Massage and Yoga Therapist Janet Weaver Deploys Healing Hands at Her Miller Avenue Practice

In two very disparate modes of expression, Janet Weaver has spent much of her adult life trying to heal others.

In the first of those efforts, Weaver spent nearly six years in Kampala, Uganda, managing programs for GOAL, a Dublin, Ireland-based nonprofit, with her work spanning adult literacy, small business development, women’s development and more. She later served as the field director for GOAL, administering grants to dozens of nonprofits in Calcutta, working to rehabilitate street children there.

“I used my anthropology background, research skills and my curiosity about people, places and cultures to design programs that helped people,” she says. “I felt there might be other ways to live in the world, and doing so in Africa and India surely were one way.”

When the Lafayette, Calif., native eventually moved back to the Bay Area, Weaver turned her attention to healing on less global, more intimate way.

Weaver spent a lot of time at a meditation ashram in Oakland upon her return, taking a yoga philosophy class and studying the teachings of yoga philosophy, meditation and Ayurveda, the latter of which operates on the principles that the mind and body are inextricably connected, and that nothing has more power to heal the body than the mind.

Weaver became a licensed massage therapist and later a yoga instructor. Within a few years, she garnered her certification as a yoga therapist, opening her own healing practice in 2006 in the East Bay, and in Mill Valley in 2010. Now on Miller Avenue, Weaver has a pair of distinct but related practices: Yoga Therapy for Life and Massage & Healing.

Weaver specializes in treating athletes, injuries, pain, stress and muscle soreness, offering specialty courses in yoga therapies and working one-on-one with clients to assess injury, diet and lifestyle imbalances using Ayurveda and yoga therapies and massage therapy.

Weaver says she prefers to start with a body work session – “that helps me to get to know the body of the person and identify areas where I can help,” she says – followed by 2-3 yoga therapy sessions. She also teaches a class at College of Marin on using yoga therapy to address anxiety and mental emotional imbalances. “It’s not just musculoskeletal, it’s also diet and lifestyle imbalances.”

“I treat all over the map,” she says.

The 411: Janet Weaver’s Yoga Therapy for Life and Massage & Healing practices are on Miller Avenue. MORE INFO.

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