The Most Important Aspect of Therapeutic Yoga

I am looking forward to an upcoming event in the Philadelphia area – a return visit with our friends at The Yoga Garden in Narberth on the weekend of November 4 & 5.

The topic for the weekend is one my favorites – “The Yoga of Therapeutic Breath, Movement and Alignment.” While prepping the workshop I came across some relevant writing I did, a chapter proposal for a handbook aimed at medical professionals. I hope it sparks your interest in continuing the discussion and, if you’re anywhere near Philadelphia, please come join us…there’s still some room in the workshop.

From “Yoga Therapy — The Art of the Individual”

When applying yoga in a therapeutic context, it is vitally important to remember that we do not treat conditions – we educate people.

Our students are likely to have already seen several professionals whose job it is to focus on their problems. By contrast, the yoga educator’s focus should be on what’s still going right with a person, not on what has gone wrong — and there are always far more things still working in a person’s body than have stopped working. Even on the sickest, most pain-filled day of a person’s life, there are untold billions of unimpeded, cellular life processes happening within them. This is the biological basis of the concept of prana. As long as there’s prana, there can be improvement — not necessarily curing or fixing — but healing — what my teacher Desikachar referred to as “the relationship to their illness.”

In any discussion about the place of therapeutic yoga in health care delivery, I assert that the principle expressed above is the most important to remember.  As long as we stay grounded in the perspective of what’s still going right, our scope of practice is profound and simple: if the person in front of us can breathe, move, and focus, even minimally, they can bring their breath, body and mind into a more integrated state and they can do yoga.