What is Yoga Therapy?
“The success of Yoga does not lie in the ability to perform postures but in how it positively changes the way we live our life and our relationships.”
― T.K.V. Desikachar
Yoga Therapy is a healing-centered, strengths-based health care modality rooted in an integrative understanding of well-being. All of a client’s experiences are taken into account recognizing connections between the physical body, emotions, thoughts, and an energetic sense of vitality. Practices are tailored to particular health concerns and evolve in tandem with client growth. Yoga Therapy has been shown to be a powerful means of healing whether practiced alone or as complementary therapy to other medical supports.
While any wisely chosen yoga practice has the potential to contribute to wellness and resilience, yoga therapy stands out in that these effects become central and intentional. A focus on supporting healing, recovery, and growth means a yoga therapist will have specific and extensive professional training and the services offered will have qualities and priorities that differ from mainstream classes.
Tenets of Yoga Therapy Classes and Private Sessions
Accessibility and Respecting Individual Experience
Students and clients are invited to explore different practices because of the therapeutic effect the practice may offer, not what it looks like. That means that if a certain shape or flow does not work for someone in that moment, a skilled yoga therapist will be able to offer modifications or other options that may look different but that will make the same therapeutic benefit accessible for that specific person.
As a yoga student, I know it can be hard to speak up, or to not get lost in comparisons and “shoulds” (“I should be able to xyz…”); I promise you though, that one of the greatest joys I take in my work is collaborating with a client to find the modification or practice that clicks with them, and I am always happy to do so. In a class context it is a beautiful thing to witness everyone in their own expressions of a shape or a flow, and every student that does so encourages that sense of empowerment and freedom in another.
Having Choice and a Voice
Participants are the conductors of their own practice and have full agency every step of the way. That may mean using modifications as described above, pausing and coming out of a practice and then rejoining, or stopping a particular practice all together. A skilled yoga therapist will only guide you to explore practices, invite you to try something or make suggestions. They will also regularly invite you to check-in with how a practice feels or with how it is affecting you so you have opportunities to notice what is or is not working. Questions and feedback are also always welcomed and encouraged!
Mindfulness and Interospection
Mindfulness can be simply understood as paying attention to present-moment experience with compassionate curiosity. Interospection refers specifically to paying attention to internal experience of any kind – physical, emotional, or mental. Whether in a class or private session, a skilled yoga therapist will consistently weave in cues to pause and notice experience, invitations to check-in with yourself, or guidance to attend to the effects of a practice.
Because we are practicing being curious without judgment, a yoga therapist will not assume any practice will feel a certain way or expect a specific result. Every individual is unique and in a yoga therapy space you can always express what is true for you. Instead of scripting what feelings must be arising, we pause, observe, and take care of what is actually present at that particular moment.
Learning to skillfully pause and check-in is one of the most powerful tools for positive growth and transformation not only within your yoga practice but also in daily life. It is part of how we learn to discern what does not serve us and what supports us, how we give ourselves opportunities to respond rather than react, and how we slowly but surely create new neural pathways and balance our nervous system.
Bio-psychosocial-spiritual orientation towards health goals
Yoga therapy recognizes that genuine well-being reflects health on five interconnected levels (panchmaya kosha) which generally align with the bio-psychosocial-spiritual model of integrative health better known in the West. In essence, this means that practices are holistic and will touch on what we may typically tend to separate and categorize as biological/physical processes, psychological and emotional aspects of experience, and connection to community and to greater meaning & purpose.
Certification as a Yoga Therapist
Certification and current membership with the International Association of Yoga Therapists ensures high professional standards of practice and requires strict adherence to attaining and continuing a certain level and quality of training as well as a professional code of ethics, and encourages participation in conferences, empirical research and journal publications.
Yoga therapists will often choose to specialize in a certain area and do additional training in their area of expertise. For example, I specialize in trauma and mental health. Like me, many yoga therapists are passionate about what they do because their specialty is inspired by their own lived experience and yoga has been a significant part of their journey to optimal health and vitality.
