By Stacey Loop

Over more than 20 years as a yoga therapist, I have deepened my understanding of what this profession entails in co-creating healing spaces and practices with clients. In this embodied work, science and art intersect. And yoga therapists’ own personal practices are essential. As my teacher Gary Kraftsow (American Viniyoga Institute) says, “You can’t give away what you don’t have.”

This teaching informs my work as a yoga therapist and helps motivate the consistency of my personal practice—I need to understand my own healing process and learn the subtleties of inner awareness and adapting to meet each moment. When we learn how to connect to ourselves, we learn how to connect to others.

Unique above all

Every yoga therapy client is unique, so we take an individualized approach to finding the doorway to making yoga accessible. This fundamental principle keeps our work intuitive and authentic when we use the tools of yoga in a clinical setting.

A yoga therapist seeks to embody a compassionate presence that helps clients feel seen and valued without judgment. We learn to listen deeply and ask impactful questions to understand the client’s priorities. Effective yoga therapists don’t assume they know what’s best for someone else. Instead, they support people to find the answers within themselves over time.

Meeting the moments creatively

Image by Purspective on Pixabay

Meeting the moment often requires creativity and out-of-the-box thinking when traditional approaches aren’t accessible.

For instance, I recently worked with a client who had a diagnosis of early-stage dementia. During our session, she became so anxious that we couldn’t even discuss breathwork, much less integrate it into our practice. I have worked with this client for years, multiple times a week, but a change in her health, which her doctor confirmed, had heightened dysregulation in her nervous system. Our work together had to shift to meet her needs.

An understanding of both current research on early-stage dementia and what sparked joy for this client helped me shift gears gently. Singing to her favorite songs while we did calming, stabilizing movements helped her to regulate her breathing. She was able to gradually relax and find happiness and ease in the present moment.

Shifting consciousness

Another quality yoga therapists help clients cultivate: perspective shifting. Can we look at our health from the angle of what’s going right versus what’s wrong? Calling in gratitude consistently trains the mind to move toward useful positive thinking.

A yoga therapist supports clients to build consciousness around not only dysfunctional movement patterns that may be creating harm, but also around imbalanced mental and emotional patterns such as fearful thinking in decision-making.

Learning to operate from authenticity rather than unconscious patterning, which we call samskara, is the deeper work of yoga. This is the gift a yoga therapist can help awaken in others.

As a yoga therapist and holistic health coach, Stacey Loop, C-IAYT, specializes in adapting therapeutic breath, movement, sound, and meditation to an individual’s condition. She has offered more than 3,500 classes in yoga teacher trainings, special education courses, private sessions, and public classes.