Almost 15 years ago, our Co-Founder, Chris Lucas, created the first version of Ompractice in a small apartment in San Diego.

Chris had just moved from Massachusetts, where he was working in public health and moonlighting as a yoga teacher, for his wife Kate's (very cool!) legal job.

Completely uprooted from his community across the country, he still wanted to practice yoga with teachers and friends, so he made the very first version of the website, which he describes as "a great idea with an excruciating and terrible experience" due to the fact that video chat didn't really exist yet.

Not deterred, he put it on the shelf, but kept the URL on ice just in case!

Fast forward to 2017, and a mutual friend (Hi, Meagan!) introduced Chris to Sam Tackeff, thinking that they would probably enjoy each other as human beings – and immediately they knew they wanted to work on something together.

Ompractice seemed like a good choice! And not just because Chris still had the URL, but because Skype existed and a brand new video platform called Zoom had just been released. Within 6 months they launched an alpha version built on Wordpress (and way too many conflicting plugins) and had students signing up from day 1. 

Quickly Ompractice grew: we found no shortage of great teachers who wanted to teach online – and students who wanted to stay connected to their teachers. (This has always been true, but we love that the data proved it!) There were also no shortage of people across the country living in rural communities who didn't have access to a wide range of options. 

One thing became clear early on: we wanted to focus on building a community to include people who had been told either subtly or overtly, that yoga and wellbeing practices weren't for "them." We know this stuff works, and everyone should have access to it! 

We wanted to build a place people could be themselves, show up to squeeze in some time for stress relief before work, take a moment's break in the middle of the day, and see themselves in their teachers and the community. 

Along the way, innovative insurers noticed, leading the way to supporting their members with Ompractice. Health systems noticed, bringing Ompractice to support clinicians in their own health, and patients in clinical workflow. Librarians, who were looking for a better way to support patrons in the community. The team decided to focus on places and partners where we could make a real difference in population health impact. 

From our roots in yoga and meditation, we added more evidence-based modalities, including Tai Chi, until we grew into the schedule we have today: a place where you can support your health in a multitude of different ways: something for everyone. As we've grown, we've built out a full schedule of classes to support health at every stage of life. 

To this day, the company still organizes around working to provide a disproportionately amazing experience for every student and teacher.

From our backgrounds in public health, fitness and mindfulness, tech startups, main street independent businesses, the Ompractice team has set out to solve population health issues one person at a time!

Our goal is to make these practices much more widely accessible.

Through our experiences, we've seen that the biggest changes in population health comes from engaging whole communities in getting more active, and bringing people together.

We love working with whole communities: at the VA, we work with Veterans, Employees, and Staff. In healthcare organizations, we work with clinicians and patients. After rolling out with libraries across the state of Massachusetts, we learned that we could make bigger change by bringing together supporting organizations like the city public health department, senior centers, and more to drive the mission together.

In the next ten years, we're working towards impacting 1 million lives a month through our classes, programs, courses, and resources. We'd love you to join us in the community!

Over the years, we've focused on putting our values into practice.

Here are some of the many moments where we aimed to bring our values to life:

Be In Service of Others: It's not just our work with organizations and people we admire – like Danny Fluker and Black Boys Om or Nicole Cardoza and her Wellemental team, our partners in VA Whole Health, or the many librarians championing for their communities. It's about building together to serve the needs of the community: with every organization we partner with, we work to address population health goals that matter to them.

Act with Initiative: When the pandemic hit, we focused on doing what we could to directly support the community: opening up our platform freely to any yoga and fitness studio that needed a virtual solution so they could keep the lights on and keep paying instructors.

Collaborate Effectively: Every few months we hold an all-teachers meeting to share the state of the company, new updates, new opportunities, and to celebrate people's birthdays and Ompractice anniversaries. (Getting to cheer on folks who have been teaching with us for more than five years now is a wild feeling!) We've always held open Q&A where everyone can speak freely – some of the best ideas come from our teachers and students, those moments where someone says "do we think we could do that?"

Be Community-Driven: One of the reasons we are doing this work is to help people live better lives on and off the mat. Our monthly newsletter connects and celebrates the people and organizations we partner with.

Solve Hard Problems: There are so many interesting and fun things we get to work on; and none of them are easy! We believe there are still large disconnects in the movement and mindfulness worlds. Bridging gaps requires patience, creative thinking, and not taking the easy road just because it's there!