Yoga Therapy: A Holistic Healing Art and a Self-Empowering Process

I'm a Yoga Therapist and part of my role in that is to begin to inform and educate about what Yoga Therapy actually is, what it isn't, and what makes it different that a regular yoga class?

So, what is Yoga Therapy?

There are a lot of really great contemporary definitions written by yoga therapists and healthcare professionals.

Here are some of them:

• Yoga Therapy can be applied to specific conditions not usually addressed in a group class.
• Yoga Therapy is a self-empowering process.
• Yoga Therapy can be not only be preventative or curative, but also serve a means to manage the illness, or facilitate healing in the person at all levels.
• Yoga Therapy, can help individuals facing health challenges at any level manage their condition, reduce symptoms, restore balance, increase vitality, and improve attitude.
• Yoga Therapy focuses on health and wellness at all levels of the person: physical, psychological, and spiritual.
• Yoga Therapy tailors the practice to the health needs of the individual. It helps to promote all-round positive health, as well as assisting particular medical conditions.
• Yoga Therapy is particularly appropriate for many chronic conditions that persist despite conventional medical treatment.
• Yoga Therapy is the use of the techniques of Yoga to create, stimulate, and maintain an optimum state of physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health.
• Yoga therapy is preventive in nature, as is Yoga itself, but it is also restorative in many instances, palliative in others, and curative in many others.
• Yoga therapy may be defined as the application of yogic principles to a particular person with the objective of achieving a particular spiritual, psychological, or physiological goal.
• Yoga therapy represents a first effort to integrate traditional yogic concepts and techniques with Western medical and psychological knowledge.
• Yoga therapy aims at the holistic treatment of various kinds of psychological or somatic dysfunctions ranging from back problems to emotional distress.
• Yoga Therapy shares an understanding of the human being as an integrated body-mind system, which can function optimally only when there is a state of dynamic balance.
• Yoga therapy is a holistic healing art.
• Yoga therapy is the application of Yoga to individuals to empower them to progress toward greater health and freedom from disease.
• Yoga Therapy uses age-old yogic approaches to deeper presence and awareness, so we are able to know ourselves more fully. Out of that knowing, we are more easily moved to embrace the opportunity for change, growth, and enhanced well-being in body, feelings, thought, and spirit.

You can find these definitions in their entirety here: https://www.iayt.org/page/ContemporaryDefiniti

Interested in learning more? I'd love to schedule a discovery call to see if yoga therapy is the next step on your healing journey.❤️