By Rebecca Quigley

During my last term of graduate school, I started working at a large private psychiatric hospital as a yoga instructor, transitioning to yoga therapist after earning my certification. I am currently still employed full-time at the same hospital as part of the rehabilitation therapy services department, working alongside occupational, art, and music therapists. Although the hospital uses a group therapy model, I also see people individually based on requests from another clinician or the patient themselves.

Beneficial additions

Outside the hospital, I maintain a small private practice where I see clients online over Zoom. I started this practice with several clients referred by a mental health therapist who had initially sought me out to help her find general physical practices to use with clients in her practice. Soon, she was referring them to me instead, and we have had a lot of success working together to move previously “stuck” clients forward.

The improvement in client outcomes from adding yoga therapy resulted in interest from the facility’s other clinicians, and I recently had the opportunity to present yoga therapy to them as an adjunct discipline for mental health treatment.

Transparent, honest practices

When working with clients and patients, appropriate transparency and honesty have been my greatest strategies for creating an environment where people can relate to yoga concepts and we can nurture a therapeutic rapport. If I’m not familiar with something, I’m honest about it. When starting at the hospital, I worked with a lot of people who had dissociative identity disorder. At first I had no frame of reference for these patients, but we worked together on what they needed me to understand and what practices they felt comfortable moving forward with. This humanistic strategy helps me foster genuine rapport, trust, and feelings of agency and equality—all of which are paramount to mental health treatment.

Rebecca Quigley, MS, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT, works as a clinical yoga therapist at an inpatient psychiatric hospital. She also maintains a private practice.

Read more of Rebecca’s story in the Summer 2024 Yoga Therapy Today, available to IAYT members in mid-August!