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| Supported Poses with gentle hands on |
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| Rotated Stomach Pose - alignment |
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| Gentle poses & support |
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SvaroopaŽ Yoga Therapy
Descriptions from the International Association of Yoga Therapist (IAYT)
Yoga Therapy is the application of Yoga to individuals to empower them to progress toward greater health and freedom from disease. Ganesh Mohan, Svastha Yoga and Ayurveda
Yoga Therapy can not only be preventative or
curative, but also serve as a means to manage illness and/or facilitate
healing in the person at all levels.
There are a few ways to approach Yoga Therapy:
- Private Instruction - Learning a few gentle, simple, supported poses that you can do at home. You will receive one hour of instruction, in which you will learn a home practice that may take 15 minutes to do and/or a breathing practice. In most cases you will be given a handout with pose instructions so that you can do yoga as a way to work with pain management or to facilitate healing.
- Yoga Therapy is more passive - very gentle floor poses are used, along with other propping to help you relax and simply soften into effective angles/poses. We start by going over the specifics of your condition/issue & then assess what actions to take. We choose a treatment plan based upon each individual. The Svaroopa approach is based upon the theory that when the body feels supported, the muscles can return to a normal/open state. That is to say, neither chronically held tight or over stretched.
- Embodyment Yoga Therapy - You are set up in Shavasana (yoga's relaxation pose) with your legs supported. This helps to get a good portion of your spine to rest along the floor. This starts the process of the muscles connected to your spine to soften & relax. From there we will determine which side of your body is the most contracted/tight, and then there is some very gentle hands on work. The practitioner has one hand on the sacrum & a few fingers on the sitbone on one side, which helps the muscles at the base of the spine release. There are changes happening at the base of the spine, which affects the whole length of the spine & has an affect on the mind as well.
For chronic conditions
If you are experiencing issues that have been ongoing and/or are chronic, then you will need to do several sessions to gain results. Please be aware that doing 1 or 2 sessions will not be a enough to make permanent change in your state if you any major issues going on. Most clients notice a big difference after (or even during) the first session. However, if you've had an ongoing issues we will need to work together toward developing a plan that will support you in your healing process. The steps will be tailored to you specifically, which may include Yoga Therapy, classes, and a home practice.
Overlap healing is sometimes recommended for clients that want to have significant results in a short period of time. The theory here is to do a few sessions in a row to get things moving and backing off from there slowly. Incorporating a home practice is part of the healing sequence - becoming less and less dependent on the practitioner to get changes/results, leading to a path of self reliance to create and sustain the openings you are getting in the Yoga Therapy sessions.
I always recommend doing ongoing classes as a way to deepen your practice and as a way to receive guidance from the teacher (me or another Svaroopa Yoga teacher) and support from the community of students as well as simply taking the time to immerse yourself for a class without being distracted.
Contact me if you have any questions or need further information
Namaste,
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