Deborah Cohen

About Deborah Cohen

Deborah Cohen trained first at the World Yoga Center with Ann Farbman-Brown in New York in 1996, then in 2001 at SVYASA, a yoga rehabilitation center and research institute in South India. In 2010 she trained at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. She currently studies hatha yoga with Barbara Benagh. The strongest and longest standing influence for Deborah is Gurumayi Chidvilasananda and the Siddha yoga tradition.

Deborah has been teaching hatha yoga since 1996. A registered yoga teacher at the 1000-hour level and a registered provider of 200-hour teacher training, she has offered yoga to hundreds of students in classes, private lessons and retreats, and trained dozens of yoga teachers.

Over the past decade her work has focused on schools, involving collaborations with researchers measuring the effects of yoga on children, curriculum development, teacher training, and daily teaching to students in grades K-12. She is a licensed Physical Education teacher and a professional development point provider for the Massachusetts Department of Education. With support from the Boston Public Schools (BPS) Health and Wellness Department, she has trained teachers to incorporate yoga into their classrooms. From 2012-2014, she collaborated on a research project with BPS and the pediatrics department at Harvard University and Children's Hospital. Through what was the Core Yoga in Schools program, now Ivy Child International, she has taught yoga to students in ten Boston public schools and trained a small corps of yoga teachers to work with children in schools. The Core Yoga in Schools manuals for grades K-5 and 6-12 meet Boston, Massachusetts and United States standards for Physical Education. She is also the author of Journey to Inner Space: A Children's Yoga Book, illustrated by Ruth Lieberherr.

Deborah has both a bachelors degree in literature and a masters in education from Harvard University, and a masters in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. She has taught Positive Psychology with Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University and at Kripalu Yoga Center.