By Anneke Sips
When I entered nursing school in 1998, I also stepped into psychiatry—and, almost simultaneously, into yoga. Those early years were a strange kind of initiation: learning how to steady myself amid human crisis while finding ways to quiet my inner world, sense my body, and get a gentle grip on my breath. I had to learn to be present with myself before I could truly be present with others.
As a psychiatric nurse, I spent years working in acute wards and crisis intervention, mostly with people experiencing psychosis. Back then, yoga was something I practiced privately before or after long shifts. It helped me stay human in a system that often forgot what care really meant.
Simple integrative beginnings
In 2006, I completed my first yoga teacher training and began gently weaving simple practices into my nursing work—a few moments of breathing before medication rounds, grounding before therapy sessions. In the beginning, the psychiatrists kept their distance. But gradually, as the results of incorporating yoga became obvious, I was given more space to practice with inpatients, who clearly benefited. My curiosity and eagerness to learn kept me going, study after study, breath after breath. Slowly, yoga began to move from the margins of my work to its heart.
I found myself being asked to design and offer yoga programs in psychiatric hospitals, including pilot studies exploring trauma-informed approaches. I developed programming for young people who were experiencing psychosis for the first time and offered trauma-sensitive sessions in outpatient clinics.
Eventually, this path led me to the Dutch Ministry of Defence, where I created trauma-informed yoga programs for soldiers and veterans and trained healthcare professionals in academic hospitals to become trauma-informed and psychosis-aware. It was moving to witness the shift from skepticism to integration and to experience what becomes possible when openness replaces fear.
Ongoing study
Self-study, or svadhyaya, is an important part of the full practice of yoga therapy, and I continued studying with my teachers A. G. and Indra Mohan. Their lineage emphasizes yoga as a living relationship with the Divine, not a physical exercise or acrobatic display. This understanding deepened gradually, transforming how I saw both yoga and healing itself.
In 2010, I founded Network Yoga Therapy and began organizing The Yoga Therapy Conference in Amsterdam to connect professionals from yoga, psychiatry, and science. What began as a small gathering grew into a movement that bridged languages, fields, and hearts.
Two decades later, all those experiences have converged in a book that invites a radical reimagining of mental health and human consciousness. I see psychosis as a normal human experience that exists on a spectrum alongside other altered states of consciousness. These experiences are not signs of brokenness, but rather expressions of life asking to be integrated.
Along the way, I’ve learned a simple yet profound truth: Healing begins when we bring humanity, consent, consciousness, and love back into care. Whether in a hospital, a yoga room, or the quiet space between two breaths, presence itself can be medicine.
Anneke Sips, RN, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT, is a psychiatric nurse and yoga therapist based in The Netherlands. She is the founder of Network Yoga Therapy and The Yoga Therapy Conference in Amsterdam and author of the forthcoming book Wisdom of Psychosis: Healing Beyond Labels.Connect with her on Instagram.
