In this conversation, Breathing Deeply Founder and Lead Teacher Brandt Passalacqua speaks with Sophie Perducat-Rubi, a certified yoga therapist and Breathing Deeply graduate, and her client Bill about a balance disorder so severe that he was left walking like ‘a drunk person for several months’.
Bill’s physician had ordered an MRI, ruled out a tumor, and sent him home with no treatment plan. Then he sought out yoga therapy with Sophie. What followed was two months of a 15-minute daily yoga therapy practice that resolved the problem completely.
How Yoga Therapy Helps Resolve Balance Dysfunction
When conventional medicine reaches the edge of what it can explain or treat, people are often left with a diagnosis that amounts to: we don’t know, and there is nothing we can do. For Bill, that meant months of severe balance problems, an MRI, and a physician who essentially said you are on your own.
Yoga therapy starts from a different place. Rather than looking for a structural cause to treat in isolation, Sophie assessed the whole picture, including Bill’s history of vertigo, a prior COVID infection he had not initially connected to his symptoms, and the specific nature of his balance dysfunction.
From that assessment, she built a practice centered on alternating nostril breathing and cross-body breathing patterns and a Prana Nidra practice. These techniques are designed to engage both hemispheres of the brain and support neurological reintegration through breath and intentional movement.
The practice took 15 minutes a day. Bill took agency over his health and did the practice daily without missing a single session.
Within two weeks, he noticed a measurable change. Within two months, his balance had fully returned, and unlike his previous experiences with vertigo, it has not come back.
Bill had done exercises to help his balance work before, such as holding standing poses with focus points. But it didn’t work. What was missing was the breath, the cross-body integration, and the engagement of the mind in the rebalancing process. Sophie identified that gap and designed a practice specifically for what Bill’s system actually needed.
For anyone navigating a condition that feels unexplained or unsolvable, this case is worth taking note of. Sometimes the missing piece is not a new diagnosis or a stronger medication; it is a different kind of attention paid to the whole person.
If you feel called to support others through complex physical and mental health challenges, our professional Yoga Therapy Training provides mentorship, clinical thinking skills, and whole-person education.
If you are navigating physical and/or mental health challenges, Breathing Deeply Wellness offers accessible programs rooted in yoga therapy principles to support meaningful change.
Other offerings include Breathing Deeply Wellness, a service-driven community of Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapists dedicated to helping the public optimize their physical, mental, and spiritual health, an annual online meditation teacher training certification, and specialized yoga therapy courses. Breathing Deeply is an active and thriving community of meditators and 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.
This video explains the difference between yoga therapy and physical therapy, including what each does exceptionally well, where they overlap, when to choose one over the other, and why some of the best healing outcomes happen when both approaches work together.
https://youtu.be/blKEg_sH6d0
One of the most common misconceptions about yoga therapy is that it is trying to compete with or replace physical therapy. It is not. And any well-trained yoga therapist would not think that way. Physical therapy is enormously valuable. In many situations, it should be the first stop for someone dealing with pain, injury, or post-surgical recovery.
But yoga therapy brings something different to the table, and understanding that difference is actually one of the markers of a mature, well-trained yoga therapist.
Where Yoga Therapy and Physical Therapy Overlap
Before getting into the differences, it is worth acknowledging how much yoga therapy and physical therapy actually share:
Both disciplines are trying to help people heal.
Both involve thorough assessment.
Both involve movement.
Both require individualized treatment planning.
Both require practitioners to develop a working understanding of anatomy, pain, movement patterns, and how the body adapts over time.
A good yoga therapist is not teaching random poses. A good physical therapist is not handing out generic exercises. Both are trying to understand what is actually happening in this specific person’s system and respond to that with skill and precision.
The Fundamental Difference
Physical therapy primarily focuses on the body itself. Yoga therapy works with the whole person.
It does not mean yoga therapists ignore the body. Movement, posture, breath, tension patterns, and pain are all central to yoga therapy work. But yoga therapy also asks a different set of questions alongside the physical ones:
How is stress affecting this condition?
How is breathing affecting pain levels?
Is trauma part of the picture?
Is anxiety amplifying symptoms?
Is this person exhausted, dysregulated, or disconnected from their body?
Why does this issue keep becoming chronic?
Sometimes pain is not primarily structural. Sometimes there is a significant nervous system component. Sometimes there is a fear component, or chronic stress, or a body that has technically healed but a person who has not fully recovered.
That is where yoga therapy shines, not as a replacement for physical intervention, but as an approach that addresses what physical intervention alone cannot always reach.
When Physical Therapy Is the Right First Step
Physical therapists have extensive medical and clinical training. They are trained in pathology, orthopedic assessment, rehabilitation, movement dysfunction, post-surgical recovery, and neurological impairment.
When someone has an acute injury, significant structural pain, major mobility dysfunction, or needs post-surgical rehabilitation, a physical therapist may absolutely be the right first step, and often the only appropriate one.
Where Yoga Therapy Often Shines
Yoga therapy tends to become most valuable when a condition becomes chronic, complicated, or multidimensional. Some common scenarios:
Someone has completed a full course of physical therapy but still does not feel well
Movement is creating anxiety or fear responses
The person has become afraid of their own body
Stress keeps amplifying physical symptoms even when the structural issue has been addressed
Chronic tension patterns have developed that are not responding to physical intervention alone
Breathing is shallow and reactive throughout the day
Trauma is part of the picture and is influencing how the body holds and expresses pain
In these situations, yoga therapy has access to tools that physical therapy does not typically employ such as, breathwork, meditation, nervous system regulation, interoceptive awareness, pacing, behavioral and lifestyle pattern work, and the energetic and psychological dimensions of healing.
These are clinical tools with real therapeutic applications.
Yoga therapy can also, in many cases, spend more time with clients than insurance-based healthcare systems allow. That deeper, more sustained relationship matters. Sometimes what people really need to heal is to learn, gradually and safely, how to reconnect with themselves.
When Both Work Together
Consider someone who has been in a car accident and developed whiplash. A physical therapist is likely exactly who they need initially, working on mobility, strengthening, and rehabilitation. But now imagine that same person develops driving anxiety, or hypervigilance, or panic responses when they feel neck tension. Or they stop trusting their ability to move safely through the world.
At that point, the condition is no longer primarily musculoskeletal. It has become a whole-person healing process, and that is where yoga therapy and physical therapy working in parallel, not in competition, can produce outcomes that neither would achieve alone.
This collaborative model is where healthcare is increasingly moving. People want integrated care and practitioners who understand the full picture of what they are dealing with and can work together across disciplines to support it.
Yoga therapists who understand their scope, respect other professions, and communicate clearly about where different modalities are most useful are the ones who become genuinely trusted members of a client’s care team.
Why Healthcare Professionals Are Drawn to Yoga Therapy Training
It is worth noting that many of the people who come through Breathing Deeply’s Yoga Therapy training are already working healthcare professionals. Physical therapists and physical therapy assistants, mental health professionals, nurses, bodyworkers, and yoga teachers all move through the training, and most of them are not coming to abandon what they already do.
They are coming to deepen it to:
Develop a more holistic framework for understanding the people they work with.
Add clinical tools around breath, trauma-informed practice, meditation, and mind-body relationships to what they already bring.
Learn how to work with an individualized therapeutic process rather than applying condition-specific protocols to everyone who walks through the door.
That kind of integration reflects a genuine evolution in how effective healthcare is understood and practiced. Yoga therapy, done well and practiced with clinical integrity, has a meaningful role to play in that evolution.
What to Take Away
Yoga therapy and physical therapy are not competing systems.
They are different systems with different strengths, different tools, and different areas of expertise. Some of the most skilled and effective practitioners in both fields understand not only what their own modality does well, but where its limits are and when another approach would serve the person in front of them better.
Are you a healthcare professional or PT interested in deepening your profession with yoga therpay? Learn more about our trainings here!
Not sure if you’re ready? Take our readiness assessment and discover your next best step towards becoming a yoga therapist here!
Become a Yoga Therapist
If you feel called to support others through complex physical and mental health challenges, our professional Yoga Therapy Training provides mentorship, clinical thinking skills, and whole-person education.
If you are navigating physical and/or mental health challenges, Breathing Deeply Wellness offers accessible programs rooted in yoga therapy principles to support meaningful change.
Other offerings include Breathing Deeply Wellness, a service-driven community of Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapists dedicated to helping the public optimize their physical, mental, and spiritual health, an annual online meditation teacher training certification, and specialized yoga therapy courses. Breathing Deeply is an active and thriving community of meditators and 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.
This video explains what actually happens inside a yoga therapy session, including the intake process, how assessment works, how a practice is built for an individual, why yoga therapy is fundamentally different from private yoga, restorative yoga, or modified group classes and the type of training that is required.
Most people who are unfamiliar with yoga therapy come in with an assumption that it is stretching or gentle yoga. That assumption is understandable but not correct.
Real yoga therapy is individualized, therapeutic, adaptive, and grounded in a whole-person assessment of who you are, what you are experiencing, and what you actually need. Two people walking in with the same diagnosis may need completely different approaches.
What Yoga Therapy Is Not
Before getting into what yoga therapy actually involves, it is worth being direct about what it is not.
Yoga therapy is not:
Private yoga instruction
Restorative yoga with a personalized touch
Modified group class sequences
A protocol applied to a diagnosis
Each of those things has value, but none of them is yoga therapy.
Real yoga therapy involves:
Assessment
Therapeutic reasoning
Individualized practice design
Ongoing adaptation
A genuine clinical relationship with the person in front of you.
The techniques matter, but the thinking behind them matters more.
What Really Happens When You Start Working with a Yoga Therapist?
There are four stages that we move through over a series of sessions when working with clients.
1. The Intake: Where It Begins
The first thing that happens in a yoga therapy session is a conversation. We don’t start with any movement or yoga techniques.
The intake is a thorough exploration of who you are and what you are experiencing.
A yoga therapist will look at:
Your symptoms and primary complaints
Your stress levels, sleep quality, and overall energy
Emotional patterns and behavioral tendencies
Your lifestyle, including how you spend your time and where your energy goes
Your goals, what you are hoping yoga therapy will help you with
Your diagnosis, medications, and medical history
Notice that the diagnosis is part of the picture, not the whole picture. A yoga therapist is not just treating a condition, they are working with a person who has a condition and understanding how that person experiences their life within it. That distinction shapes everything that follows.
2.The Assessment: Seeing the Whole Person
Once the intake is complete, assessment begins. At Breathing Deeply, this assessment draws on Ayurvedic and yogic frameworks combined with modern clinical understanding of how body patterns, stress, and mental patterns contribute to pathology.
A yoga therapist will observe and assess:
Breathing patterns
Posture and physical presentation
Muscular strength and weakness
Nervous system patterns and regulation
Movement tendencies and how you move through space
Energy levels and how they fluctuate
Sleep patterns
Behavioral and emotional tendencies
All of this is then viewed through a yoga therapy lens to develop a picture of what is actually happening in this person’s system, not just what their diagnosis says should be happening.
3.Building the Practice
This might happen in the first session, or it might take until the second or third. The timeline depends on what the assessment reveals and how complex the picture is. When it does happen, building the practice is a collaborative process.
A yoga therapy practice can include:
Breathwork designed to affect the nervous system and support specific conditions
Movement practices adapted to the individual’s capacity and patterns
Meditation techniques chosen for their specific therapeutic effect
Lifestyle adjustments and how to realistically make them
Mini practices and awareness practices that are integrated into daily life, not just a formal session
The goal is a practice that feels sustainable, achievable, and genuinely therapeutic. Not overwhelming but effective.
The aim is always to find the least amount of work needed to produce the most meaningful change, and then to refine from there based on how the individual responds.
4. Refining The Process Overtime
One of the things that makes yoga therapy distinct from many Western medical models is the ongoing, adaptive nature of the relationship. There is no single protocol applied.
A yoga therapist is continuously observing. Do the symptoms shift? Does the practice feel manageable? Did what worked last month stop working? Is there a different approach, a different technique, a different entry point that might serve this person better right now?
This requires a specific set of skills, including clinical reasoning, where a yoga therapist will assess why they are recommending this, and what the evidence is that it is appropriate and effective. Yoga therapists also have keen observation, where they observe what the client is telling them directly and what they notice without words. Critical thinking is another essential skill where yoga therapists are able to refine the process with their clients to get real and tangible results.
That kind of ongoing, responsive, individualized work is what yoga therapy is built for. It is also what takes genuine training and supervision to do well.
Why Training and Supervision Matter
Yoga therapy is not memorizing techniques. It is not applying the same sequence to everyone with the same diagnosis. It is a whole-person clinical model that requires people to develop specific skills over time, through real supervised client work, not just coursework.
Every yoga therapist at Breathing Deeply has permanent access to senior teachers and experienced mentors. There is no point at which a graduate is expected to figure out difficult cases entirely alone. That ongoing support matters because no yoga therapist, regardless of experience, can know everything about every condition. Supervision and consultation are built into how effective yoga therapy practice works.
What Breathing Deeply trains for is the ability to think critically about the person in front of you, using a consistent clinical method, and to keep refining that thinking as the therapeutic relationship develops.
The outcomes that follow from that approach are reflected in the numbers. Across the Breathing Deeply supervised practicum, an 86% positive client outcome rate has been recorded. That figure reflects what becomes possible when clinical thinking, not just technique, is at the center of the work.
What to Expect If You Work With A Yoga Therapist
If you are considering yoga therapy for yourself, here is what you can realistically expect from the process:
You will be listened to thoroughly before anything else happens.
You will be assessed as a whole person, not just someone with a diagnosis.
Your practice will be built collaboratively, designed to fit your life and your capacity.
Your practice will be adapted over time based on how you respond. And the goal throughout will be finding the most efficient, sustainable path to meaningful change, not giving you more to do than you can manage.
You will leave with a starting point and a relationship with someone who is invested in refining that starting point until it genuinely works for you.
If you are interested in working with a Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapist, find out more here.
Become a Yoga Therapist
If you feel called to support others through complex physical and mental health challenges, our professional Yoga Therapy Training provides mentorship, clinical thinking skills, and whole-person education.
If you are navigating physical and/or mental health challenges, Breathing Deeply Wellness offers accessible programs rooted in yoga therapy principles to support meaningful change.
Other offerings include Breathing Deeply Wellness, a service-driven community of Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapists dedicated to helping the public optimize their physical, mental, and spiritual health, an annual online meditation teacher training certification, and specialized yoga therapy courses. Breathing Deeply is an active and thriving community of meditators and 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.
In this conversation, Breathing Deeply Founder and Lead Teacher Brandt Passalacqua speaks with Jennifer Herndon, C-IAYT and Breathing Deeply Advanced Program graduate, about a client navigating multiple complex diagnoses, including POTS, fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s disease, IBS, and EDS.
Jen shares how she approached assessment and therapeutic design and traces the progress her client made across 15 months of consistent yoga therapy work.
How Yoga Therapy Helps Complex Autoimmune and Autonomic Conditions
Conditions like POTS, fibromyalgia, and Hashimoto’s disease rarely arrive alone. For many people living with chronic and complex illness, multiple diagnoses layer on top of each other, compounding symptoms and making standard treatment approaches difficult to apply.
Fatigue, heart rate dysregulation, joint pain, sleep disruption, and nervous system dysregulation can all happen at once, and Western medicine does not always have an effective answer for the full picture.
Yoga therapy starts somewhere different. Rather than addressing each diagnosis in isolation, a trained yoga therapist assesses the whole person and identifies the patterns connecting the symptoms.
In Jen’s case, that meant beginning with something as simple as diaphragmatic breathing, supported by published research in the European Journal of Neurology on its effectiveness for POTS-related heart rate dysregulation, and building from there into a daily yoga nidra practice that began measurably shifting her client’s heart rate variability, sleep quality, and energy levels within 12 weeks.
Across 33 sessions over 15 months, the trajectory changed completely. A woman who had been too exhausted to attend her book club in person, who had to lay in bed on Zoom just to participate, is now taking public transit into Atlanta for all-day conferences and flying across the country to visit family.
For people living with conditions that can be progressive and isolating, that kind of functional change is not a small thing. It is the difference between a life that is shrinking and one that is opening back up.
If you feel called to support others through complex physical and mental health challenges, our professional Yoga Therapy Training provides mentorship, clinical thinking skills, and whole-person education.
If you are navigating physical and/or mental health challenges, Breathing Deeply Wellness offers accessible programs rooted in yoga therapy principles to support meaningful change.
Other offerings include Breathing Deeply Wellness, a service-driven community of Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapists dedicated to helping the public optimize their physical, mental, and spiritual health, an annual online meditation teacher training certification, and specialized yoga therapy courses. Breathing Deeply is an active and thriving community of meditators and 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.
