YogaTherapy--A Hot "New" Healing Modality

Yoga therapy is showing promise as an important alternative health modality. Based on the ancient science of yoga, a growing body of research shows that yoga therapy offers great potential to relieve a wide range of health problems and enhance health and wellness at all levels of the person: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

Yoga therapy focuses on the path of yoga as a healing journey that brings balance to all aspects of life through an experiential awakening of one’s essential nature. Yoga therapy is useful both for people who seek relief for specific health challenges, as well as for people who want to enjoy good health, prevent disease, and slow the progression of aging.

Yoga therapy is based on a view of the individual as a wholeness. For true health to occur, all aspects of a person must be addressed as a whole. The tools and techniques of yoga serve to reconnect each client to him or herself at all levels—from the physical body to the breath, the energetic body, mind and emotions, the higher wisdom faculty, and to the spirit.

How Is Yoga Therapy Different from Yoga?

• Yoga Therapy works with your goals. Yoga therapy is typically offered in individual sessions tailored to your needs, whether you want to learn yoga postures for back pain, facilitate injury recovery, improve flexibility, reduce stress, do yoga for depression, or simply improve well-being.

• In Yoga Therapy poses are adjusted to your body's needs. A yoga therapist will show you how to modify and adjust poses to your body’s specific needs, using props, modifications, and alignment assists. This ensures that you get the full benefits from each pose.

• Uses adjunct techniques to speed your progress. When called for, many yoga therapists uses deep tissue massage and fascia release work while you are in the pose to release tight muscle groups and facilitate a deeper core awakening.

• Deepens body awareness. Yoga therapy is offered in individual sessions or small classes, enabling the yoga therapy instructor to guide you in the fine subtleties of muscle relaxation, stretching, and strengthening. This increases body awareness and helps you make more rapid progress in reshaping your body.

Who Can Benefit From Yoga Therapy?

• People with specific health concerns, looking for ways to relieve and manage their condition and improve overall wellness. Yoga has proven helpful in the management of chronic pain, arthritis, depression, anxiety and stress, back and neck pain, fibromyalgia, PMS, headaches, insomnia, menopause, and weight concerns.

• People who are looking for a fulfilling way to exercise. When done correctly, yoga is a rewarding and intrinsically motivating way to stay or become fit. Individual sessions are an important adjunct to regular yoga classes to ensure you gain the most from the postures.

• People who wish to slow aging and improve their health. Yoga therapy can give you the tools to deepen body awareness and increase the health of your body from its most subtle level of functioning.

• People who would like to develop a fulfilling personal yoga practice andoptimize the experience of yoga asanas as a preparation for meditation.

Eva Norlyk Herriott, Ph.D., LMT, RYT-500

Eva Maria Herriott has a Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis on health psychology. She works as a health writer, yoga teacher, and yoga therapist. She completed her 200-hr yoga training at KripaluCenter for Yoga and Health in Lenox, MA, and a 500-hr. training in Integrative Yoga Therapist with Joseph Le Page.