Online CPD: Integrating Yoga Therapy Skills into CBT

Description

In this three-day CPD course (split into two parts), Veena Ugargol and Sam Bottrill will teach you how to integrate key yoga therapy skills in order to enhance your Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) interventions. Veena and Sam will be accompanied by guest lecturer Heather Mason, founder of The Minded Institute.

CBT is currently one of the best-recognised and well-evidenced treatment approaches in mental health care. There is growing recognition that a greater emphasis on body awareness and bottom-up regulation skills can enhance traditional CBT. Cognitive and behavioural change strategies are very well elaborated in traditional CBT; however there has historically been less emphasis on clinical techniques drawing on and utilising physical experience to promote change. Such bottom-up approaches can provide clients with a broader skill set for emotional regulation. Additionally, bottom-up approaches improve pre-frontal cortex functioning, thereby enhancing traditional cognitive-behavioural change strategies by supporting clients’ capacity to consider alternative ways of interpreting and responding to their experience.

In recent years, leaders in the field of traumatic stress are increasingly integrating mind-body approaches into their therapeutic work. Professor Bessel Van der Kolk (Boston University School of Medicine) proposes that, in body-based interventions such as yoga, physiological mechanisms influence neurological ones, thereby bolstering PFC functioning, enhancing psychological well-being and supporting a more effective therapeutic encounter. Additionally, Professors Patricia Gerbarg (New York Medical College) and Richard Brown (Columbia University) propose that, through controlled breathing and movement, various bottom-up pathways act in unison, promoting neuroplasticity and improved executive functioning and, consequently, more effective therapy.

“When one feels safe, one has relaxed attention, can explore and play……… This also provides the basis for integrative thinking and learning. Clearly, this is a state you want to create in therapy.”
Paul Gilbert 

During the training, you will learn:

• The common neural correlates that span most mental health conditions
• Research that expresses yoga’s potential role in mental health and the neurological mechanisms that underline its curative effects
• How to integrate basic yoga-based practices into CBT protocols to promote greater emotion regulation and improved client self-efficacy
• Yogic and mindfulness-based techniques to help you maintain or restore your own wellbeing

The course is split into two sections. This is to give the opportunity to familiarise yourself with the techniques covered in the first two days and also practice some key skills with either friends or clients. The second part (one day) then offers a rich opportunity for group supervision and a deeper exploration into how to integrate yoga therapy into CBT protocols. There are four required assignments for this course (3 practice ‘client sessions’ and a very short written reflection of 300-400 words) that must be completed prior to the second section of the course in order to gain certification.

Read more on Yoga for Anxiety and Yoga for Depression.