What Is Yoga Therapy

Many people wonder what the difference is between yoga and yoga therapy, and which one is right for them. Here are the highlights of what yoga therapy is, what its benefits are, and how yoga therapy differs from traditional yoga asana classes.

Basically, yoga therapy uses the ancient science of yoga to enhance health and wellness at all levels of the person: physical, emotional, and spiritual. Yoga therapy focuses on the path of yoga as a healing journey that brings balance to all aspects of life through an experiential awakening of our essential nature. Yoga therapy is useful both for people who seek relief for specific health challenges, as well as for people who want to enjoy good health, prevent disease, and slow the progression of aging.

Yoga therapy is based on a view of the individual as a wholeness. For true health to occur, all aspects of a person must be addressed as a whole. Many forms of yoga therapy, such as Integrative Yoga Therapy, use the ancient Vedic model of the Five Koshas as a framework for creating holistic healing and transformation.

In yoga therapy, the tools and techniques of yoga serve to reconnect each client to him or herself at all levels—from the physical body to the breath, the energetic body, mind and emotions, the higher wisdom faculty, and to the spirit. Some of the main ways in which yoga therapy differs from yoga are:

• Yoga therapy works with your goals. Each session is tailored to your needs, whether you want to gain relief from chronic pain, facilitate injury recovery, improve flexibility, reduce stress, improve well-being, get help with depression, or simply retain your youthful appearance and energy.

• Yoga therapy targets the practice to specific disease condition. Most disease conditions benefit from some yoga asanas or yoga breathing techniques and not others. A yoga therapy program for back pain, for example, would be very different from a yoga therapy practice targeting depression. Some yoga therapists specialize mainly in one disease condition, while others have a more broad focus.

• Yoga therapy adjusts the poses to your body's needs. A yoga therapist shows you how to modify and adjust poses to your body’s specific needs, using props, modifications, and alignment assists.  This ensures that you get the full benefits from each pose.

• Yoga therapy uses adjunct techniques to speed your progress. When called for, some yoga therapists may use deep tissue massage and fascia release work while you are in the pose to release tight muscle groups and facilitate a deeper core awakening.

• Yoga therapy deepens body awareness. Yoga therapy is offered in individual sessions or small classes, enabling the therapist to guide you in the fine subtleties of muscle relaxation, stretching, and strengthening. This increases body awareness and helps you make more rapid progress in reshaping your body.

As the government starts deliberations on how to transform the nation’s health care system, the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City and the Urban Zen Foundation have taken concrete steps to put “health” back into health care. For these two institutions, health care is not limited to the usually invasive procedures of Western medicine; it also involves the more holistic interventions of Eastern healing practices such as yoga therapy and aromatherapy.

As an offshoot of its long-standing commitment to combine integrative medicine therapies with conventional treatment of non-terminal cancer patients, Beth Israel has launched a pilot program to study the effectiveness of using yoga as therapy, along with the breathing control and relaxation techniques associated with yoga for stress management, to help cancer patients deal with the stresses of conventional chemotherapy and radiation treatments. These two invasive treatments often bring such side effects as lingering pain, nausea, constipation, anxiety, sleeplessness and fatigue.

The yoga therapy program at Beth Israel receives financial support from the Urban Zen Foundation, a non-profit organization that promotes the use of yoga, aromatherapy and other Eastern healing practices in combination with Western medicine. The husband of Urban Zen’s founder was a cancer patient, and he used yoga as therapy along with other Eastern techniques to cope with treatment symptoms and acquire inner peace.

Urban Zen believes integrative medicine, incorporating such yoga therapy techniques as yoga breathing exercises, will be able to set the patient’s internal environment so that a healing process more optimal than conventional medicine alone can be attained. The pilot program seeks to demonstrate that integrative therapies can help patients obtain inner peace and relief from the side effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

The program initially trained 15 teachers to provide yoga therapy to cancer patients. Nurses and hospital staff will also receive training in relaxation techniques such as yoga breathing exercises, visualization and imagery, and aromatherapy. Aside from yoga breathing exercises to attain better breath control, yoga therapy involves meditation and gentle restorative postures that help patients anchor themselves to a deeper sense of self and connectedness with a universal life force.

There is a research component in the pilot program. Its objectives are to track the progress of the non-terminal cancer patients and measure the effectiveness of the combination of Eastern healing traditions and Western medicine. The head of Beth Israel’s Continuum Center for Health and Healing, which is implementing the pilot program, believes yoga therapy and integrative medicine can help develop a more relationship-centered care program that should be part of any effort to reform the healthcare system.

The 15 yoga therapy instructors participating in the program have taught yoga for stress management techniques to about 500 patients already. The patients are taught to execute basic yoga postures, simple movements, and yoga breathing exercises. The patients have learned that yoga as therapy develops their inner strength and helps them become calmer and more relaxed. As a result, they sleep better and experience less anxiety, nausea and other symptoms.

The program also teaches yoga for stress management to the hospital staff. Nurses and other healthcare providers can become physically and emotionally depleted as they go about performing their demanding tasks. Unless they are able to rejuvenate themselves, they will not be able to provide quality care to their patients. Yoga as therapy helps them eliminate their stress and regain their energy.

Just as a plant recovers more quickly with the aid of healthy soil and frequent watering, so too, the human body often responds better to medical treatments when they are combined with alternative modalities, including yoga therapy.

There is increasing evidence that yoga therapy may enhance the results and alleviate the side effects of modern medical treatments. In yoga therapy, the body attains a relaxed state that allows it to gain the full benefit of prescription drugs or cope more effectively with treatments like chemotherapy or radiation for cancer.

Several studies indicate that the practice of yoga therapy may help reduce unwanted side-effects of conventional health treatments and improve overall well-being. In the case of prescription drugs, yoga therapy can actually make it possible to reduce dosage levels while maintaining effectiveness.

Yoga therapy can also aid in the healing of psychological disorders and trauma, when combined with traditional approaches such as counseling or psychotherapy. Yoga and other forms of therapy can work hand in hand to help a patient attain peace of mind. For example both yoga and meditation, an integral part of yoga, provide a way to center the mind and keep the awareness grounded in the body.

Due to its holistic nature, yoga therapy supports conventional treatments by providing the whole physiology with much needed rest and rejuvenation. By simultaneously strengthening and relaxing both the mind and body, yoga therapy can help patients cope with health concerns more effectively and return more quickly to thriving good health.

For more information on the healing benefits of yoga therapy, also see Yoga Therapy and Mind-Body healing.

Yoga therapy can help target a yoga practice to specific health concerns or health limitations. When yoga is used as therapy, it has the potential to heal or alleviate a surprising range of conditions. You will find yoga therapy practices targeting diabetes, yoga for depression, yoga for back pain, yoga for heart disease, and so on.

Even a regular yoga practice in itself offers numerous health benefits. Many yoga teachers have experienced that people attending their yoga classes often spontaneously report several health benefits from their yoga practice.

How does yoga and yoga therapy create such a wide range of effects? It comes about in many ways. When practiced in the right way-with attentiveness, awareness and without strain, pushing, or forcing, yoga creates extraordinary effects on many levels. Firstly, the long, slow stretches of yoga induce a sense of relaxation and well-being, which remains even after the practice. Often, what keeps people coming back to yoga classes again and again is the peace they experience at the end of the practice and the enhanced well-being they enjoy in the days that follow.

Beyond that, however, yoga therapy often works magic, because it doesn't just enhance the health of the body, it offers a complete system of mind-body healing. In fact, yoga therapy doesn't just affect mind and body; it works on all levels of our being, mental, emotional, and spiritual.

According to yoga traditions, we are not just a bodies made up of individual parts. We are holistic, multi-dimensional beings made up not just by our physical form, but by many different, interactive levels. These include our body, our vital energy, our mind and emotions, our higher wisdom self, and our deepest essence of Self. Yoga therapy has such wide-reaching effects, because yoga asanas work multi-dimensionally, on all levels of our being.

According to yoga philosophy, the different dimensions of our being are referred to as the Five Koshas, or five sheaths. The Five Koshas include the physical body, the energy body, the mental-emotional body, the wisdom body, and the Bliss body. The Five Koshas, or sheaths, are not part of our body in the usual anatomical sense; rather they are different expressions of our deepest, underlying nature. True, lasting healing comes about by creating deeper integration and balance in all these fundamental dimensions of our being.

Yoga therapy offers multi-dimensional healing, because it brings greater harmony and balance to all the dimensions of our being. According to yoga philosophy, each of the Five Koshas is mutually dependent on each other and influence one another. Imbalance or malfunction in the body is not necessarily caused on the level of the body, but may arise from a problem in another Kosha, another part of our being. This is why true healing can never take place by focusing on just one level, i.e. the physical body.

For healing to be complete and lasting, according to the yoga therapy tradition, it must affect change multi-dimensionally, involving all levels of our being. This is exactly what yoga therapy does and why yoga therapy can create positive changes for such a broad range of disease conditions.

Yoga has come a long, long way, literally speaking. Yoga was first introduced to the US more than a century ago, when Swami Vivekananda made the then month-long trip from India to the US to speak at the Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893.

The Parliament aimed to lay the foundation for a synthesis of East and West, religion and science. Little did participants realize just what that vision would grow into just 100 years later!

In the late 1980s, a few years before the hundredth anniversary of Vivekananda's first visit, yoga therapy burst into national awareness with the publication of Dr. Dean Ornish's first study on the effects of lifestyle intervention on heart disease. Dr. Ornish's study was the first to demonstrate that heart disease could be reversed through a healthy lifestyle program, which included therapeutic yoga, meditation, and dietary changes.

Dean Ornish's "Program for Reversing Heart Disease" got approved for health insurance coverage in 1990 and it opened the door for yoga therapy to gradually make its way into mainstream medicine.

Following Ornish's study, research has been done on yoga for depression, yoga for insomnia, yoga for respiratory conditions, yoga for carpal tunnel syndrome, and much more.  Today there are volumes of research showing that yoga asanas and yoga breathing exercises (pranayama), when used appropriately in a therapeutic context, can help manage symptoms of disease and in some cases even make sick or injured people better.

The effort to integrate yoga therapy into mainstream medicine in the U.S. today is spearheaded by the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT). The association attempts to bridge the gap between mainstream medicine and the millennia old system of yoga.

Where allopathic medicine treats mainly the body, yoga therapy approaches healing and wellness by focusing not just on the body, but on all levels of the person: physical, mental-emotional, and spiritual.

The the effort to make yoga therapy available as an alternative healing modality is in its early stages and will continue for some time to come. Yet, at the current rate of research on the benefits of yoga as therapy, one might surmise that we won't have to wait another 100 years before yoga therapy becomes an integral part of healing and wellness.