By Anna Schneider, C-IAYT, Ph.D.
Certified Yoga Therapist

Like many healthcare practitioners, I am passionate about my profession because it was vital to my own healing and continued thriving. I have found that practicing yoga holistically (including physical movement, applied philosophy, ethical values, breathwork, and meditation), is a powerful path towards reducing suffering, transforming relationships, and gaining freedom from patterns that limit growth, resilience and purpose.

While any wisely chosen yoga practice has the potential to support well-being, yoga therapy aims to support health and flourishing through personalized, client-centred, strengths-based care in therapeutic contexts. Yoga therapy is a complementary and integrative healthcare practice grounded in the traditional holistic yoga system and informed by current biomedical and health sciences research. A yoga therapist has specific and extensive professional training and the services they offer will have qualities and priorities that differ from many mainstream classes.

Qualities of Yoga Therapy Individual Sessions and Group Classes

Accessibility and Respect for Individual Experience

I will invite you to explore practices for their therapeutic effect and not for achieving some concept of perfect form or what it should look like. A skilled yoga therapist can offer modifications that will make the same therapeutic benefit accessible for each individual. In a class context, it is a beautiful thing to witness each student in their own expression of a shape or a flow, and every student that engages in personalized practice encourages that sense of empowerment and freedom in another.

Encouraging Personal Choice

Participants are the conductors of their own practice and have full agency every step of the way. I will encourage you to make choices that support restoration and reflect listening to your body and nervous system. This may mean using modifications as described above, pausing and rejoining, or stopping a particular practice altogether. I will regularly invite you to check-in with how a practice feels or with how it is affecting you, so that you have opportunities to notice what is not or is working. Questions and feedback are always welcomed and encouraged!

Focus on Mindfulness and Interoception

Mindfulness can be simply understood as paying attention to present-moment experience and, I would add, doing so with compassionate curiosity. Interoception refers specifically to being aware of internal experience of any kind – physical, emotional, or mental. Whether in a class or private session, I will consistently weave in cues to pause and notice sensations and experiences. We learn to connect with our inner observer, the central part of us that engages in self-inquiry and discovery.

Bio-psychosocial-spiritual Orientation Towards Health Goals

Yoga therapy recognizes that genuine well-being reflects health on five interconnected levels (panchamaya kosha) which generally align with the bio-psychosocial-spiritual model of integrative health better known in the West. In essence, this means that practices are holistic and integrate what we may typically tend to focus on in isolation. I will invite you to explore practices which offer a felt-experience of the connections between biological/physical processes, psychological and emotional aspects of experience, and connection to community and to greater meaning & purpose.

Yoga Therapy for Pelvic Health

A yoga therapy approach to pelvic health recognizes that an individual’s experience is dynamic and multi-dimensional. Yoga therapy is also salutogenic, and aims to support optimal states of health and vitality, a process which can encompass diminishing primary symptoms, but which is not dependent on the absence of those symptoms for improving quality of life across physical, mental-emotional, social and spiritual domains.

For example, pelvic pain can be understood as a product of feedback loops between all layers of the bio-psychosocial-spiritual model. In addition to a specific medical diagnosis and its associated characteristics (such as a weak or tight pelvic floor), pelvic pain is often interwoven with other experiences.

One might notice a change in posture and alignment as the body tries to compensate for pain patterns or to adopt a protective shape. One might become prone to more rapid, shallow breathing or holding the breath. One’s internal narratives often become more critical, hopeless, or devaluing. It is common to feel bigger waves of anxiety, depression, anger, mind-body dissociation and fatigue. One might isolate and draw back from activities, or feel challenged maintaining relationships. Particularly in the case of chronic pelvic pain, one might struggle to feel seen and heard or to feel a sense of belonging.

All of these experiences (and so many more!) make complete sense for someone struggling with pelvic pain. While I offer practices which are tailored to alleviate primary symptoms, I focus on you, the whole human experiencing the symptoms, rather than adopting a localized fix-what’s-wrong approach. I find that most importantly, yoga therapy empowers the practitioner with a sense of agency in their own recovery through the development of: self-awareness, self-regulation, safe-embodiment and self-compassion.

Over time, we cultivate our ability to attune to even the most subtle somatic cues and sensations, gaining a felt-experience of the pelvic floor in dynamic relationship with the nervous system, respiratory system, alignment, mental-emotional activity, and socio-cultural environment. We learn which practices have specific therapeutic effects for us, and these tools become resources in times of pain, overwhelm, or challenge. This refined awareness and self efficacy in turn allows us to meet our experience with clarity and discernment so that we might skillfully offer ourselves the care we need most while staying true to our values and goals for well-being.

Changing our relationship with our pelvic muscles can prove challenging for many reasons including: the subtlety of noticing pelvic resting tone, of guiding activation and relaxation, and dissociation from the pelvic area due to trauma or pain. I welcome you to come explore the Proactive Pelvic Health Centre’s yoga therapy program, where you can engage in leading-edge care in meeting these challenges, supported by a caring multi-disciplinary healthcare community.

Our ‘Yoga Therapy for Pelvic Pain program’ has just launched. You can sign up here.

Learn more about our Yoga Therapist Anna Schneider here.

References

Howard, L. (2017) Pelvic Liberation: Using Yoga, Self-Inquiry, and Breath Awareness for Pelvic Health. Leslie Howard Yoga

Prosko, S. (2016) Optimizing Pelvic Floor Health Through Yoga Therapy. Yoga Therapy Today Winter Issue: 32-34.

Sullivan, M. & Robertson, L.C.H. (2020) Understanding Yoga Therapy: Applied Philosophy and Science for Health and Well-Being. New York: Routledge.

Wrobel, L. (2021) Yoga for Pelvic Floor Health: A Whole-Body Approach to Strengthening & Healing. Danish ISBN Office