How can I help?
What can I do for YOU/Therapist/Mental Health Professional?
In the simplest terms, yoga complements more cognitive and pharmaceutical therapies by helping the client feel and connect body, breath, and mind. Ultimately, through consistent practice, they are able to balance their autonomic nervous system and thus better respond to other therapies and manage and live life more joyfully. These powerful techniques are ancient yet proven again and again by modern medical and scientific data to be a valuable part of an integrated mental health treatment plan. All yoga sessions can be done on-line and from a mat on the floor or in a chair.
This is not physical exercise or fitness yoga. You can call it innercise or resilience yoga and all that is required to practice is a willingness, a body, breath, mind, and heart. The goal is nervous system resilience, and the process is evidence based.
- Yoga for Anxiety and Depression (Harvard Health Publishing)
- 5 Ways Yoga Can Benefit Your Mental Health (Psychology Today)
- A systematic review of randomised control trials on the effects of yoga on stress measures and mood
- Yoga Therapy and Polyvagal Theory: The Convergence of Traditional Wisdom and Contemporary Neuroscience for Self-Regulation and Resilience
Support your clients one-on-one
Gentle, adaptable, simple, personalized trauma-informed practices will be developed based on an extensive intake that will include the full range of the client’s current mental, emotional, and physical conditions, habits, and their personal spiritual attitudes and goals. These practices may include conscious movement and breathing, meditation, chanting, visualization, journaling, along with many other techniques and lifestyle modifications. The practices will be fine-tuned over time to give the client the ability to be aware of and regulate their nervous system and come into better balance at times of anxious overactivation or shut down deactivation. These customized practices are taught with the intention that the client will feel confident in and empowered by using them on their own as part of daily self-care or whenever they feel the need.
Share some of the simpler tools of yoga in small groups
You and Your Professional Team
I can work with you personally or with your professional team to learn some basic breathing and movement that you can use while you work, to calm and focus yourselves as you deal with the daily stress of seeing clients who are suffering. As you become adept with the techniques and feel the positive benefits, you may want to share them with your clients.
Your Clients
I can work with a group of clients to teach some simple tools of yoga that they can use in daily life, and before or after your sessions together to balance their body, physiology, mind and mood. Often these practices help the client take moments of pause, to stop and check in, when they are feeling overwhelmed or triggered and wait to respond more calmly, rationally, and compassionately to whatever is going on around them.
My Story
The Optimal State Yoga Therapy School is one of the only IAYT accredited schools that specialize in the area of mental health and yoga therapy. We have a mental health crisis that is coming like an ocean wave on the heels of Covid 19 global pandemic. Therefore, the training has been optimized for the tele-health world and we have found that many clients with mental health difficulties prefer working online with their yoga therapist from the comfort of their homes. The Optimal State Yoga Therapist has the tools and skill to assess the client, build daily practices and lifestyle guidelines and give the support the client needs during the process.
The American Viniyoga Institute™ uses the term Viniyoga to refer to an approach to yoga that adapts the various means and methods of practice to the unique condition, needs and interests of each individual – giving each practitioner the tools to individualize and actualize the process of self-discovery and personal transformation.
I am a mind-body expert. I teach slow, mindful accessible yoga, breathing practices, meditation, plus many other personalized techniques, that help my students learn how to self-regulate and be more resilient to daily ups and downs.
My students say that they feel less stressed, calmer and more peaceful, have fewer aches and pains, and feel more in touch with themselves due to their yoga practice.
I’d love you to try it out for yourself. Please contact me and I would be happy to set up a short introductory session for you and/or your staff.
