Yoga Therapy offers specific practices to heal and recover from illnesses, injuries, cope with chronic pain and depression. A Yoga therapist is highly trained in the science of yoga and understands which yogic practices your body and mind require to re-align, heal and strengthen.
 

In these one-on-one sessions, I assess, design, and build a personal practice for you to effectively release tension, re-align, re-balance, strengthen and develop new body awareness to maintain the re-established state of health. Some will be able to take these prescribed practices and do them on their own and some will require further guidance. Either way, the body and mind will continue to improve while feeling a decrease in pain and gaining strength.

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It's widely known that Yoga can enhance your physical and emotional well being, but when Yoga is practiced with a therapeutic intention in the form of Yoga Therapy, it can help prevent and aid recovery from physical and mental ailments. Yoga has long been practiced with therapeutic intentions as way of transforming both the body and the mind.

 

The applications of Yoga Therapy range anywhere from maintaining health, to recovering from illness - in some cases, even those considered incurable. The first stage of healing involves the movement of vital forces in the system. Practitioners of many Eastern forms of medicine believe that every illness involves a certain level of energy blockage. By promoting the flow of prana, or vital force, yoga combats those blockages, restoring the basic condition for health. Common applications for Yoga Therapy also serve structural problems such as spine misalignments or joint function.

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By combining different techniques such as breathing, postures or alterations of the circulatory patterns, yoga promotes specific changes in muscles, joints and organs altering the vital functions of the body. A good example would be the way Yoga Therapy can help overcome panic attacks. By practicing a balancing breathing technique, a sense of control is gained, combating the fear and anxiety produced by its loss. Or how by practicing a specific technique that involves eye movement resets the pituitary gland via the optic nerve, influencing the 'fight or flight' reaction so intimately related with the syndrome.

 

On a psychological level, the introspection promoted by yoga is essential to the self-knowledge process that fuels psychic transformation. The different relaxation techniques allow the troubled mind to calm and decrease its activity while promoting stability. Yoga considers the psyche to be spread in different centers along the body (chakras). Each is related to a nervous plexus, an endocrine gland, an organ or group of organs and specific psychic qualities. By acting upon the chakras (energy centers), yoga brings light to any psychic blockages, making them available to the conscious mind. The modern western correlate of this scheme is in the core of psycho-neuroimmunology, a branch of psychology that studies the interaction between the nervous, endocrine and immune systems, explaining some of the subtle mechanisms of psychosomatic medicine.

 

The fact that science is now acknowledging that everything in the universe works together with absolute, intimate and exquisite interrelationship is part of the basis of the increasing success and respect that Yoga Therapy is gaining among main stream medical practitioners. As more clinicians use these techniques and as more masters design specific applications of yoga, the spectrum of Yoga Therapy grows exponentially.