So You Want to Try Yoga Therapy? Here’s What You Need to Know.

You love yoga. You take class a few times a week and regularly rely on your restorative practice to decompress at home. But now you’re wondering how else yoga might help improve your mental and physical health. Maybe you’re coping with prolonged anxiety or recovering from knee surgery and seeking complementary treatments. Enter yoga therapy.

What Is Yoga Therapy?

Yoga therapy is an approach to health care that relies on elements of yoga—physical practice (asana), breathwork (pranayama), and meditation—to treat various health conditions. Research suggests that yoga therapy triggers the body’s relaxation response and may improve symptoms of many mental and physical health issues.

Yoga therapy doesn’t cure underlying health conditions, but it may be used as a complementary treatment to help alleviate symptoms associated with the following conditions:

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Physical pain
• Headaches
• Menopause
• Trauma
• Neurological conditions such as stroke, epilepsy, fibromyalgia, and multiple sclerosis (MS)

Is Yoga Therapy for You?

Before you start this treatment approach, you’ll want to consider what your personal values are and whether they align with the following principles of yoga therapy.

Collaborative and Personalized Health Care

Typically, a yoga therapist develops a customized practice to help alleviate a patient’s symptoms, explains Ingrid Yang, a practicing physician, certified yoga therapist, and 500-hour trained yoga teacher based in San Diego. Yang has used yoga therapy to help patients with lingering pulmonary, cardiac, and neurological symptoms of COVID-19. She also works with those recovering from cancer and people with disabilities.

Yang advises people to seek a yoga therapist when they want to be more active in their own health care. “Yoga therapy is patient-centered care,” Yang says. “Yoga therapy interventions are a co-creation between the therapist and the patient, so the patient has ownership of the plan, instead of just being told to take this pill, or do that pose.”

Evan Soroka, a certified yoga therapist, 500-hour trained yoga teacher, and the creator of Soroka Yoga Therapy, based in Aspen, Colorado, agrees. “The difference between yoga and yoga therapy is the element of autonomy, or self-empowerment,” she says.

“Yoga therapy is about understanding yourself, understanding your needs, and understanding what’s out of balance and how to bring it back into balance,” explains Soroka, also the author of Yoga Therapy for Diabetes. As a yoga therapist, Soroka helps people manage physical pain from injury or disease, develop customized practices for healthy aging, and address neurological issues. She also helps clients experiencing diabetes manage blood sugar levels so they can feel more in control of their health. She connects the biology, physiology, and psychology of diabetes to yoga, using spinal movement, breathing techniques, and meditations to help clients feel empowered to take charge of their own self-care.

“Yoga therapy is turning into a niche approach to healthcare,” says Soroka.

Whole-Person Approach to Health

Yoga therapy may be for you if you’re interested in addressing your physical, emotional, and spiritual health. “The people I work with are drawn to the whole-person perspective,” says Marsha Banks-Harold, a certified yoga therapist and 500-hour trained yoga teacher, plus a trauma sensitive yoga facilitator.

Banks-Harold, also the owner of PIES Fitness Yoga Studio and Holistic Yoga Therapy School in Alexandria, Virginia, practices and teaches yoga therapy using a kosha-based model. The koshas are the energetic layers, or sheaths, that make up a whole person, including the physical, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and pranic elements of existence.

For example, Banks-Harold works with cancer survivors at a local hospital. Some have a stage 4 diagnosis and are recovering from surgery or chemotherapy. They are preparing for transition and don’t always know how to communicate how they feel to loved ones. Their yoga therapy plan may include relief from physical symptoms of pain and exhaustion as well as the psychological work of dealing with grief and loss.

Or maybe you deal with regular migraines and want to understand your triggers. A yoga therapist may help you focus on self-awareness and identify what exacerbates your symptoms, Yang explains. “For example, is your stress the result of receiving constant criticism?” she says.

Alleviating symptoms in the physical body used to be the focus of yoga therapy, says Banks-Harold, but she is seeing a shift toward understanding trauma, social justice, and overall well-being.

Banks-Harold has clients who are dealing with race- and gender-based trauma, particularly in the workplace. “I hold space for clients as they share details and unpack stress,” she says. “Self-esteem is often an underlying issue when you are constantly impacted by microaggressions. If you’re consistently not accepted, valued, or seen, you lose agency and the confidence to speak or even be heard.” Banks-Harold then customizes practices and readings to help clients with the challenges they face.

Other Considerations

Yang cautions that yoga doesn’t cure physical and mental health issues, but it can effectively treat symptoms. The proof is in the way you feel after yoga therapy, she adds. “If you have less arthritis pain despite X-rays that show nothing has changed physically, it’s working.”

Although yoga therapy is not yet an insurance provider-approved treatment, it is moving in that direction, says Yang. At the hospital where she works, patient treatment plans often include add-ons for integrative therapies, including music therapy, aromatherapy, reiki, and now yoga therapy.

“It’s becoming more viable, thanks to the growing volume of modern science that now backs its benefits,” she says.”In our lifetimes, I think we’ll see yoga therapy integrated into medicine in a much more foundational way, in hospitals and elsewhere.”

How to Find a Yoga Therapist

To find a yoga therapist, go to the IAYT member directory and search for therapists in your location, or ask your local yoga teachers or peer support groups for recommendations for teachers who work either in-person or online.

This article has been updated. Originally published May 12, 2021.