Yoga Therapy

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Coming soon to Bee You Yoga and Wellness personal yoga therapy appointments with a certified yoga therapist.

What is yoga therapy?

“What does a yoga therapist do?”

Put very simply, a Yoga Therapist helps people with yoga techniques to balance themselves and reduce pain and suffering.

Yoga therapy focuses on health and wellness at all levels of the practitioner, physical, psychological and spiritual. Yoga therapy is a path of a healing journey through yoga that bring balance to the body and mind through an understanding of our essential nature. To bring unity with a person’s natural bliss, to alleviate suffering from being separated from their natural bliss state. Yoga therapy is about unique individuals, not conditions. Yoga therapy combines Ayurveda and yogic sciences to a holistic system, ayurveda for individual constitutions, yoga for physical health, Pranayama for energy, meditation to engage the mind and western medicine for anatomy, treatment goals and safety. There are infinite possibilities when it comes to healing through Yoga Therapy with an emphasis on emphasis on prevention – keeping balance.

A yoga therapist is a guide or mentor in the student’s journey of healing and self-discovery. Rather than offering a diagnosis and treatment for a specific condition, the yoga therapist creates a safe learning environment where the student can remember his/her own innate healing resources.

 

“From the Yoga Therapy perspective, the entire life journey is a healing process of reunion with us, with nature, with other people and with Spirit.

A traditional Yoga approach to health focuses on the integration of all aspects of being through experiential knowledge of the true Self”

– https://iytyogatherapy.com/sites/default/files/uploads/yogatherapyjournal/AA_whatyt.htm

Yoga therapy sessions will most likely include the following components:

  • Breathing Exercises (Prayanama): The therapist will guide the person in therapy through a series of breathing exercises ranging from energizing breaths to balancing breaths.
  • Physical Postures (Asana): The therapist will teach the person in treatment appropriate yoga poses that address problem areas. For example, the “Legs Up the Wall” pose is used to treat things like anxiety and insomnia. In this pose, the person lays on his or her back with legs positioned up against the wall.
    Meditation: Relaxation and mindfulness are the focus of meditation when it is combined with yoga poses.
  • Guided Imagery: The yoga therapist attempts to calm the body and mind by providing a guided visualization intended to bring inner peace.
  • Homework: An important element for any yoga practice is to find a way to incorporate it into daily life. Yoga therapists provide instructions on how to use what has been learned in treatment at home.

5 Reasons To Work With A Yoga Therapist

Yoga therapy is an emerging field. As such, most of the public doesn’t know what a Yoga Therapist is or why they would want to work with one. I thought I’d do my part and write the top reasons to work with a Yoga Therapist.

1) Head To Toe Thinking
For physical concerns, Yoga Therapists are trained to think about the whole body. In a world full of never-ending specialization, Yoga Therapists are uniquely positioned to see connections that others may miss. In practice, this often involves strengthening or stretching structures seemingly unrelated to one another. The result is a whole body approach to healing that often has amazing results.

2) Time
Yoga therapy sessions are often an hour, sometimes more. Unlike healing professions that are constrained to short sessions because of insurance and other factors, Yoga Therapists have the time needed to take in your full story. It makes us well positioned to see connections that others simply don’t have the time to make. Sometimes we not only need practices to help heal us, we also need someone to help us connect the dots in our daily life. Are we getting enough sleep? Do we need to re-think our medications? Are we unknowingly creating stressors that can be cut out? A Yoga Therapist is able to take in your entire picture and help you make beneficial shifts that others often miss.

3) Education Not Dependence
The goal of the Yoga Therapist is to educate people so that they may heal themselves. Working with a Yoga Therapist should leave a client feeling empowered to self-assess as part of their healing process. Independence from the Yoga Therapist is the goal.

4) Commitment To Relationship
Yoga is relationship. Yoga Therapists understand that relationship is a key part of any healing process. This mostly applies to our relationship with ourselves, but it also applies to the therapist/client relationship. A Yoga Therapist is a friend on the path entrusted with a certain role and a good therapist is committed to a relationship that benefits all involved. When working with a Yoga Therapist, a client should always feel on equal ground within the confines of healthy boundaries.

5) One Stop Shopping
Yoga therapy is interested in all aspects of the self: the physical body, pranic body, mental states and emotions, the unconscious workings of the mind, the heart and its connection to all. Yoga Therapists are trained in practices to facilitate healing connection and balance within all of these parts. For many, this holistic approach can alleviate suffering across the spectrum of their experience. This may eliminate or reduce the need to obtain help from different individuals which is often important since the cost in both money and time can be overwhelming, especially when working with chronic conditions.

There are, of course, many more reasons to work with a Yoga Therapist! May this short list inspire you to continue your healing with yoga therapy and please spread the word by sharing this writing.

May the healing power of yoga continue to spread,

Brandt

Re-posted from Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy School: https://breathingdeeply.com/5-reasons-to-work-with-a-yoga-therapist/

Yoga Therapy: A Brief History

Yoga Therapy is rooted in the ancient practice of yoga. Yoga originated in India thousands of years ago but did not become popular in the United States until the late 1800s when Swami Vivekananda, a Hindu monk from India, gave speeches at the World Parliament of Religions of 1893 offering an overview of his faith and a call for unity between the world’s major religions. After the Parliament of Religions, he toured many parts of the US. His popularity opened up new views for expanding on “life and religion to thousands” During a question-answer session at Brooklyn Ethical Society, he remarked, “I have a message to the West as Buddha had a message to the East.” Vivekananda spent nearly two years lecturing in the eastern and central United States, primarily in Chicago, Detroit, Boston, and New York. He founded the Vedanta Society of New York in 1894. In 1895 he gave free, private classes in Vedanta and yoga. Vivekananda gave private lectures to a dozen of his disciples at Thousand Island Park in New York for two months.

Following Vivekananda, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, an Indian yoga teacher, ayurvedic healer and scholar began combining aspects of yogic practice, breath, energy and ayurveda for health. Often referred to as “The Father of Modern Yoga,” Krishnamacharya is widely regarded as one of the most influential yoga teachers of the 20th century and is credited with the revival of hatha yoga. Krishnamacharya held degrees in all the six Vedic darśanas, or Indian philosophies. While under the patronage of the King of Mysore, Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV, Krishnamacharya traveled around India giving lectures and demonstrations to promote yoga. He is widely considered the creator of vinyāsa, in the sense of combining breathing with movement. Krishnamacharya taught the principle “Teach what is appropriate for an individual.” While he is revered in other parts of the world as a yogi, in India Krishnamacharya is mainly known as a healer who drew from both ayurvedic and yogic traditions to restore health and well-being to those he treated. Some of Krishnamacharya’s students include many of yoga’s most renowned teachers: Indra DeviK. Pattabhi JoisB.N.S. IyengarT. K. V. Desikachar. Krishnamacharya’s students BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, TKV Desikachar, and Indra Devi all came to the west to teach yoga. Yoga therapy as a formal manner emerged in the 1980s when Dr Dean Ornish released a study that illustrated how the implementation of a healthy lifestyle program could reverse heart disease. Dr Dean Ornish’s program included therapeutic yoga and was the first to highlight the benefits of yoga in this way. Dr Dean Ornish’s program for treating heart disease was approved for insurance coverage in 1980 and this began the acceptance of yoga as a treatment option in the medical field. The International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) was founded in 1989.

“Don’t be afraid to start over. It’s a brand new opportunity to rebuild what you truly want.”
– https://livelifehappy.com

 

“Unfuck Yourself. Be who you were before all that stuff happened that dimmed your fucking shine.”

“When you can no longer think of a reason to continue….you must think of a reason to start over.”
– Linda Poindexter

“Yoga therapy is a growing field and scientific evidence has begun to emphasize its efficacy. It is used to treat existing mental and physical health issues, but can also be used as a self-care strategy for prevention and maintenance. Yoga therapy is well established as a treatment for depression and anxiety. A meta-analysis cited in the Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders found that yoga therapy also shows promise for the treatment of posttraumatic stress (PTSD) and schizophrenia. Additionally, yoga therapists have begun to develop treatment modalities to suit children with autism. The book Yoga Therapy for Children with Autism and Special Needs, written in 2013 by yoga teacher Louise Goldberg, is already considered a critical text for novice and experienced yoga therapists alike.

According to a 2012 article in Social Work Today magazine, yoga therapy is also emerging as an effective treatment for substance abuse issues. Mental health professionals point out the way yoga positively impacts the parts of the mind and body susceptible to addiction. Studies have shown that yoga boosts the neurotransmitter GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid), which is important because GABA levels are statistically low in people who experience substance abuse, anxiety, and depression.

Because of its concentration on mind and body integration, yoga therapy is also used to address many physical health issues. It has been effectively used to treat back pain, heart conditions, asthma, chronic fatigue, hypertension, multiple sclerosis, and side effects of chemotherapy.

Yoga therapy is practiced in a wide range of formats. Physical therapists, for example, often implement yoga techniques in their delivery of massage and other treatments. Yoga therapy practice can resemble physical therapy, rehabilitative therapy, and/or psychotherapy. Unlike a standard yoga class, yoga therapy sessions are typically conducted in one-on-one or small group settings. Yoga therapy can be provided as an adjunct therapy to complement other forms of treatment, or it can be used to directly treat a specific issue. Yoga techniques range from simple to advanced, and can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

Potential benefits from yoga therapy include stress reduction, psychological well-being, improved diet, and efficient functioning of bodily systems. A 2011 qualitative study from Inkanyiso: Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences examined the effects of yoga therapy on anxiety. The findings not only indicated that yoga therapy effectively reduced subjects’ anxiety, but improvement across several dimensions of physical and mental health including physicality, relaxation, and mindfulness.”
– https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/yoga-therapy