Imagine sitting in your therapist’s office, you are upset recounting a challenging situation that is stressing you out. Your therapist tells you to take a deep breath. Next, your therapist teaches you HOW to take a deep breath. Next you learn how to connect mind and body to the present moment. Also, how to move your body and focus your awareness in a way that calms your anxious mind. allows you to think more clearly, feel more relaxed, and brings you into alignment so you can make healthy choices in response to the challenges you are facing.
THAT is Yoga Therapy.
Yoga therapy is neither yoga nor therapy in the traditional sense, but a yoga-based therapeutic and compassionate practice that brings you into balance: physical, mental/emotional and spiritual. If you lose your balance in any of these areas, all areas of your life suffer.
If you are in balance, your physical, mental/emotional and spiritual life will return to their naturally self-healing state. Yoga therapy can help you recover from injury, chronic pain, and emotional challenges like grief, anxiety, depression and ptsd.
Yoga therapy gets its wholistic healing powers from the physical practice of yoga, the mental/emotional healing of meditation and the most ancient healthy lifestyle practice on record, Ayurveda. For over 5,000 years, Ayurveda, the wholistic health science, which gave rise the physical practice of yoga, has supported our connection with nature, and our natural ability to heal. Ayurveda, combined with advanced knowledge of adapting the physical practices of yoga to any physical situation, is the basis of Yoga Therapy. Yoga therapists also employ modern brain science, neurobiology, along with teachings from psychology and physical therapy.
Who can Yoga Therapy help?
Anyone who is breathing.
Stress is now scientifically linked to between 80% and 90% of all disease. Yoga and meditation help you respond to stress in a healthier way, alleviating some of the dis-ease that goes with our stressful lives. How’s that for a magic pill?
Yoga therapy helps:
- Reduce stress
- Reduce chronic pain
- Recover from (and prepare for) hip, knee, back and multiple other surgeries.
- Parkinson’s, MS, arthritis and other chronic disease
- Anxiety, depression, PTSD, grief and loss
I have clients who have age-related challenges, chronic diseases such as MS and Parkinson’s, and clients who are simply seeking more ease, less stress and more joy. I have clients who run triathalons, who want to support their training with healthy, individualized practices that are wholistic including lifestyle, diet and physical practices.
How do you want to improve your health? Yoga therapy can do that. For more information on yoga therapy follow this link https://www.iayt.org/ to the certifying body International
Association of Yoga Therapists.