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But Yoga Therapy isn’t just a blanket term for all things Yoga. The Yoga Therapy I’m talking about works on a very subtle level; the body’s life force energy. In Chinese medicine this energy is known as

Pictured: Kamini Desai, PhD. demonstrating a strap assisted stretch in I AM Yoga Therapy™ Training course
Photo Credit: Thompson Brand Images

Chi. Japanese mystics refer to it as Ki (as in Reiki). In Yoga, it’s called Prana. It’s the energy that enlivens the physical body. It’s the divine intelligence that fires the neurons and secretes the hormones. Without Prana, there is no life.

In Yoga Therapy, blocked energy (Prana) is seen as the cause of all maladies. Once that energy is cleared to flow freely, the body and mind will be restored to order. It’s different from psychotherapy (or talk therapy), which focuses on thoughts and emotions. Psychology works at the level of the ego, or the personality, which can help us achieve a sense of life mastery. Yoga Therapy not only restores the body and mind, which can help us master life, it helps us recover our true nature – the person we are meant to be. Whereas psychology is about life mastery, Yoga Therapy is about that and liberation from the ego.

Everything we experience in life is a movement of energy that is meant to flow in to, through and out of us. We experience this energy not just through our senses, like touching, hearing or seeing, but also through a sensation felt deep within our body.

Emotions are sensations that drive thoughts in our minds. When we feel angry, fearful, sad, rejected, abandoned, or even happy, we feel a sensation in our body. Recall, for example, the gut feeling you may have experienced when someone threatened your job, or when your lover broke up with you. Sensations are always there, but most of us brush them off.

One of my earliest breakthroughs occurred in a Yoga Therapy session where I adopted a pose to stretch my haunches and release the tightness in my hips. Suddenly an enormous sadness swept through me. I didn’t know why I was sad. My mind started to search for a story to help it make sense. But, by this time, I knew that thinking wasn’t the answer.

Often, our feelings are so overwhelming we shut them down. We pass off the problem to our mind, where it’s easy to get caught up in analyzing issues to death. When we avoid the emotional sensation, we block the energy’s natural flow. It begins to circle in the body, growing more dense until it gets stuck.

In Yoga Therapy, we learn to locate, feel and release the bodily sensation tied to the emotional experience. We might access it through a Yoga posture, breathing techniques, or by revisiting the traumatic experience. All can help us find patterns and traumas we experienced years, decades, or perhaps even lifetimes earlier.

Once we sit with that sensation awhile and allow ourselves to feel it, the energy is free to move and typically does so rather quickly. As we become more adept at finding sensations in the body, we expand our capacity to sit with these intense sensations. Over time, we can learn how to access and move the energy ourselves.

This is how Yoga Therapy restores our physical, emotional and spiritual balance. From shifts in our overall wellness to shifts in our perspective, relationships and reactions, the results can be “sensation-al”!