I am a long-term yoga teacher practitioner who trained with the British Wheel of Yoga, and gained my diploma in 2002. I also trained as an aromatherapist with Penny Price in 2004 and with Danielle Collins in Face Yoga in 2021. Most recently, I have undertaken a Yoga Therapy Diploma with Yoga United, under the guidance of Judy Sampath, the Course Director. This diploma in yoga therapy is a 600 hour course and is accredited by the BCYT (British Council of Yoga Therapy).
What is Yoga Therapy?
Human well-being in this country has been commodified and is increasingly medicalized and individualised. At the same time we are seeing rising rates of chronic conditions such as heart disease, Type 2 Diabetes, obesity, osteoarthritis and chronic pain. Yoga philosophy and practice describe a pathway that offers many of the evidence-based necessary lifestyle modifications called for to alleviate the underlying physiology of these conditions. Yoga practices also support us in adapting to and managing life with chronic conditions.
Yoga therapy also acknowledges, however, our deep pain at a soul level, faced with unprecedented crises – in our natural world, in our communities, in our economies, in our health systems – which are largely outside our control but can create a deep sadness and a sense of impotence, and can lead to anxiety and depression.
For me personally discovering yoga therapy has been a revelation. I first used yoga practice to bring balance and wellbeing back into my life when I became ill at 32 with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, seemingly out of the blue. It was a very frightening time in my life when my health, which I had always taken for granted, totally failed me and I felt utterly burnt out, on every level. I read everything I could and looked everywhere for a way forward. Eventually I found yoga and, following several years of private yoga practice, I trained as a yoga teacher with the British Wheel of Yoga. Yoga for me is holistic in nature, embodied in a way of being, and the various ways this manifests, rather than an activity engaged in intermittently, but yoga therapy has brought me a much deeper recognition that the mind and body are powerfully interconnected. I have learnt that through self-awareness, self-regulation and personal control, a guided process of therapy can be literally life changing, helping to alleviate the physical and mental health conditions which can result from the world we inhabit.
Yoga therapy belongs to an important tradition of integrative healing which sits alongside traditional medicine:
“The term “drugless healers” is historically associated with a 19th century Germanic philosophy centred around a “nature cure” that embraced the body’s inherent drive to maintain health. This drive was regarded as an intelligent “vital force”, considered Divine by some, and permeating every atom, molecule and cell and capable of re-establishing homeostatic conditions to promote healing”
(Cody 2018, p.16)
It is a healing-orientated complementary medicine that takes account of the whole person, including all aspects of an individual’s lifestyle. It emphasizes the therapeutic relationship between practitioner and health seeker, is informed by evidence, and makes use of all appropriate therapies, looking to the new paradigms founded in good science and considers prevention of illness and health promotion to be paramount. It is often described as the merging between old and new science, informed by anatomical, physiological and neuroscientific knowledge as well as by psychotherapeutic principles and yoga philosophy.
Aims and Objectives
- Yoga therapy to offer opportunities to take a deeper dive into our sense of self and our experience of life, situating the individual firmly at the centre of the therapeutic experience and helping us to support ourselves in living well.
- The use of forms of mindful movement followed by a settling into states of physical stillness leading to the quieting of relentless mental chatter. Through yoga therapy self-care and well-being is supported and the emphasis is on self development.
- Finding ways to draw on our own ‘poetic imagination’; how we can use archetypal forces as part of yogic philosophy to try to express ‘the interconnectivity of all phenomena’ and find personal resilience in testing times.
Interested?
If you are interested in yoga therapy and would like to get in touch, please use the contact form within this website.
BCYT Certificate
You can download or view Sharon’s BCYT certificate for yoga here.
Interested?
If you are interested in yoga therapy and would like to get in touch, please use the contact form within this website.