Yoga for therapists is an increasingly important field that sits at the intersection of modern healthcare and ancient wisdom. As yoga becomes more widely recognised for its therapeutic benefits, more professionals are exploring how to integrate it into their clinical or wellbeing-focused work.
“Yoga therapy is a self-empowering process, where the care-seeker, with the help of the yoga therapist, implements a personalized and evolving yoga practice, that not only addresses the illness in a multi-dimensional manner, but also aims to alleviate his/her suffering in a progressive, non-invasive and complementary manner.”
– TVK Desikachar
At Minded we are often asked: what is it like to be a yoga therapist? As a career that covers such a broad range of techniques for healing, it is a difficult question to answer. The easy response is: “a yoga therapist applies yoga therapeutically to health conditions”, but really this doesn’t get to the heart of the profession or provide inquiring minds with a real sense of this emerging field with ancient roots that weaves together scientific knowledge, spiritual insights, and psychotherapeutic skills. When speaking to our graduates over the years they say things like, “being a yoga therapist is taking the practice that has transformed my life and learning how to help others change their lives from the inside out”, “being a yoga therapist allows me to bring in spiritual teachings with a scientific underpinning and help someone wherever they are in the life,” “as a yoga therapist, not only can I inquire with them and provide some support like any therapist, but I can teach them skills to transform both their physiological systems and psychology”.
Many who undertake this profession have a seemingly juxtaposed interest in experiential phenomena that are not able to be quantified, alongside an insatiable thirst for the scientific underpinnings of yoga practices. This unique blend of the intuitive with the scientific is what makes being a yoga therapist such an all-encompassing approach to health. As science continues to meet spirituality in the mainstream, yoga therapy offers a profession with endless opportunities for those who choose to walk this extraordinary path.
Yoga for Therapists: What is it really like to be a yoga therapist?
To begin with, yoga therapists need to be committed to further professional development, as there is a clear distinction between being a yoga therapist and a yoga teacher. Yoga therapy involves education that is unique from that of a yoga teacher or a health professional, and yet a career in yoga therapy spans aspects of both of these fields and builds on this relationship. Therefore, yoga therapy training programmes require students to be an experienced yoga teacher or health professional prior to engaging in a yoga therapy qualification. Although there is much variety in training programmes, all will cover:
- Physiology
- Health conditions through a yogic, psychological and medical lens
- Philosophy as it supports behavioural change in clients
- Anatomy that relates to musculoskeletal skills
- The client therapeutic relationship
In addition to the above, The Minded Institute’s rigorous Professional Diploma in Yoga Therapy is renowned for weaving in elements of Buddhism, in depth neuroscience, research and clinical skills found in psychotherapy. Accordingly, the work of Minded yoga therapists is bolstered by an embodied sense of mindfulness, an ability to translate neuroscientific and other research findings into useful practices based on a client’s health complaint/s and vital expertise in psychotherapeutic holding. As a testament to our commitment to excellence, The Minded Institute is the only yoga therapy training organisation in the world to be accredited by both the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) and the British Council of Yoga Therapists (BCYT), in addition to the National Council of Integrative Psychotherapists (NCIP). Whether training with Minded or one of the growing number of yoga therapy programmes around the world, what ultimately draws people to this transformational career is a desire to delve deep into the holism of human experience in order to support people in development and healing.
What Does Practising Yoga for Therapists Actually Look Like?
To begin with, a yoga therapist provides clients with an in-depth intake form before a session begins. With this form in hand, the yoga therapist will engage in a multidimensional assessment using the Kosha Model. The koshas—which refer to 5 related yet distinct aspects of a person—include the physical body (annamaya), the breath and energy body (pranamaya), the mind (manomaya) and even more subtle connections to intuition, wisdom, and discernment (vijnanamaya) and a person’s innate blissful nature and how to connect to it (anandamaya). Relatedly, yoga therapy upholds that there is an inextricable link between the body, mind, breath and spirit, and yoga therapists are therefore trained to not only investigate symptoms but consider root causes. For example, a client may seek help for lower back pain, and the yoga therapist in discussions with the client may determine that low mood is present and was present even before the back pain. This low mood likely influenced the posture and eventually presented as lower back pain. The change in posture that led to pain may have impacted breath patterns, which in turn provoked more anxiety and depressive experience leading to a cyclic spiral of dis-ease.
When the client and the yoga therapist meet for the first time, the yoga therapist will discuss the form, inquire with the client about their needs, feelings, concerns, and goals, and presumably update the kosha assessment they have done to look for root causes and best starting points for work. These will be based on client need and willingness to engage in certain practices or directly address certain problems. Although the therapeutic trajectory aims to address symptoms, improve function and prevent occurrence or re-occurrence of underlying causes of illness over time, the priority of any yoga therapy session is to meet the client where they are in the present moment; as such, yoga therapists must be sharp enough to adjust any prior plan in order to meet the ever-changing and shifting needs of the individual. Before offering a practice, a therapist will consider a host of variables. For example:
- Does the client need deep relaxation to allow the nervous system to recalibrate? In so doing it will be easier to draw on the client’s innate physiological, psychological, and energetic resources.
- Should I conduct a physical assessment of the person’s body to better understand areas of strength, weakness, mobility, pain, and stiffness?
- Should I engage in a breath assessment as I believe a breath practice will best support this person and I want more information about how they breathe?
- Do I need to create more safety and grounding as this person is nervous, has been traumatised, has a serious health condition?
- Do I need to provide lots of props?
- Should we work in a chair or on the floor?
From here the yoga therapist can go in a vast number of directions, offering any or all of the following: breath practices, postures, guided meditations, relaxation practices, further inquiry, mindfulness techniques, the sharing of yoga philosophy. Accordingly, the field of yoga therapy and a yoga therapy session is informed by intuition, science and client interest, and treatments are creative and highly person-centred. We could say that although relying on common principles, no two yoga therapy sessions look alike. At the end of a session, a yoga therapist will always offer clients a personal prescription of practices, designed specifically to empower them to continue the work beyond sessions. Through the diverse toolbox of yoga, the role of the yoga therapist is ultimately to empower the client to take a more active role in their self-care as a means of moving towards improved health and wellbeing overall.
In future sessions, a yoga therapist will inquire into the home practice, inquire into the client’s changing needs and development, and build on practices accordingly. In yoga therapy, the client is the expert, and the yoga therapist is a guide to help that client activate their own internal capacity for healing or management of an enduring condition. The dialogue and co-inquiry are vital aspects of the intervention, and even though yoga therapists are not talking therapists, they do explore people’s life history and reflect insights.
Although this highly individualised approach also means that yoga therapists generally work on a one-to-one basis, group sessions can be facilitated with a focus on a particular health condition or group of conditions. Since group sessions tend to be more economically viable for health and social care institutions, this is most commonly how yoga therapists begin to branch out from private practice. Yoga therapists now find work in an increasingly varied array of settings beyond healthcare, from care homes to prisons, with refugees, veterans and children with learning difficulties—to name but few. The scope for group yoga therapy really is boundless; essentially, in any community in which health and wellbeing are a concern, there is an opportunity for yoga therapists to create and offer bespoke programmes as a means of improving quality of life.
Scope of Practice
Within the context of yoga therapy emerging into such a broad range of settings, the IAYT have designed a Scope of Practice (SoP) for yoga therapists in order to bring clarity around the boundaries of their expertise, as defined by their education, experience and competency. Under the SoP, yoga therapists are not allowed to diagnose health conditions or advertise as licensed healthcare practitioners unless appropriately qualified through another profession. However, the SoP does delineate that yoga therapists may rely on the diagnoses of other qualified healthcare professionals to inform what they offer, in addition to receiving and providing referrals from and to other appropriate healthcare providers—a promising springboard from which yoga therapy and healthcare professionals are increasingly working together.
While some graduates choose to make yoga therapy their full focus, some opt to integrate yoga therapy tools with their existing profession. Some of the most popular examples we see year after year are psychology, psychiatry, medicine, nursing and care home assistants, and as the profession continues to gain traction in health and social care settings worldwide, innovative ways of integrating yoga therapy and existing health disciplines will no doubt continue to emerge. Perhaps the most prominent example of yoga therapy being fused with another profession is that of talking therapy, in which the amalgamation of mind and body interventions are becoming more commonplace. Reflecting this trend, increasing numbers of psychotherapists, counsellors and clinical psychologists are undertaking the necessary training to integrate yoga therapy into their work.
In recognition that the boundaries of the SoP prevent those without an existing psychotherapy training from weaving together the vast and well-aligned toolkits of talking therapy and yoga therapy, The Minded Institute is currently working alongside the National Council of Integrative Psychotherapists to add an additional year to the training, thereby offering the world’s first Integrative Yoga Psychotherapy Diploma. Building on the strong foundational knowledge base of our existing yoga therapy training, Minded’s Integrative Yoga Psychotherapy Diploma—which can only be undertaken after the Yoga Therapy course is complete—will incorporate psychotherapy skills from a diverse array of disciplines such as: transpersonal psychotherapy, acceptance and commitment therapy and cognitive behavioural therapy and beyond.
The Future of Yoga for Therapists: Where Is the Profession Headed?
The ability to work with all aspects of a person without medicine or surgery (despite these being important and often vital approaches to ill health) uniquely positions yoga therapists at the head of a profession which is both expanding and in-demand. This trend is clearly reflected by a growing global recognition of yoga therapy as a respected profession; in the UK, the national careers service now recognises ‘yoga therapist’ as a career path, whilst the work of the IAYT continues to establish yoga therapy as a distinguished profession worldwide.
Not only are we are seeing a big move towards fusing yoga therapy with pre-existing professions, but yoga therapists are also working to transform health and social care services, develop yoga therapy research, and even work on public health policy. As the profession continues to expand, the possible trajectories for those working in yoga therapy appear to be endless. That same transformation that yoga therapists are privileged to witness in their clients drives the revolution that yoga therapists are stirring in healthcare and beyond.
