5 Reasons Yoga Therapy Can Change Your Life
By: Emma Boone
Tags: Yoga, Wellness, Creative Life, Mindset, Personal Development

5 Reasons Yoga Therapy Can Change Your Life

Photo by Rawan Yasser on Unsplash

One night several years ago, I attended a yoga class I’d been to many times before. Only this time a substitute had replaced the regular teacher. She moved around the room in the darkness, silently correcting body postures and giving encouragement. She seemed calm and constrained — less like she was leading a workout class, and more like she was involved in something spiritual. At the end of class, she told us she was a yoga therapist and had a small practice in town. I’d never heard of yoga therapy, but because I’d liked her as a teacher, I looked it up the second I got home. I found her website and one line jumped out at me:

“Yoga is about so much more than working out or being flexible. It’s about living life to the fullest and finding peace in the present moment.”

After years of traumatic life events — a stillborn child, the loss of my mother to cancer, and infidelity in my marriage — I felt a distinct lack of peace. I had spent years and thousands of dollars in traditional therapy, and I felt burned out on talking about the same issues over and over again, focusing on the events of the past or trying to make big decisions about the future, instead of finding any clarity or peace in the moment. That night, I emailed the yoga therapist and set up my first appointment. To say she changed my life would be an understatement.

At our first meeting, she led me through a series of breathing and yoga techniques, and at the end of class, I did something I’d never done before: I sat against the wall, physically and emotionally drained, and sobbed in front of a stranger. I had held onto pain for so long, that just having a physical release, having a moment to slow down and feel something connecting in my mind and body, pushed everything to the surface. It was the start of a detoxification process I hadn’t realized I’d needed. It was a spiritual, physical, and emotional awakening that has helped me to push past the feelings of being stuck and hopeless. I knew yoga felt great, but I never would have believed its practice could do something on such a large scale.

Here are a few reasons why I believe everyone should try yoga therapy:

1. Receive Individualized Attention

Yoga therapy is unique even within the broader yoga community because it assumes you’re working through trauma or pain of some sort. Where yoga classes focus on postures and practices, which are, of course, helpful on their own, yoga therapy uses postures and practices as tools to reach a higher level of personalized relief or healing. A yoga therapist can take time to focus on the ways our body reacts to specific traumas, releasing the pain points in a way that promotes physical, mental, and emotional relief.

Yoga therapists tailor each session to each individual, much like traditional therapy, except it combines the mind and body in ways that only focusing on mental health cannot.

2. Heal From Traumas or Manage Everyday Stress

Even if you don’t have a specific trauma you’re healing from, every person holds their stress and fatigue and pain differently in their body.

One example is the way stress is carried and stored in the neck, shoulders, and hips, among other places. By using yoga poses based on those particular areas of the anatomy, a yoga therapist can guide you through relieving those pressure points, and the tightness and pain are released in a way individualized for each person.

Or, where sleeping in a fetal position can imply a lizard brain reflex of folding in on yourself for protection, a yoga therapist can experiment with exercises such as Cobra pose, Fish pose, or Sun Salutation flows that open the heart, hips, and body to release tightness in muscles and tissues that have accumulated from stress or trauma.

Realistically, yoga classes geared toward the general population must assume a one-size-fits-all approach, where yoga therapy allows for the time and space and individual attention to reach higher levels of awareness and mental shifts. They allow a one-on-one teacher-student bond that a trained and empathetic instructor can use to focus the practical application to the individual needs.

3. Learn to Breathe

Even if you never do take yoga therapy, consider learning how to breathe effectively. Deep breathing techniques are essential to so many things: elevating mood, managing pain, reducing stress, depression, and anxiety, releasing endorphins into your brain, helping control anger and regulating other emotions, increasing focus, improving muscle health and movement, keeping the body oxygenated, and so much more.

In a world inundated with negativity and stress via social media, news, politics, and more, taking a moment to reflect on your own body and your own feelings and finding your own center would go a long way in healing a lot of the divisiveness and fear and anger surrounding us on a daily basis.

Breathing is a simple practice that can be done anywhere, and its benefits are nearly limitless. Try stopping for a minute and breathing deeply. You’ll be amazed at how quickly it can recenter your mood. Add a trained yoga therapist to that, and she/he can teach you how to breathe more efficiently and how the benefits will immediately and infinitely impact your physical and mental health.

4. Improve Mental Health

Mental health is a huge term that encompasses many different factors. MentalHealth.gov says, “Mental health includes our emotional, psychological, and social well-being. It affects how we think, feel, and act. It also helps determine how we handle stress, relate to others, and make choices.” Entire books have been written on each of these topics, and it’s a massive field with constant new developments. However, in relation to yoga therapy, I believe we can distill mental health with the words of Swami Vishnu-devananda:

“The goal of all Yogic teaching is how to concentrate the mind, how to discover its hidden facets, and how to awaken the inner spiritual faculties.” (The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga, 19).

With this definition of mental health — concentrating, discovering, and awakening — we can see how yoga allows for positive changes in all areas of mental health. The entire foundation of yoga is based on the interconnectedness between body and mind. When the mind is healthy, the body can function at higher levels, despite various limitations. When the body is healthy, the mind can function at higher levels, despite various limitations.

5. Improve Physical Health

In a September 2019 TedX Talk, Kim Searl made a case for why yoga therapy should be integrated into the mainstream healthcare system. Among the statistics of ways it would help individuals and reduce long-term healthcare costs, she argued that yoga therapy is proven to help depression, anxiety, body pains, injuries, aging, and sleep issues, to name a few. She called our current medical systems a “fix it and forget it” model and argued that ongoing attempts to integrate yoga therapy with medicine would put individuals in charge of their own health and self-healing.

I love that idea. But I also believe that it’s probably a long way from happening in our current healthcare climate that fixes physical problems only as they arise and in many ways still stigmatizes mental health issues.

In an ideal future where yoga therapists coordinate with healthcare, this would be part of the individual puzzle. But until then, yoga therapy is a way we can take an active role in our own self-healing, regulating our health in meaningful ways. It allows us to restore belief in our own bodies. It allows us a mental and spiritual connection with our anatomy that is essential to long-term physical health and well-being.

Conclusion

I have always enjoyed yoga classes and felt better practicing when I could. However, it wasn’t until I had the one-on-one support and individual attention of yoga therapy that I was able to tailor those moves to my individual needs.

For example, one place where I learned I store stress is in the fascia (connective tissues) in the bottoms of my feet. I always knew my feet hurt, but I didn’t know why. My lovely yoga therapist taught me simple poses and stretches that I can do at my desk or in short yoga practices to relieve that stress and its associated pain. It is a small but life-changing practice that allows me to easily divert the pain when it comes on, and more often than not, to avoid the pain altogether.

Yoga therapy is a special subset of yoga that can be incredibly helpful for victims of trauma, chronic pain, depression, and other mental health areas to find peace in the moment and also moving forward. By working with yoga therapists, who are invaluable when properly trained, students can move to a state of taking more responsibility for their own mental, emotional, and physical health. The journey toward growth and healing can start with something as simple as meditation or breathing techniques or focusing on the body’s posture. It doesn’t need to be complex.

In addition to finding mental and emotional healing in the present, yoga therapy is uniquely beneficial in moving toward a more fulfilling future. It can change the way we feel about ourselves, and also, impact the way we feel about others and the world around us.

Like any practice, yoga takes discipline, consistency, and an established, accredited teacher with a positive track record. However, since starting yoga therapy several years ago, I have seen a drastic improvement in my own mental and physical health, and I believe others will see their own changes, individualized and specific to their needs.