The Healing Power of Yoga Therapy for Mental Health

Yoga therapy uses the teachings and practices of yoga to promote mind-body healing. It is a personalized therapy that aims to address an individual’s physical, mental, and emotional needs. Yoga therapy focuses not on the external expression of each participant (i.e., “doing it right,” having perfect alignment, “mastering” the postures) but rather on the internal experience of the participant. It incorporates components of traditional yoga such as physical postures, breathing exercises, and meditation to provide coping strategies for challenges like anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and insomnia. Yoga therapy sessions can either be a standalone practice or a supplement to individual therapy and can be utilized regularly or sporadically based on your unique needs. While yoga therapy in mental health treatment is still evolving, it has already been proven to help with a variety of issues, including (but not limited to): depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and schizophrenia. Additionally, yoga therapy has been shown to improve stress management and emotion regulation.

Yoga therapy uses a “bottom-up” approach compared to traditional talk therapy, which uses a “top-down” approach. A top-down approach starts with the mind by focusing on our narratives, thoughts, and feelings about our difficulties. The logic behind this approach is that changing our thoughts inspires change in other facets of our life. However, the top-down approach can be limiting because it can often feel overwhelming to talk about our difficulties at first (and we may not even have the words to verbalize them), especially traumatic ones. In these cases, a “bottom-up” approach can be more effective. A bottom-up approach starts in the body by helping to create “islands of safety,” or body-based self-regulation skills, so that we feel safe enough to eventually process our thoughts and feelings about our difficulties without getting overwhelmed. The wisdom in the bottom-up approach is that our body is the container of all of our emotions and past experiences we haven’t yet healed from. The bottom-up approach allows us to find healing in a way that transcends language.