SCHOLARSHIPS
EMPOWER YOUR COMMUNITY WITH YOGA
Body Mind Heart’s 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training is designed especially for people interested in sharing inclusive, evidence based, trauma informed yoga.
One of The Yoga Impact Charity’s core values is EMPOWERMENT. In line with this, we have previously awarded a number of full scholarships. People who have a refugee, migrant or first nations background invited to apply for a full scholarship in 2024 to Body Mind Heart's 200 Hour Trauma Informed Yoga Teacher Training.
"Everyone has a motivation to keep going - mine is to be of service and empower others. Teaching Yoga has allowed me to have connection with students in a way that I miss in my daily routine. It gives me a sense of self-satisfaction by making a positive difference to students. Studying and teaching Yoga makes me realise that Yoga has the capacity to change to brain away from stress and toward calm and relaxation"
- Zainab Al Jawadi, Scholarship recipient 2019
BIJA YOGA SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Persons from a refugee, migrant or First Nations background who have participated in The Yoga Impact Charity community programs and are seeking to become teachers themselves are invited to apply.
To make an application, please answer the following questions:
Why are you interested in becoming a Yoga Teacher?
How do you intend to empower others upon completion of the Yoga Teacher Training program?
ABOUT THE BIJA YOGA SCHOLARSHIP FUND
In the words of BIJA Yoga Director Keith Kempis “The BIJA YOGA SCHOLARSHIP for The Yoga Impact Charity was inspired by my mother, Maria Kempis, who was the first person to teach me the word, 'refugee'.
My parents came to Australia in 1979, having fled martial law in the Philippines.
A year after this, in our humble flat in Campsie, we had an unexpected visitor at Easter; a Vietnamese woman with a giant Easter egg for my brother and I. My mother didn’t know her but invited her in, nonetheless.
It turns out that this young woman had seen my mother at flats (she lived in the same flats as us) and felt a kindred spirit in her. Through broken English she was able to share with my mother that she had fled Vietnam, sadly without her family, and was very lonely. My mother held her hands and listened. Later she would explain that our visitor was a ‘refugee’.
That night my mother held my brother and I and kept telling us that we were so lucky to have left the Philippines together and that we must never forget this.
A few years later, my mother revealed to us that in the early 1970s her whole family moved to Vientienne, Laos and they all worked for an organisation called Operation Brotherhood, providing medical and other aid to the most vulnerable people on both sides of the war. It suddenly made sense to me the empathy Mum felt for our visitor that day.
Maria Kempis was passionate about education and there is no more valuable education than that of knowing one’s Self. This is why our community at BIJA decided to create the scholarship fund; to provide education in YOGA as a way to help people manage trauma in its myriad forms. Our hope is that the recipients are from a migrant or second-generation background with a wish to enrich the lives of people in their community.
It is our great honour to have been involved with the Yoga Impact Charity since it’s inception and we will continue this heart-centred alliance for as long as our respective communities exist. We are nothing without our actions.”