training scholarships for teachers committed to giving free service by way of yoga to women’s shelters and homes for abused women. White Lotus has been active in environmental rainforest preservation work.

Ongoing Impact

The Foundation has been in operation for more than fifty years. Many of its graduates have established the next generation of yoga schools. The Foundation has been recognized as establishing Santa Barbara as a major center for the practice and training of Yoga. For example, the Santa Barbara Independent called the city "A Mecca for Training Programs and Practice" and wrote that White Lotus "serves as the origin story for many instructors around the world."

References

{{Reflist Yoga organizations