About Yoga Therapy

It takes lot of dedicated study to learn the technology and methodology needed for the myriad of cases that come to a teacher. It takes much more than a weekend workshop. When the teachers knowledge and experience is scanty they cannot help the student with confidence. My aim in training the teacher is to give them a broad scope of understanding, so that they are armed with sensitivity, understanding and skill. Teachers require a lot of courage to proceed. That courage is not just in knowing technically HOW to help the student, but also the courage to guide another, to be a support for another . . . .

Although I now have a lot of experience from having regularly assisted the medical classes in Pune, still I have a very strong sense that it is the wholeness of yoga, its integrative effect, that brings us to balance and equanimity. We come to that point because those integrative aspects on the path are engaging the follower in their own upliftment.

There is a lot to yoga therapy that appears to be prescriptive, but there is never anything about helping to up-lift others that can ever be taken and copied verbatim like from a script. The principles that apply to yoga practice universally apply to even more so to one who suffers from in dis-ease (vyadhi).

In the HYP it is said – Any person who is not lethargic in the pursuit of different forms of Yoga attains perfection (Siddhi) through practice, be he young, old or even very old, sickly or weak. And… One who is intent on practice will obtain Siddhi, not one who is idle. Yoga-Siddhi is not obtained by a mere reading of the scriptures (Shastra’s). Ch 1.64 & 65

It is clear that yoga is not only for those with robust health, wealth, agility and physical proweressness, with bravery, skill and expertise. It is for the sick, the old, the weak, and the infirm. The path is an obstacle course, not a race. It is populated by those encountering and struggling and in the dark, it is a path from darkness into light and the teachers role is to introduce that path to people.