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Yoga Training for Psychotherapists: Clinical Applications, Benefits, and How to Get Started

A young Black woman using yoga training for psychotherapists to work with a client
A young Black woman using yoga training for psychotherapists to work with a client

Wondering about incorporating yoga into your clinical practice? Combining cognitive treatments with yoga techniques can give you a more powerful, holistic approach that leads to better client outcomes. But first, it’s necessary to complete the proper yoga training for psychotherapists.

I’m Brandt Passalacqua, the Co-Founder, Director, and Lead Teacher of Breathing Deeply, a yoga therapy training school. After helping thousands of yoga therapy clients in my private practice, I turned my attention to training other yoga therapists. Many of our students are psychotherapists and mental health professionals, and I’m confident that our program can help you meet your goals.

Keep reading to learn more about yoga therapy, its clinical applications, the benefits of combining it with psychotherapy, and how to get started. If you’re interested in joining our program, check out the alumni stories below, read about our training, and apply to our school today or start a conversation with our staff.

Table of Contents:

Introduction to Yoga Training for Psychotherapists

You may not know all the ins and outs of yoga yet, and that’s okay! In fact, you don’t have to be an exceptional yogi who has mastered the most complex poses in order to help others heal with yoga.

First, I’ll go over a few key concepts and frequently asked questions to lay the groundwork for a greater discussion on how to use yoga as a psychotherapist.

What Is Yoga Therapy?

Yoga therapy is a holistic practice gaining global recognition. It’s all about harnessing yoga’s power for therapeutic purposes, addressing specific physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual conditions.

This application of yoga caters to individuals, offering a personalized approach, unlike group yoga classes. It can involve a variety of different yoga techniques, such as asanas (yoga poses), pranayama (breath work), meditation, or chanting.

What’s the Difference Between a Yoga Instructor and a Yoga Therapist?

Understanding this difference is crucial. In general, a yoga instructor guides groups of people through asana sequences to enhance general well-being or improve fitness. By contrast, a yoga therapist has additional training to use yoga techniques therapeutically to address a specific person’s health conditions one-on-one.

Yoga instructors:

  • Learn yoga techniques
  • Complete at least 200 hours of yoga teacher training
  • Teach others to practice yoga, especially asanas
  • Help others with general well-being or fitness
  • Offer group classes
  • May focus on a specific style of yoga

Yoga therapists:

  • Learn yoga techniques and therapeutic applications
  • Complete yoga teacher training plus yoga therapy training
  • Teach others to heal with yoga
  • Address specific health conditions
  • Work in one-on-one sessions
  • Personalize and adapt techniques to the situation
A chart outlining when to see a yoga teacher vs yoga therapist.

For more information, read our blog post about yoga teachers vs. yoga therapists.

The Role of Yoga in Mental Health Care

Yoga’s holistic approach balances mind, body, and spirit. By regulating breath and nervous system responses, yoga therapy can lead to better mental health outcomes. It can also lay the groundwork for effective cognitive work in psychotherapy.

More and more studies are showing that yoga is safe, practical, and effective for treating a host of mental health conditions, including:

  • Anxiety
  • Depression
  • Trauma
  • PTSD

Yoga is becoming more widely accepted in Western medicine and requested by clients, transforming the mental health care landscape.

Effectiveness of Yoga for Mental Health

There is a wealth of evidence to support the efficacy of yoga for mental health. These are just a few of many studies:

In addition, the American Psychological Association recognizes yoga’s benefits for mental health, and the Department of Veteran Affairs covers yoga in veterans’ medical benefits. The unique mind-body techniques used in yoga therapy are an exceptional complement to traditional therapeutic approaches, making it an increasingly popular method for mental health treatment.

Unpacking the Clinical Applications of Yoga Therapy

A psychotherapist talking with a client about the clinical applications of yoga therapy

If you’re considering yoga training for psychotherapists, you probably want to know more about how yoga therapy can apply to your clinical practice. Fortunately, there are a plethora of ways that yoga therapy can integrate effectively into psychotherapy. This can be as small as teaching a client a breathing technique during a clinical session to scheduling separate sessions just for yoga therapy in addition to your usual appointments.

Regardless of the logistics, yoga therapy gives you additional techniques to use with clients when cognitive techniques aren’t working. Yoga can help a client get to a place where cognitive work can become effective and also enhance its results. It can be applied to a wide range of mental health conditions, including depression and anxiety, and it also offers an approach that can be especially effective for addiction recovery and trauma recovery.

How Yoga Influences the Nervous System

Yoga’s impact on the nervous system is profound, giving psychotherapists new ways to help clients:

  • Through yoga therapy, you can teach clients how to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, or the “rest and digest” response, reducing anxiety and stress.
  • It also promotes neuroplasticity, enabling improved mental fitness and adaptability.
  • Moreover, yoga’s focus on slow, controlled breathing stimulates the vagus nerve, enhancing heart rate variability, a primary marker of resilience.

Not only can this make your clinical work more effective, but it also can give you a way to change a client’s mental environment so they can proceed with cognitive work. For example, someone suffering from depression can use yoga to reduce their depression, allowing them to better work through their depression cognitively.

Therapeutic Benefits of Yoga for Mental Health

Yoga offers many therapeutic benefits for mental health, such as:

  • Reducing stress, anxiety, and depression
  • Regulating emotional states
  • Fostering mental well-being
  • Enhancing self-reliance and agency

In addition to these benefits, which will apply to many clients, yoga therapy can also be used therapeutically for a number of other specific mental health conditions, such as ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, PTSD, addiction, and eating disorders.

Incorporating Body-Based Techniques

A client in Warrior Pose, showing how you can incorporate body-based techniques after completing yoga training for psychotherapists

While psychotherapy lacks body-based techniques, yoga therapy can fill this gap with asanas (yoga poses) and pranayama (breath work).

Asanas can be used to:

  • Promote physical health and well-being
  • Encourage relaxation and mindfulness
  • Reduce anxiety, depression, and stress

Pranayama can be used to:

  • Regulate breath
  • Calm the nervous system
  • Clear the mind
  • Cultivate mindfulness
  • Reduce anxiety, depression, and stress

The mind-body synchronization offered by yoga can assist and amplify the healing power of therapy.

Incorporating Meditation and Mindfulness

A woman sitting in Lotus Pose, showing how psychotherapists with yoga therapy training can use meditation with clients

Meditation and mindfulness are potent components of yoga therapy. Mindfulness brings the mind into the present moment, minimizing anxieties related to the past or future. This complements meditation practices that heighten concentration, clarity, and emotional positivity. The result is a deeper sense of inner peace and tranquility, crucial to mental health resilience.

This can be a great complement to cognitive work or offer clients an alternate approach that may work better for them. For example, if you’re struggling to help a client become more aware of their thoughts in your clinical practice, you can teach them to witness their thoughts more easily through meditation practices.

Yoga Therapy for Addiction Recovery

Yoga therapy plays an invaluable role in addiction recovery. For example, yoga can:

  • Balance the doshas (I’ve found that many addicts are pitta imbalanced)
  • Calm and regulate the nervous system
  • Change reactions to thoughts
  • Retrain the unconscious mind so it doesn’t guide actions
  • Break addiction patterns and form new habits
  • Reduce stress, anxiety, and depression
  • Improve mindfulness, clarity, focus, and self-awareness

These can be vital factors in breaking addiction patterns and arming recovering addicts with essential tools to help combat cravings and prevent relapses. Addiction can be incredibly difficult to overcome, and yoga therapy provides additional techniques within a holistic framework to help more people find successful treatment.

Yoga Therapy for Trauma Recovery

Many yoga techniques, including movement, breath work, and meditation, have proven effective in helping people recover from trauma. A trauma-informed yoga therapy approach can:

  • Improve emotional and nervous system regulation
  • Reduce PTSD symptoms and trauma responses
  • Reshape responses to triggers
  • Change unconscious mental patterns
  • Relieve stress, anxiety, and depression
  • Increase self-awareness and concentration
  • Foster resilience and empowerment

I have found that yoga’s mind-body approach is highly effective in treating trauma, and yoga training can give psychotherapists additional strategies to promote healing for these clients.

Benefits of Combining Psychotherapy with Yoga Therapy

Many of the benefits of combining psychotherapy with yoga therapy become clear when discussing the clinical applications of yoga therapy. In addition to these advantages, clients enjoy greater convenience and psychotherapists can fuel their career growth when yoga therapy is offered along with psychotherapy.

More Tools and Techniques to Use with Clients

A woman doing breathing exercises with the help of a psychotherapist with yoga training

As a psychotherapist, integrating yoga therapy into your practice introduces a myriad of additional tools and techniques to support clients. This broadened range includes engaging with physical postures, breath work, meditation, mindfulness, and more. These diverse tools empower you to address a host of mental health conditions in different ways, expanding your therapeutic capabilities and improving client outcomes.

Yoga Therapy Can Support Cognitive Work

In addition to providing different tools and techniques to use when cognitive ones aren’t working, yoga therapy can also be used to enhance cognitive work. Reducing stress, anxiety, and depression with yoga can help pave the way for cognitive therapy to flourish, for instance.

Another major benefit is the mindfulness honed through yoga practices, which encourages conscious thought processing. This mindfulness, intertwined with cognitive techniques, can influence neural pathways, aiding individuals to address destructive thought patterns.

With yoga therapy, cognitive work can become even more comprehensive and far-reaching.

Better Outcomes and More Convenience for Clients

Would you rather research, schedule, and onboard with two health care professionals at two different locations or one? The time and cost associated with multiple practitioners is higher, making it far more convenient for clients to see you for both psychotherapy and yoga therapy. Not only that, but the combination of these services produces a more efficient, comprehensive therapy, which should yield better client outcomes and higher satisfaction.

Making Your Work More Valuable and In Demand

For all of these reasons and more, completing yoga training for psychotherapists and introducing yoga therapy into your practice increases its value. It enriches your skill set, elevating your demand in the mental health care field. More and more, clients are interested in incorporating yoga into their treatment, and professionals who can provide these services will gain more clients.

But yoga therapy is more than just a professional add-on. It’s an investment in a fulfilling, impactful career. You likely got into your profession because you want to help people, and gaining more skills that can produce better client outcomes makes your work more valuable to you as well as to clients.

How to Get Started with Yoga Training for Psychotherapists

Ready to learn how to get started with yoga training for psychotherapists? I’ll answer some common questions and share tips for getting started below.

Do You Have to Be Great at Yoga?

I’ve worked with numerous psychotherapists who are interested in learning yoga therapy, but nervous that it means they need to be an accomplished yogi. Fortunately, you don’t need to be able to perform handstands or other complicated movements in order to be a successful yoga therapist!

As you study yoga, you’ll develop a personal practice and learn how to wield different movements and techniques. This will give you the foundation you need to help others, and it doesn’t require you to be able to practice every single complicated yoga pose yourself.

Do You Need Yoga Therapy Certification?

To become a yoga therapist, you need to successfully complete yoga therapy training. Depending on your needs, you may decide to conclude your studies after learning the foundations of yoga therapy, or you may go on to learn advanced yoga therapy.

As a certified psychotherapist who already has numerous tools at your disposal, you may not need to gain an additional certification or complete more advanced training. If you do want to become a certified yoga therapist at the highest level, you should complete an 800+ hour yoga therapy training program like ours and gain certification from the International Association of Yoga Therapists (C-IAYT).

Choosing the Right Yoga Therapy Training Program

If you have already established a career, then it will probably be important for you to find a program that is flexible and proven in providing yoga training for psychotherapists. At Breathing Deeply, we pride ourselves on making yoga therapy training as accessible as possible. We offer:

  • Self-paced coursework
  • Online lessons with 24/7 access
  • Live online retreats
  • Live Q&As with the head teacher
  • Flexible payment plans
  • Hands-on experience
  • Lifetime access, mentorship, and community

Learn more about our programs, hear from our students below, or contact us with any questions.

Hear from Our Students

Don’t just take our word for it! We’d like to spotlight a few of our students in the mental health profession.

Shervon Laurice is a licensed clinical professional counselor and yoga therapist. She said:

This training has given me a deeper understanding of what my clients are going through, and the movement they might need to move forward to more healthy, balanced lives. Where other programs focused on the clinical, Breathing Deeply accounts for a more balanced consideration of mental and physical health.

It has given me fresh eyes, no longer only looking through the mental health lens I was originally trained with. I now also incorporate the lens of yoga in the work I do with clients.

Julie Kormanyos is a licensed mental health counselor and yoga therapist. She said:

My clients are now receiving the benefits of Yoga Therapy when following the plans designed for them. It is wonderful to see people apply the practices and heal themselves.

I would want potential BDYT students to know that they should not hesitate to join Breathing Deeply. They will be joining a learning community that offers a TA, retreats, weekly Q&A sessions, and a supportive peer group to help them reach their goals. Brandt is extremely knowledgeable and will push you to look at concepts from all different perspectives.

Liza Hahn is a mental health therapist and yoga therapist. She said:

Since I enrolled in the Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy Program, my knowledge and practice of yoga have expanded not only for myself but in how I work with clients. I feel more confident and know I have a place to turn for ongoing support.

When I applied, I was working on my hours toward becoming a licensed counselor and wanted to integrate my yoga teaching. With the program online, it allowed me to do this at my own pace (Thank you, Breathing Deeply!).

Apply for Our Yoga Training for Psychotherapists

Join yoga teachers, mental health professionals, and other like-minded students who want to help others heal with yoga under our expert guidance. Learn more about our training, apply to one of our programs, or schedule a call with our staff today!

Is Chair Yoga Good for Weight Loss? Tips, Exercises, and How to Start

An older man uses a chair for balance and support while stretching, showing that chair yoga is good for weight loss and mobility
An older man uses a chair for balance and support while stretching, showing that chair yoga is good for weight loss and mobility

Chair yoga can be an excellent modification for those who find seated yoga poses more accessible. But you may be wondering, is chair yoga good for weight loss? The short answer is that any kind of yoga can be beneficial for weight loss in a variety of ways, and chair yoga is no different.

With that in mind, let’s dive in! I’m Brandt Passalacqua, the Co-Founder, Director, and Lead Teacher of Breathing Deeply, a yoga therapy training school. I’ve benefited personally from using yoga for weight loss and studied these techniques extensively. This has led me to help numerous clients lose weight with yoga, as well as develop weight loss training for yoga therapists to help their own clients.

Whether you want to use yoga for your own weight loss or you’re a yoga instructor or yoga therapist who wants to help others, I’m here to share what I’ve learned.

Keep reading to learn more about chair yoga, how it helps with weight loss, example exercises, and tips to get started and achieve the best outcomes. If you’d prefer to work one-on-one with myself or one of the highly qualified yoga therapists I’ve trained, learn about our private sessions and contact us today. If you’re looking to get yoga therapy training yourself, check out our programs.

Table of Contents:

Introduction to Chair Yoga for Weight Loss

Before I answer the question, “Is chair yoga good for weight loss?,” I’ll share some introductory information for those who may not be familiar with chair yoga. If you already know the basics, feel free to skip ahead!

What Is Chair Yoga?

Chair yoga, in essence, is yoga performed while seated. It includes many yoga poses you’ll see in other styles of yoga, but they are modified to be practiced while sitting in a chair. Chair yoga retains the essence and benefits of traditional yoga, but adapts these practices for those who find traditional poses challenging or inaccessible.

Who Should Do Chair Yoga?

A young Black man and a young Black woman practicing chair yoga for weight loss

Chair yoga is inclusive! It’s ideal for a wide range of people and situations, including:

  • Senior citizens
  • Beginners
  • People with mobility issues
  • People who are overweight
  • People who work at desks
  • People looking for low-impact exercises

Benefits of Chair Yoga

Engaging in chair yoga offers a medley of benefits. These include:

  • Increased strength
  • More flexibility and mobility
  • Better balance
  • More stamina
  • Better mood and mental health
  • Better quality of sleep
  • Greater self-awareness and mindfulness

More and more studies emerge to support these claims. For instance, a 2023 study published in Healthcare (Basel) found that chair yoga improved fitness and daily life for elderly adults with knee osteoarthritis. Another study in the International Journal of Yoga suggested that chair yoga can safely and effectively improve mobility for older adults who are at risk of falling.

As we turn our attention to using chair yoga for weight loss, I’ll go into more detail about several of these benefits below.

Is Chair Yoga Good for Weight Loss?

If you’ve been thinking about trying yoga to lose weight but know you might be restricted to seated or otherwise modified poses, you may have asked yourself, is chair yoga good for weight loss? As I stated above, any kind of yoga can be effective for losing weight! Learn more below about why chair yoga can help you lose weight in order to wield these practices successfully.

Does Chair Yoga Burn Calories?

Yes, chair yoga can burn calories, but not as many as vigorous exercise. In general, yoga doesn’t burn as many calories as certain other exercises.

Burning calories, when paired with a calorie-deficit diet, can aid weight loss. But in Western countries, being overweight or obese is often due to poor dietary and mental patterns. Even when people try to cut calories and exercise, they may still struggle with these habits and, therefore, struggle to lose weight.

Calorie burn is not one of the main ways that yoga helps people lose weight. Instead, yoga thrives in its ability to support people in other areas of weight loss, detailed below.

Chair Yoga Can Improve Mobility and Functioning

Regularly practicing yoga can be a great way to improve your mobility and functioning. Studies, such as this one in Age and Ageing, show that yoga can help with mobility.

Yoga helps to stretch and lengthen muscles, enhancing overall flexibility. It can also reduce stiffness, aches, and pains. For those who struggle with mobility, chair yoga gives you a way to safely start stretching and moving.

This, in turn, makes performing daily activities and other exercises easier, reducing injury risk. Over time, chair yoga may make it easier for you to walk longer or to start doing water aerobics, giving you greater mobility, fitness, and bodily function.

Yoga Reduces Stress

Yoga techniques involving movement, breathing, and meditation can all reduce stress—and all of these techniques can be applied with chair yoga. Studies continue to show this, including one published in the International Journal of Preventive Medicine that found yoga effective in reducing stress, anxiety, and depression.

Cortisol, the main stress hormone, surges during times of stress. Stress hormones can contribute to weight gain.

Yoga lowers your cortisol levels, reducing your stress. Feeling less stressed can also support other aspects of losing weight, such as forming healthier behaviors. When you’re stressed, it’s all too easy to fall back on bad habits like stress eating as a way to self-soothe.

Yoga Improves Self-Awareness and Mindfulness

Whether standing, seated, or supine, yoga encourages mindfulness. We become attuned to our bodies, emotions, and even our eating habits. Mind-body techniques like those found in yoga give us greater introspection and awareness of our bodies.

This can help you to:

  • Pay more attention to hunger cues
  • Eat more mindfully
  • Better interpret other cues, such as needing to sleep, take a walk, or step away from the computer if you’re stressed or low on energy
  • Avoid overeating or binge eating
  • Avoid late-night snacking

Yoga Facilitates Habit Change

Yoga also fosters healthy habit change, which is crucial for weight management. In the United States, we lack some of the healthy dietary patterns common in the East. This often means it’s necessary to rework our eating habits.

For example, many of my weight loss clients would wait until later in the afternoon to eat their first meal, then eat far more than necessary. Eating very regularly and at the proper times for you is often the biggest contributor to successfully managing your weight. This can include:

  • Eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner on a regular schedule
  • Eating a balanced, healthy diet
  • Avoiding overeating or binge eating
  • Avoiding late-night snacking

Yoga enables people to create new patterns more easily, contributing to habit change. Regularly practicing yoga can help you to regulate in general, as well as to regulate specific aspects of your life like eating on time or having protein or snacks during the day. Chair yoga can help you commit to changing your diet and other healthy lifestyle changes.

3 Example Chair Yoga Exercises

First, it’s important to explain that there’s no single set of chair yoga exercises that I can prescribe wholesale to anyone who wants to lose weight. You’ll get the best results from yoga if the techniques that you use are personalized for your unique body, circumstances, health, history, lifestyle, and goals. If this is something that interests you, consider working with a yoga therapist.

But if you’re curious to see how traditional yoga poses can be adapted or examples of chair yoga exercises that could support weight loss, I’ve included 3 below.

1. Seated Sun Salutations

A woman practicing Seated Sun Salutations as an example of chair yoga for weight loss

Seated Sun Salutations can be a great way to get started. These movements sequence in harmony with your breath as you inhale and exhale. With Seated Sun Salutations, you can foster calmness and mindfulness while:

With regular practice, Seated Sun Salutations can increase your flexibility, improve your mindfulness, and reduce your stress, all of which can support weight loss.

2. Chair Warrior II Pose

A person practicing Warrior II Pose modified for chair yoga

Warrior II Pose is a fusion of strength and grace. As a chair yoga exercise, it involves sitting sideways on a chair, extending one leg behind you, leaving the other leg bent at the knee before you, and stretching your arms parallel to the floor. When you’re done, don’t forget to switch sides!

This pose helps you to:

  • Align your body
  • Strengthen your legs, including your thighs
  • Stretch your shoulders, chest, hips, and hamstrings
  • Engage your back and lengthen your spine
  • Enhance your focus

By stretching and strengthening your body, you can improve your mobility and functioning over time, making it easier to get active and stay fit.

3. Chair Extended Side Angle Pose

A man performing Extended Side Angle Pose while seated as part of a chair yoga routine

If you’re building a sequence of chair yoga exercises for weight loss, Extended Side Angle can fit right in with the previous pose. Starting from the Chair Warrior II Pose, swing your extended leg back in toward the bent leg and bend it as well. Gently reach one arm to the ceiling while the other descends toward your feet, resting on your calf if you can’t reach the floor. As with Warrior II, remember to switch sides.

Chair Extended Side Angle Pose can facilitate weight loss by strengthening and stretching your muscles to support mobility and function:

  • It strengthens your legs, including your hamstrings and thighs
  • It stretches your legs, hips, sides, and back
  • It opens your chest and shoulders

How to Get Started with Chair Yoga for Weight Loss

Want to get started? I’ll answer a few common questions you may still have about using chair yoga for weight loss.

How Often Should You Practice Chair Yoga for Weight Loss?

Consistency is key, but keep in mind that anything is better than nothing! See what routine will best fit your schedule, ability, and goals.

  • If possible, I would recommend practicing yoga at least 3 times per week. If you can do it every day, that’s great!
  • As a starting place, you might do 15-minute or 20-minute sessions. But longer sessions, such as an hour, are generally more beneficial.
  • You can also break it up over time or with different activities. For example, you could do 20 minutes of movement and 30 minutes of breathing, meditation, or other techniques. Or, instead of doing 50 minutes all at once, you could do 15 minutes before work, 20 minutes during your lunch break at your desk, and 15 minutes after work.

Over time, you can tailor the intensity and duration of each session to fit your goals. Remember, it’s okay to start small at first!

Support Weight Loss with Good Eating Habits

Part of the yoga concept is a regular lifestyle. While some people treat yoga simply as a fitness routine, using it to also support healthy habits will yield greater benefits for weight loss.

There are many healthy patterns you can develop to support weight loss, but good eating habits are some of the most important. Simply eating a balanced breakfast, lunch, and dinner at regular times while practicing yoga 3 times per week can be enough to make a difference.

Can You Practice Chair Yoga at Your Desk?

Yes! You can effectively practice chair yoga poses at your desk. It’s a great way to combat a sedentary lifestyle, break the monotony, stretch, and reduce work-related stress. All you need is a sturdy chair and a little space.

How to Set Up Your Space for Chair Yoga

Setting up for chair yoga is simple. All you really need is a chair! When possible, consider these tips to make the most of your yoga practice:

  • Choose a quiet, clutter-free space.
  • Pick a stable, armless chair.
  • Place your chair on a yoga mat or carpet for added stability.
  • Avoid distractions so you can concentrate better.

Work with Our Expert Yoga Therapists

Many of the clients I’ve worked with have tried unsuccessfully to lose weight and keep it off in the past. Often, their struggles come down to the fact that they were only focused on one or two pieces of the puzzle, such as exercising or dieting. But I’ve seen time and time again that the best results come from a sustainable, holistic approach that takes your body, mind, and habits into account.

Yoga is an ancient, multi-faceted practice designed to promote physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health. It can be an incredibly practical, safe, and effective way to treat different health conditions, including overweight and obesity. But it takes a skilled yoga therapist, who receives more training than a yoga teacher, to successfully apply yoga techniques to specific conditions.

I have been honored to help thousands of clients on their healing journeys, including many weight loss clients. I am also proud to make these services more accessible by offering them in a live, one-on-one, online format. I hope you will learn more about our yoga therapy and contact us today if you are interested.

If you are a yoga teacher or yoga therapist who would like to receive training to help others with weight loss and a whole host of other health conditions, please take a look at our programs and apply today.

The Conscious Mind & The Application of The Yoga Sutras to Yoga Therapy

yoga sutras
yoga sutras

Welcome to episode 67 of The Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy and Meditation podcast.

The Manomaya kosha is the layer of our being that represents the intellect and the conscious mind. This is the level of our conscious thoughts.

The Manomaya kosha is one of the most important koshas, because of the huge effect it has on us. Because the mind is so powerful, it can affect all the other 4 koshas dramatically. We can think of the Manomaya kosha as the pivotal centerpiece in the 5 kosha model. 

This is why, as yoga therapists, it is important to ensure the Manomaya kosha is healthy and balanced through specific practices. 

In this episode, Brandt shares the role the Manomaya Kosha plays in our mental and physical health and the two ways we work with the Manomaya Kosha as yoga therapists. Brandt then takes us on an exploration of chapter one of the yoga sutras and how we can apply the teachings in the yoga sutras to the Manomaya kosha personally and in a therapeutic context.

This was a clip taken from inside the Manomaya Kosha Module of our Yoga Therapy Foundations Program.

Our next class starts on the 16th of November 2023: https://bit.ly/40Tyxmc

Om Shanthi

This episode covers:

  • The role the Manomaya kosha plays
  • How we can take our health back in our hands
  • The placebo effect & the power of the mind and disease
  • The two ways we work with the Manomaya kosha
  • The shame people feel around mental health
  • Chapter one of The Yoga Sutras Chapter One: Higher Samadhi 
  • The yoga sutras from a therapeutic point of view

Breathing Deeply is a Yoga Therapy and Meditation School, founded by lead teacher Brand Passalacqua in 2014. We hold online and in-person Yoga Therapy Foundations and IAYT accredited Advanced Programs and retreats along with Meditation Programs, including online meditation teacher training and certification and holistic weight loss with Being At Peace with Food.

Breathing Deeply is made up of an active and thriving community of yogis, caregivers, therapists, teachers, medical professionals, parents & children with the same intention—to serve others, lessen suffering, and co-create a new paradigm in wellness.

Q&A: Body Dysmorphia, Hormonal Imbalances & Dosha Assessments

body dismorphia
body dismorphia

Welcome to episode 66 of The Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy and Meditation podcast.

In today’s Q&A, Breathing Deeply founder and lead teacher, Brandt Passalacqua sits down with his students to ask their yoga therapy questions. 

Brandt answers questions covering advice on how to work with teenagers struggling with body image issues and body dysmorphia, ways to approach hormone imbalances in women and dosha assessments in yoga therapy and our advanced program.

This clip has been taken from a live Q&A session with Brandt and his yoga therapy students.

We hope you enjoy this Q&A. Let us know in the comments any key takeaways you had and share it with someone you think it may benefit!

Our next Yoga Therapy Course starts on November 16 2023. Find out more information here: https://bit.ly/3lxc0KK

Om Shanthi, Om Peace

This episode covers:

  • How can I help a young client struggling with body image and mental health? 
  • How would you approach working with hormonal imbalances as a yoga therapist?
  • Will I be able to assess someone based on their doshas after this course?
  • Is doshic assessment covered in the advanced program?

Breathing Deeply is a Yoga Therapy and Meditation School, founded by lead teacher Brand Passalacqua in 2014. We hold online and in-person Yoga Therapy Foundations and IAYT accredited Advanced Programs and retreats along with Meditation Programs, including online meditation teacher training and certification and holistic weight loss with Being At Peace with Food.

Breathing Deeply is made up of an active and thriving community of yogis, caregivers, therapists, teachers, medical professionals, parents & children with the same intention—to serve others, lessen suffering, and co-create a new paradigm in wellness.

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