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In 2018, Olivia Scott was living in a small apartment in Harlem and was dealing with what she described as a challenging relationship. She attended a yoga festival in July 2018 and had an “aha” moment.
The instructor told the class to use their yoga mats as a place to work out their issues, not run away from them.
“I was able to have this incredible connection of mind, body and spirit,” Scott, 50, recalled. “I realized that there was something in yoga that was allowing me to strengthen my body, ease my mind and connect with my soul.”
Scott got her yoga certification in August 2018 and started Freedom At The Mat shortly after. The mission was to “create and provide a safe and sacred space for all women to find their freedom and find their peace.”
Scott says Freedom At The Mat encourages women to make time for themselves, reduce their stress levels and ultimately lead healthier and happier lives. The Memphis native says she understands that self-care is not top of mind for many women who have so many other priorities. Her mother, sister and grandmother all died at 65 and “it was all stress-induced,” Scott said.
“I had this lineage of Black women who had all died at 65. How do I change my lineage? Being from Memphis, there are some women who do not have access to self-care. It’s survival. It’s food on the table,” Scott said.
In her six years as a nurse technician for various hospitals including Ochsner, Touro, West Jefferson and Tulane Lakeside, Tiara Sceau saw firsthand how the lack of self-care led to poor health outcomes. Sceau had worked in labor and delivery, in behavioral health and at dialysis clinics where she connected with patients one-on-one. But she said she got “burned out with the numbers side of health care.”
“The way the system works right now, it’s more focused on the business side of health care than the care side of health care,” Sceau explained. “It’s a lot of focus on paperwork and things that take away from the care of a person. People turn into symptoms and numbers and you get numb to the fact that you’re dealing with actual people and families.”
Overwhelmed, Sceau said she wanted to do health care in her own way and in 2019 became a holistic practitioner. She is a certified doula, herbalist and Reiki practioner. She creates teas and tinctures to address issues such as allergy symptoms and nausea.
“I would describe health care as healing the mind, body and soul,” Sceau said. “I wanted to try it in a different way.”
It’s a different approach outside the traditional health care system in the same way Freedom At The Mat is taking a different approach to health.
Freedom At The Mat offers in-person yoga classes that incorporate journaling. When Scott moved to New Orleans in January 2020, she started a YouTube channel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Freedom At The Mat’s video content includes yoga, affirmations, meditation sessions, and interviews from medical experts.
“To me, self-care is a direct correlation with health care. If you neglect self, you have poor health,” Scott said. “Understanding that Black women, we all take on way too much. We don’t have boundaries and we end up stressed out, so we have heart disease, we have high blood pressure. All those things that can lead you to needing to find your freedom at the mat. I’ve been on this journey, this quest, of trying to create a safe space for our women to pause and find their freedom.”