What is Yoga Therapy?

With its popularity, yoga may at times appear like just another fitness fad, with a little spiritual flavoring thrown in. No doubt, as a fitness approach, yoga offers tremendous benefits, which are valuable in their own right. However, it’s important to not lose sight of the deeper therapeutic benefits of yoga. Yoga as therapy offers a tremendous potential for healing and transformation.

Yoga is so popular, not just because it’s a great way to get fit, but because it has a profound impact on one’s health and well-being. Any long-term yoga practitioner will note that their health and overall well-being improves in significant and unexpected ways: more energy, more zest for life, even better relationships.

However, when it comes to addressing specific, long-standing or deeper health concerns, a more targeted, therapeutic approach to yoga can help many people progress faster and achieve greater improvement. Going to a yoga class and following the class through a random collection of yoga postures, while helpful, won’t be as effective as a practice specifically targeted to address specific health concerns.

In many cases, people with health problems won’t be able to do certain yoga poses and need a more modified, gentle yoga routine. In addition, different types of yoga asanas and yoga techniques have different effects.

Yoga therapy is the therapeutic use of yoga to help alleviate or manage health concerns or disease conditions. A skilled yoga therapist can help create a yoga therapy routine targeted to your specific needs. Whether you’re suffering from depression, high blood pressure, asthma, stress, or want to find a way to heal after cancer treatments, a health professional trained in yoga therapy can offer options beyond what a typical yoga teacher is able to offer.

A yoga therapist will select postures with a specific therapeutic focus in mind and will help you make the fastest possible progress. In addition, these postures meet you where you are; they are designed to offer a progression, which will help you start wherever you are and progress from there.

Yoga therapy has been used with great success to help manage or treat many disease conditions. You will find yoga for depression,  yoga for back pain, diabetes, MS, high blood pressure, heart disease, and so on. For more information about yoga therapy and its many uses, and for specific tips on how to deal with any condition you may be struggling with, look through the many resources we have collected on this website.