Yoga Therapy

Tanaya Ti’en, C-AAYT yoga therapist from Mind Body Collective and committee member at the Australasian Association of Yoga Therapists, says: “Yoga therapy takes the age-old tradition of yoga and brings it into a clinical setting – offering many benefits to someone’s mental, emotional and physical health.”

Where a yoga teacher may have the basic 200 hours of yoga teacher training, a Yoga Therapist has completed several more years of study and research to be able to offer a very individualised approach to yoga.

“Going into a group yoga class, I will often teach up to 50 people,” Tanaya says. “These will be 50 very different people of different shapes and sizes, different health conditions and different circumstances – I will read the room and deliver a class to the general consensus depending on their experience and physical capacity, but you can’t deal with individuals in a class of 50 people. Yoga therapy, on the other hand, is a one-to-one personalised approach to yoga. We work through an extensive assessment process which provides a picture of the whole person, not merely the physical aspects. We look at your day-to-day activities, family life, medical history etc. The more honest you are in the assessment, the more effective the program is that I can put together for you.”

Physically, there are benefits of yoga therapy for dentists, who can suffer from the repetitive nature of their work. “Dentists will often be in what is called the ‘text neck’ position when they are working,” she says. “Text neck is a repetitive stress syndrome, usually resulting from excessive strain on the neck from too much time spent in a forward head position. This can lead to headaches, neck pain, shoulder and arm pain, and poor breath quality which can initiate an array of other symptoms. With personalised yoga therapy, from a physical perspective, we would counterpose the forward head posture and work through specific practices to alleviate built up tension in the areas of imbalance.”

She says ultimately yoga is a psychology, or ‘science of the mind’. “The practices we do in yoga are all for one common goal – to tame the mind,” she says. “The physical benefits of yoga are just the tip of the iceberg. What yoga can do for the mind is it can set people up for a lifetime of self-regulation. “For a dentist, for example, if you are in the middle of a busy work day and are feeling overwhelmed, physically tense or fatigued, there are specific yoga therapy based practices and techniques that you can draw upon in that moment to reboot and take your best self to your next patient,” she says.

Tanaya offers a free 15-minute consult for anyone curious to know more about how yoga therapy may be able to improve your quality of life; mind, body and spirit. mindbodycollective.com.au

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