What does it take to be a yoga therapist?

Yoga therapy is a part of yoga that’s becoming increasingly known and popular. With books such as The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk highlighting trauma and its effects and breathwork popularised by Wim Hof, to benefit health, there is widespread understanding that the mind and body affect each other in all aspects of health. This means to work with health conditions fully, it is helpful and more often necessary to address both the mind and body together. In yoga therapy, consideration of the whole person is fundamental, whether that’s looking at mind, body, breath or deeper aspects of our human existence. Then considering the person and the connection to symptoms, factors or causes of illness and health.

But what is yoga therapy? And what does it take to be a good yoga therapist?

Simply put, yoga therapy is the application of yoga in a therapeutic context with the intention of providing yoga designed to benefit the health of the care-seeker.

With the breadth of yoga covering the body structure and movement, breathing, mind, emotions, mindset, beliefs, relationship to oneself and others, as well as areas of philosophical and spiritual practice and lifestyle, the range of yoga that can be employed for therapeutic use is also wide.

What’s most important is that the care-seeker, as an individual, is at the heart of yoga therapy and the yoga practice.

What makes a good yoga therapist?

These three qualities are essential…

- the basis of a good yoga therapist is to be someone who really enjoys working with people; to be a great listener and genuinely interested in the story of the other person. It’s important to enjoy listening, engaging and communicating with all sorts of different people. This is an innate quality which is hard to generate. It's fundemental too because the relationship between care-seeker and therapist is a part of the therapy. With this one quality - enjoying working with another - there is the basis of successful yoga therapy for both client and therapist.

- to have a genuinely felt desire to help another in a way that is empowering and supportive for the other. The therapist requires the skill of seeing the person as a whole and considering their needs, situation and ability – assessing the whole picture and yet being able to look more closely at details too.

The desire to help another may come from a place of experience. If a therapist has gone through a health journey, it then helps to understand something of another’s journey too. And if the therapist has the experience of practising yoga and finding it to provide a set of powerful tools which have made a huge difference to their life, this also the desire to share that with others. The experience of yoga and the desire to share that to benefit another is this second essential quality.

- you might not expect this quality, but although being a yoga therapist is hugely rewarding work, it can also be complex and challenging. In providing support for others, there is a risk that we end up giving more of ourself to our work than is good for us. As a therapist, the desire to help needs to be balanced with holding the capacity for self-care and maintaining a state of one's own well-being.

Care-seekers come for advice and support but need to find their own motivation; their own desire to change their health. Yoga requires this from us – it is an active therapy, requiring at least some motivation to undertake it. External support is helpful too, but the self-motivation, in some form, must be there. If this doesn’t work, for whatever reason, then it’s also important as a therapist, to let the disappointment of that go lightly. Feeling exhausted or burnt-out from yoga therapy work, is neither beneficial to the care-seeker nor to the therapist. A sense of containing our energy and not devoting it to others, will support us and prevent another's problems from overwhelming and burdening ourself.

These qualities need to become inherent but can be refined and practised over time. It is important to do so, not only to provide good service to those that are looking for help, but also for the therapist to enjoy the work of yoga therapy fully too.