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.
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.
You can find Jen and her course on difficult conditions on our Breathing Deeply Wellness Platform.
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.
Breathing Deeply is a Yoga Therapy and Meditation School co-founded by lead teacher Brandt Passalacqua in 2011. Breathing Deeply offers two levels of certification: Foundations of Yoga Therapy and an IAYT-accredited Advanced Program, offering C-IAYT eligibility.
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.
Brandt talks about common questions applicants have about the Breathing Deeply Yoga Therapy Program. Tune in to get the full program details.