While Yoga classes & studios are wonderful communities, and the physical practices of Yoga are healing and powerful, Yoga Therapy is a completely tailored approach to whole-person care that honors each person's path and incorporates so much more from the rich field of the Yoga tradition.
Yoga Therapy is:
Evidence-informed: there are thousands of scientific studies to date showing how the various practices of Yoga demonstrate relief for many physical, mental, and life conditions, including cancer care, depression, insomnia, chronic pain, grief, and so many more. Learn more here!
Customized: group yoga classes are not structured to fully address an individual's needs. Yoga Therapy 1:1 sessions take into account the whole individual -- their body, mind, spirit, & environment -- and the therapist and client co-create a practice that aims to serve the client through their current challenges and beyond.
Empowering: through our time together, the client learns to listen to and follow the rhythms of their own bodily, mental, and energetic states in order to continue to care for themselves as their life unfolds, even after our sessions come to an end.
Yoga Therapy is not, however, a licensed health care profession in the state of Nebraska, and Yoga Therapists do not diagnose mental or physical health conditions. Acute conditions and recent injuries and diagnoses are best handled by other qualified care teams.
Yoga Therapy can be a standalone process, but in many cases, it also works well alongside other treatment plans and protocols. More on that here.
For decades, the primary way we've all seen Yoga represented in magazines, movies, shows, books, and of course in social media is its physical form -- fancy poses that frequently showcase a certain kind of body, under a certain age, and in certain physical shape.
While the physical aspects of the Yoga tradition and modern practices can be deeply beneficial to both body and mind, the representation of these practices has been skewed (to say the least) by our visual media, and many people have gotten the idea that this is all there is. The most unfortunate part of this misunderstanding is that many of those people then also assume Yoga can't possibly be for them, because they don't 'fit' the common stereotype of the modern Yoga practitioner in one way or another.
Nothing could be further from the truth!!
It may seem like a huge field, but the physical practices are just one small part of the larger Yoga tradition; the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. I think the rich variety of ways we can get creative with customizing a Yoga practice to suit the individual is the most exciting part of Yoga Therapy. Yoga poses may not even be a part of your Yoga Therapy practice! And any poses that we do together will likely look very different from the flashy displays you see all over Instagram, because the performance of the pose isn't where the benefits lie but rather in what lies beneath what you can see. The magic of Yoga is in what you feel and notice in the moment, and what changes you observe over time. No photo can capture that.
As I often mention in my classes, if you have a body and you're breathing, Yoga and Yoga Therapy are for you. Let's work together to find out how!