Why Yoga Therapy?

The Distinction Between a Yoga Therapy Session and a Yoga Class

Why work one-to-one with a yoga therapist?

The general public still sees yoga as a system of exercise. Even you may have heard about or attended a group yoga class, known to have a generalized effect on your body, breathing, emotions, and mind. You might have watched a YouTube video. Usually, the teacher gives general practice options, and perhaps if the session is face-to-face, there’s time to ask questions at the end or get personalised correction or instruction. Yet, those who come to understand that yoga is more than exercise may look for instruction to explore its other aspects.
Therefore, when someone seeks out a yoga therapist or a therapeutic group, they are usually not coming to learn yoga, but to get help with or relief from some symptom or health condition that is troubling them. In most cases, the instruction focuses on their condition and how the yoga techniques can help them feel better or improve their function, rather than on the techniques or methods of yoga practice.
No specific previous knowledge of yoga or level of physical fitness or mobility is assumed. A yoga therapist deeply listens to understand more completely the challenges you are facing in various areas of your health and well-being, and crafts an approach tailored to your unique disposition, needs, and wellness goals.

Focus is on your needs

A yoga therapist will get to know you and your personal goals before “doing” or practicing anything! Essentially, rather than focusing on yoga methods and practices, yoga therapists fundamentally focus on their clients’ needs. Their job is to understand why their clients have come to see them and determine what they can do to support them. To help them in their work, therapists are trained to assess clients through listening, questioning, observing, and appropriately touching, if sessions are in person. Therapists look for ways to help their clients reduce or manage their symptoms, improve their function, and help them with their attitude in relation to their health conditions. After assessing clients, therapists establish appropriate goals, develop a practice intervention, and then teach clients to practice that intervention. In this sense, therapists choose yoga techniques in relation to how they will specifically benefit individual clients.

Committing to change

The intention changes in yoga therapy sessions for individuals or groups with specific conditions. After an appropriate intake and assessment, therapists will often focus on the specific symptoms that trouble their clients and identify methods to help them manage those symptoms. Examples include helping clients with pain management, fatigue, or sleeplessness. In addition, the therapist's role is to empower clients to take a more active role in their self-care. The therapist’s job is less about teaching yogic techniques and more about helping clients to overcome their challenges and gain independence.
Creating change through shifting habitual patterns and behaviours asks that you take the driver’s seat with your own health. This type of self-directed therapy is about your commitment to change. Individual yoga therapy sessions offer support; they also ask that you do the work—in other words, practice! Your yoga therapist may focus on helping you understand the power of choice and how choices affect your health and wellness. You might cultivate this understanding over the course of your sessions.

A yoga therapist assesses your readiness for change, motivates a commitment to practice, and offers support through listening, guiding, providing printed or recorded practices, and follow-ups. Yoga therapy clients are not expected to “muscle” or “push” through change alone. The yoga therapist may ask questions focusing on your home space to practice, daily rhythms, how you learn best, and what motivates you to continue.

Long-lasting steps toward well-being

Health and well-being sometimes sound like states that can be acquired or lost in an all-or-nothing way. A yoga therapist, however, focuses on supporting you through gradual, sustainable changes you can work toward over time. The intent of earlier sessions and practices is to increase your self-awareness and the capacity to be present. This invites you to shift your relationship to your current situation and take actionable steps toward change.

A yoga therapist offers a toolkit of practices that you can use consistently to support sustainable transformation in your well-being. The yoga therapist may ask questions focusing on how you wish to live your days through the long term, what enriches your life, and what holds meaning and value for you. They may support you in celebrating your successes and tweaking practice approaches along the way—all to meet you where you are on your individual healing path.

Private Yoga Therapy Class

Allow a fully trained and experienced instructor to tailor a single session or program, according to your specific needs.

Traditionally, Yoga was only ever taught on a one to one basis.

You can also book a class for someone else- why not give someone you love the gift of yoga?

Family or Partner Yoga

Partner yoga classes are a very recent invention and a very good one. They are a good way to discover yoga, and they have allowed it to be brought into many people’s lives across the globe.

Couples, siblings, a parent with a child, friends, why not do something fun and healthy together?

Allow a fully trained and experienced instructor to tailor a class or program according to your specific needs.

Yoga for Seniors

Specialised yoga and meditation tailored for the elderly. For all sorts of reasons, participation in physical activity for the elderly or those with reduced mobility is often limited.

They are amongst the most vulnerable in society and I would like to offer them access to the benefits these activities provide, counteracting the devastating effects on the poor quality of life, especially when isolated, anxious and scared of losing the full range of physical functions. By offering this safe and easy to follow program they can significantly improve their physical health and mental wellbeing. I have over 25 years of experience in healthy ageing exercise routine and have practiced it in Germany and France, before moving to the UK.

Practice of our yoga therapy program has proved to help the elderly with body awareness, strength, flexibility, mobility, relaxation and improving balance, while bringing the joy of engagement in activities, a better quality of life, and increased longevity.

Happy Stance Yoga Therapy can help with following:

Chronic pain

Many types of pain respond well to gentle movement. Yoga poses, breathing techniques , and meditation, can change people’s relationship to pain and the way you experience it.

Pain that lasts 3 months or more—well beyond the time most injuries take to “heal”—is usually considered to be chronic and it results from the interaction of many causes.

Stress reduction and greater postural awareness—especially as aided by asana practice—are part of our approach to managing and alleviating chronic pain.

Mental Health

Mind and body are part of an integrated system; they’re not separate.

Breathing practice can for example profoundly affect specific area of the body or the mind. A particular type of breathwork could help address chronic asthma; if practiced regularly, long-time anxiety can be eased, too.

Yoga therapy can promote general emotional balance and assist with mood regulation.

Research into effects on specific concerns is promising, and yoga has been used as an adjunctive therapy for anxiety, depression, trauma and PTSD, insomnia, and other conditions.

Neurological Conditions

The brain can—and does—change throughout our lives.

Thanks to neuroplasticity, the symptoms caused by stroke, multiple sclerosis (MS), Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury (TBI), and other neurological conditions can be affected by yoga therapy techniques.

Sometimes the symptoms themselves change, even for those with serious conditions. Even when that doesn’t happen, yoga practice helps individuals change their relationship to themselves and the conditions with which they live.

Living with a lifelong neurological condition is a daily effort, both mentally and physically.

Neurological conditions present many challenges. Rather than focusing solely on a symptom or perceiving a progressive neurological disease as something to be “fought,” yoga therapy can provide a personalized self-care resource, with an eye to improving or sustaining day-to-day well-being and quality of life.

For the people with Parkinson’s disease yoga therapy improves physiological and non-motor factors that can affect quality of life over a relatively short period.

It also can help relieve the symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS), by regaining the balance, being able to walk short distances and longer periods of time,

improving fine motor coordination, and being better able to go from sitting to standing. Their quality of life also improved in perceived mental health, concentration, bladder control, with a decrease in pain and fatigue.

Wellbeing

Yoga therapy offers many tools for people who don’t have a particular health problem. In fact, yoga practices were originally developed not to cure disease, but to help people reach their highest human potential.

Today, yogic practices–including physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation techniques—can help us transform all kinds of suffering. Many people seek yoga therapy as a way of helping them manage or decrease stress. 

Yoga therapy can also support people who want to change habits of addiction or other unhealthy behaviors, improve their mood and ability to concentrate, and get better sleep

Many of us could use extra support with natural life processes like pregnancy and the postpartum period, or with healthy ageing. Yoga practices may help shorten labor and delivery times, and yoga therapy specifically has been shown to be beneficial for osteoporosis. It may even help with balance and fall prevention.