For the thousands of years that yoga has been around, practitioners and teachers have noted its therapeutic qualities. Baked within yoga’s “eight limbs” and referenced in its ancient texts are references to its benefits and its help in the relief from suffering.

Far more recently, and especially here in the United States, yoga therapy has crystallized as a professional field. It is now established as a type of therapeutic care overseen by a governing body called the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT). There are professional designations for its members, related to given levels of training, experience and expertise, the most advanced of which is C-IAYT, denoting full certification through one of a number of rigorous processes and/or education pathways. There is also a searchable database of registered certified yoga therapists for prospective clients and a verified list of registered yoga therapy schools where prospective yoga therapy students can find pathways for their education.

For this three-part special section on yoga therapy, Natural Awakenings spoke with several of Atlanta’s certified yoga therapists and mental health professionals, as well as professionals in related modalities such as sound and energy medicine and traditional Chinese medicine practices such as tai chi.

---

So, What Is Yoga Therapy?

The IAYT defines yoga therapy as “the process of empowering individuals to progress toward improved health and well-being through the application of the teachings and practices of yoga.”

Although not the only governing body for yoga therapists—there are local organizations, such as the British Council for Yoga Therapy, for example—IAYT has emerged as the dominant professional collective. It hosts annual research and professional conferences, publishes written policy papers and research journals and maintains an accreditation process for individuals, training schools and continuing education providers. Its efforts toward creating a working definition of the field and delineation of its scope of practice and ethics have been notable in the last 15 years, and they have made significant headway in the crystallization of the field.

Despite these efforts, IAYT acknowledges the challenges of defining yoga therapy as a care modality and professional practice as well as the complexity of its creation as a “field.” One challenge it confronts is that yoga is a living practice and exists with great diversity all over the world.

Yoga is constantly changing because it is in conversation with cultures and people who are also constantly changing. At the same time, yoga is an ancient path with longstanding traditions and practices, many of which are indigenous, local and ingrained. Together, its changing nature and its “established-ness,” require a flexibility of definition that challenges any fixity an organization might want to impose or welcome.

Tra Kirkpatrick, an established C-IAYT who works both in private practice and in Western medical environments, explains that yoga therapy, on the other hand, is not necessarily a newly crystalized field. Rather, she explains, “what’s new is that the Western world more deeply understands that there is a therapeutic benefit to yoga. It’s being shown more now through scientific research, and that research is becoming more prevalent and widespread. Knowledge about the modality is what’s crystallized—and not necessarily the modality itself.”

Three Aspects Set It Apart

Three aspects of yoga therapy help to define the field by what is practiced. First, yoga therapy embraces an individualized approach to yoga. Usually working with a yoga therapist, the student crafts an approach to their health and well-being that is directly tailored to them. Ideally, this approach will also be regularly re-evaluated for its efficacy and continued relevance.

The founder of Southern Yoga Therapy Association, Tzipporah Gerson-Miller, LCSW, C-IAYT, notes: “My teachers always said, ‘You’re teaching to the person who’s in front of you.’ A part of entering into a therapeutic relationship is going to involve assessment, diagnostics, treatment planning and identifying some potential outcome there—and then noting progress along the way.” She adds, “As a yoga therapist, I am working with the individual or the therapeutic group to assess, to guide, to re-assess, to offer—always accounting for the person in front of us.”

Second, the underpinnings of yoga therapy should be the yoga philosophy. This is the yoga part of yoga therapy, a distinction that can sometimes get lost. Yoga therapists believe that there are two things that need to provide the foundation of their therapeutic work. The first is an adherence to yogic principles—the yamas and niyamas, for example, the guidelines for living an ethical and moral life. The second are the principles laid out in yoga’s foundational texts, such as the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita. Of those, the yoga therapists with whom Natural Awakenings spoke agree that a vibrant personal practice and an in-depth education in yogic texts and principles is paramount to being a good yoga therapist. They help yoga therapists stay within their scope of practice and not veer into other fields, such as mental health therapy.

The third aspect of yoga therapy that helps define it is that yoga therapists are committed to their duty of care and emphasize their high levels of professionalism and training. In practice, yoga therapy serves those who are seeking relief from suffering and an improvement in their daily condition, which often includes significant health challenges. Thus, C-IAYT yoga therapists are required to have over 1,000 hours of professional training with additional teaching and internship hours on top of that. They are also asked to continually update their education. They are typically highly trained across a range of subjects, including anatomy and physiology, and spend long periods apprenticing more experienced colleagues before practicing on their own.

Kirkpatrick recounts her feelings of inexperience and a lack of training as a newly qualified yoga teacher and personal trainer, feelings that led her to more in-depth yoga therapy training. “That’s how I came into yoga therapy,” she says. “Because I knew what I didn’t know—which was a lot.” She continues: “My job as a yoga therapist is to be discerning and always seeking knowledge.”

What Yoga Therapy Isn’t

We can also get more insight about what yoga therapy is by clarifying what it isn’t. It is not generalized postural instruction delivered in a group setting. It’s not repeated sun salutations, some backbends or an option to stand on your hands or even to lie down in corpse pose for 10 minutes. While there are often therapeutic benefits to standard yoga classes, any of these might not be appropriate for a given student at a particular time.

Still, the prescriptive nature of standard yoga classes precludes it from being yoga therapy. They might be taught by teachers who’ve had less training or are less experienced. Indeed, some Western yoga studios see standardization as a part of their brand identity and quality control measures and use scripts to help teachers with their cueing and choreographed class sequences.

“At the yoga therapy level,” says Kirkpatrick, “you are teaching yoga techniques, tools and practices that are integrated within the bio-medical model as a way to create a path that alleviates physical, mental, psychological and energetic suffering. That, to me, is the delineation.” ❧

---

Patricia Schmidt, C-IAYT, E-RYT 500, YACEP, is a certified yoga therapist specializing in pelvic health, accessible yoga and yoga for cancer support. She is a Franklin Method trainer, Roll Model method teacher and somatic movement specialist. To learn more, visit PLSYoga.com.

---

More Articles on Yoga Therapy

This article is one of three in a special section on The New Frontiers of Yoga Therapy. Here are the other two stories.