It’s no secret that the pandemic began a shift in conversation on wellness and self care. It opened up a dialogue on how different populations deal with their mental health, and the many ways that we choose to treat and approach it.
Wellness and self-care don’t have to be expensive, and they don’t have to consume hours of your time. That sentiment is one of the driving forces behind Memphis native Olivia F. Scott’s company Freedom at the Mat.
Freedom at the Mat is a wellness brand that provides weekly YouTube content in the form of affirmations, meditation, yoga flows, and interviews with wellness advocates.
“It’s really our mission to make sure we are getting content out to women of all socioeconomic classes throughout the world,” Scott explains.
Scott says that the content is specifically and strategically targeted to be under 30 minutes, in order to cater to women who say “I don’t have time to take care of myself.”
“Naturally, you find that women, by our nature, we are nurturers, and we take care of other people, and we don’t take time to prioritize our own self care,” Scott continues.
Along with accessible self care, Scott’s company manufactures and retails yoga mats that are available to purchase through her website.
Fifteen percent of the profit made from Freedom at the Mat’s paid classes, journals, and yoga mats goes to nonprofits that are dedicated to serving women. One such recipient is Grace House in Memphis.
Shortly after graduating from Central High School in 1991, Scott found herself in a number of places from Missouri to Chicago and New York, where she says she was able to create a career for herself.
Health had always been a part of Scott’s life because of her lineage. Her mother, her sister, and her grandmother all died at the age of 65, and Scott knew that from a young age, she would have to watch her health.
While she was always conscious of her health, it was when she started to experience burnout in her mid to late 30s that she decided that she needed to really figure things out.
“I was on this hamster wheel in New York, and I had this really amazing career, but I didn’t have any balance. I did [yoga] one time when I was in Chicago, and I was like, this is so boring I’ll never do yoga, it’s so so boring,” she recalls.
After taking a power vinyasa class and becoming a registered yoga teacher, Scott says she realized that yoga was her saving grace.
“Women are so busy, and our lives are also busy. You may not have another moment to yourself to actually pray or to set the intention for your day or move your body, so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t leave anything out, that I wasn’t only focusing on the physical or only focusing on the mental.”
While her own experiences helped to push her to start her company, Scott says her familial experiences are a big part of her “why.”
“My sister struggled with substance abuse for about 35 years,” she says. “When she passed away I realized that the world has so much happening every single day. I think about my sister, and I say ‘If she knew that there was a place that she could go in her home that was accessible to her, would she have been able to better combat the demons in her head?’”
Combined with her sister’s struggles, and a car ride through Frayser, Scott realized that sometimes women don’t always have the resources to be able to figure out safe coping mechanisms.
“I saw the dire poverty in Memphis, and I thought ‘I wonder are these people thinking about their wellness?’”
Scott said she answered her own question, as, by necessity, people are often only thinking about survival.
“The moment I saw that section of North Memphis, I said ‘I may never be able to reach those women per se … but I want to contribute to an organization that I know is contributing to their health and wellness.’”
