According to a First Responder Mental Health Needs Assessment conducted in 2025 by the Benjamin Center for Public Policy Initiatives at SUNY, New Paltz, first responder mental health remained at crisis levels, with 94% identifying stress and 90% citing burnout as major challenges. Over 50% reported depression symptoms, 38% experienced PTSD symptoms and 16% reported suicidal thoughts.
As conversations around first responder mental health continue nationwide, an Albuquerque-based organization is training firefighters, law enforcement officers and others to regulate stress before it turns into something more serious.
Yoga For First Responders, headquartered in Albuquerque, hosted its 38th Instructor School March 2 through 6 at the Bernalillo County Public Safety Training Academy. The five-day intensive certifies and licenses instructors to bring a specific nervous-system-based protocol directly into fire departments, law enforcement agencies, EMS services and dispatch centers.
Founder and CEO Olivia Mead did not originally set out to create a national organization. Mead was a longtime yoga instructor teaching in studios across New York, Las Vegas and Los Angeles when she began questioning the direction mainstream yoga had taken.
“What I really loved about yoga was the true, authentic practice of it,” says Mead. “It’s a 5,000-year-old practice, and it was intended to train mental discipline. It was intended for Warriors. It was a real elite, advanced practice.”
While teaching at a hot yoga studio in Beverly Hills, Mead says the focus felt misplaced.
“The feedback I was getting from the owners was about what I was wearing, the playlist that I was playing, and nothing having to do with the authenticity of yoga,” says Mead. “I was just so sick of it.”
Around 2012 and 2013, Mead shifted toward working with veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. Mead received specialized training in nervous system function and cultural competency and began teaching at the VA.
Then a phone call with her mother changed the direction of her work.
“I was talking to my mom in L.A. sitting in my car and a fire truck went by,” says Mead. “And I was talking to her about this veterans event I was doing, and she said, ‘Why don’t you teach first responders?’”
Mead began researching yoga programs specifically tailored to first responders and found none.
“I Googled yoga for first responders,” says Mead. “There was nothing for yoga for first responders. I was, like, ‘Well, I can’t just close the computer and be, like, Guess I won’t do it.’ No, that was like an invitation. It was a calling. I had to build it myself.”
Mead contacted the Los Angeles Fire Department and was eventually invited to teach, where she developed a protocol for active-duty first responders.
“I went through a lot of work to create and tailor a protocol that would be very job specific to first responders,” says Mead.
Thirteen years later, the organization has trained 250 active licensed instructors and reached nearly 200,000 first responders across seven countries.
President Eric Brenneman first encountered the program as a firefighter, and admits he was skeptical at first.
“There’s a lot of misconception about what yoga is,” says Brenneman. “My guys didn’t want to go to this kind of training, because I originally thought it was all kind of stupid. But by the time we got into it, they were coming to me and saying, ‘Hey, boss, we’re sleeping better at nighttime. I don’t feel as emotionally charged from it,’ because they’re learning to regulate their nervous systems.”
Over time, Brenneman says, the benefit became clear not just in sleep but in how firefighters handled stress on the job.
“It’s a shift from reactive training,” says Brenneman, “to training your mind, body and nervous system proactively so that you’re better equipped to handle the inevitable stress of tomorrow.”
For Bernalillo County Fire Rescue engineer and Public Information Officer William Bryant Harris, the program also reflects a larger shift in how departments view wellness. “Ten years ago, our mental health was not a thing in the fire service,” says Harris. “It was not a thing that we took care of, or even put a lot of thought to.”
Firefighters operate under extreme physical and emotional strain. “Firefighters and first responders wear really heavy gear, and it’s often 60 to 80 pounds or more,” says Harris. “We operate in very high heat, high stress, emotionally intense situations.”
Because of that, recovery must be trained as intentionally as emergency response. “We train really hard for emergencies, but we also need to train for recovery,” Harris says. “Recovery can sometimes be just as important as a response.”
Harris believes the program resonates because it is directly connected to job performance.
“This isn’t about stretching in a quiet room,” Harris says. “It’s about tactical breathing, mobility and resilience training that directly improves performance.”
The program’s research foundation grew organically when a research scientist approached Mead about conducting a doctoral study.
The initial six-week online pilot study showed “people’s stress levels were going down and resilience was going up,” says Mead. A follow-up in-person study demonstrated “a significant decrease in post-traumatic stress symptoms, a significant increase in resilience and cognitive reappraisal.”
Those showing early symptoms but not yet diagnosable with PTSD had “the most significant decrease,” says Mead, “enough to say this could prevent post-traumatic stress in first responders.”
The Instructor School in Albuquerque includes eight hours of online foundations training followed by five days and 50 hours of in-person intensive instruction, along with additional coursework and practice teaching.
“Anyone can come to instructor school,” says Mead. “We are not necessarily looking for yoga instructors specifically, because a lot of times you have to untrain things that aren’t going to work for this population.”
Classes begin with breath work, include a physical component and end with what Mead calls a neurological reset.
“We tell them: You’re here to learn how to process stress, build resilience and enhance performance,” says Mead. “That’s the skill that we’re teaching people not stretching hamstrings.”
Albuquerque is now the permanent home of the organization’s open instructor schools.
“Those 38 instructor schools have been all over the country, and we don’t want to travel anymore, and so we’re exclusively going to be doing open instructor schools only in Albuquerque,” says Mead. “Albuquerque is now the home, the hub of the headquarters of yoga for first responders, and I am very proud of that.”
The organization offers free 45-minute classes twice a week that are open to the public and livestreamed. Instructor School tuition is $1,750, with a $300 annual licensing fee. Partial scholarships are available when funding allows.
“It’s very important for us that whoever needs it gets it,” says Mead.
For more information about Yoga For First Responders, including details on free community classes and research findings, visit yogaforfirstresponders.org.