What is Yoga therapy?
Yoga therapy is a holistic practice that uses the teachings of yoga such as breath work, yoga postures, meditation, and mindful movement to improve your health, overcome challenges and bring about a sense of balance.
For many years yoga was practiced to bring a calmness to the mind, manage fluctuations in chaotic thinking and find a state of peaceful calm, the second of Patanjali’’s yoga sutras ( Yogic wisdom texts ) is;
“Yogas Chitta Vritti Nirodha”
We can understand a translation of this to mean that practicing yoga can help to calm the whirlpools of the constantly thinking mind.
Yoga connects your mind and your body which means that yoga therapy works on every level, your physical health, strength and mobility can improve as well as your mental health and your emotional wellbeing, this form of therapy can complement other treatments you may be having. I am trained in nutrition and the psychological benefits of yoga and meditation which means that working with me is a whole body, mind, brain, heart and gut connecting process.
Yoga therapy can help with all sorts of things like;
Anxiety & Depression
Addiction
Trauma, PTSD
Eating Disorders
Long Covid
Mobility & Confidence
Hormonal changes like Menopause
High Blood pressure
Heart Conditions
COPD
Chronic Pain
Diabetes
Cancer and Cancer Treatment
Dementia
CFS & ME
I have experience working with clients with all of the above conditions and continue my professional development with CPDs and training every year.
You don’t need any yoga experience to benefit from Yoga Therapy and it doesn’t matter if you’re not very fit or flexible. I work with many practices like breathing exercises, movement, mindfulness and meditation, you’ll receive a practice that works just for you, a bit like a prescription. Depending on each client’s needs I will design suitable home practices to develop and continue the work we do together.
Training
With over 10,000 hours & 12 years of full-time teaching yoga, I trained with The Minded Institute in 2015, a two-year yoga therapy training including 550 hours of in-person training and over 100 hours of case studies and client work.
At Minded we studied many different conditions and diseases, we learnt the history and the symptoms, the incidence and prevalence as well as the current diagnosis and treatment guidelines, we then learned how the many and varied practices in yoga can benefit those living with and suffering from these illnesses.
My training was very in-depth with excellent tutors who all work as yoga therapists in specialist fields both privately and within the NHS. Heather Mason who founded the institute and was my lead tutor has been instrumental in getting yoga into the NHS with the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance.
While training with Heather I had the opportunity to work in a number of clinical settings offering therapeutic yoga to healthcare staff.
I am fully insured and a qualified first aider.
Experience
I have years of experience working one to one both in-person and online with many clients living with different challenges including anxiety and depression as well as burnout and PTSD.
My approach is individual and holistic, sessions are co-created and guided by the application process, my intention is to give you the tools and techniques to overcome trauma, and the skills I have in body-mind connection can teach you how to live with mental health challenges in a more positive way, to get back to feeling well after stressful times and live a healthy and fulfilling life with more peace and more joy.
How to Book yoga therapy
First, we decide together over the phone why you want to try yoga therapy and if I’m the right therapist for you.
You can book an initial phone call of around 5-10 minutes then from there, we can arrange a date and time for our first session, before the session I will send you an application form to complete before the session which helps me to plan our time together.
I prefer to work with 75 or 90-minute sessions in a course of 4 to 6 weeks but I am flexible and guided by your wishes, each session is different, for some clients, one session is enough and for others, a weekly session over a couple of months works best.
Each session includes a custom-designed home practice created by me informed by the session and for you to keep, either a hard copy printed and posted or a PDF emailed to you after the session.
Prices
£90 for a 75-minute session.
£120 for 90 minutes session.
£255 for 4 weekly 60 minute sessions.
£325 for 5 weekly sessions of 75 minutes.
£450 for 5 weekly sessions of 90 minutes.
I offer a 10% discount for full-time NHS workers, students and state school teachers.
