What Is Yoga Therapy, and How Is It Different From a Yoga Class?

People ask me this constantly, usually after they've already tried a few group classes for a real problem — a bad shoulder, chronic fatigue, a back that won't fully settle — and found that the classes helped a little, or not at all, or occasionally made things worse. The confusion is fair. From the outside, a therapy session and a yoga class can look identical: a mat, some postures, some breathing. The difference is almost entirely in what's underneath.

A yoga class is built around a sequence. Therapy is built around a person.

A group class — even a good one — is designed in advance, for a room of strangers with different bodies, different histories, and different limitations. The teacher can adjust at the margins, but the sequence itself doesn't change. That's not a flaw; it's simply what a class is for: shared practice, general benefit, movement and breath for people who are broadly well.

Yoga therapy starts from the opposite direction. Before any movement happens, there's an assessment — what hurts, when, what makes it better or worse, what your medical history is, what you've already tried. The "sequence," if you can call it that, gets built around that specific picture and changes as you do.

The goal is different, not just the intensity

A class asks: can you keep up? Yoga therapy asks: what does this specific nervous system and this specific tissue need right now to move toward recovery? Sometimes that means far less movement than a class would ever offer — long stillness, breath work, almost no "poses" for weeks. Sometimes it means very targeted strengthening a general class would never include because it's too specific to be useful for a room of twenty people.

Who yoga therapy is actually for

• Chronic or recurring pain — back, neck, joints — that hasn't resolved with general movement or rest
• Recovery after injury or surgery, where movement needs to be reintroduced carefully
• Nervous system dysregulation — chronic stress, burnout, anxiety that shows up physically
• Hormonal transitions like menopause, where the body's baseline is genuinely shifting
• Anyone who has tried general yoga for a real condition and found it didn't move the needle

If you're generally healthy and want a strong, enjoyable practice, a good Hatha class is often exactly the right tool — and often more affordable and social than one-to-one work. Therapy isn't a "better" version of a class. It's a different tool for a different problem.

What a first session actually involves

Not a workout. Mostly conversation and assessment — how you move, where you're guarding, what your goals actually are versus what you think you're supposed to want. The plan that comes out of that first session is usually far more specific, and often far gentler, than people expect.

My own path into this

I didn't come to this as a wellness interest. I came to it after a physical injury that a decade in advertising and a series of generic fixes hadn't resolved. What eventually worked was precise, adaptive, and slow — nothing like the yoga content I'd been exposed to before. That's the method I now teach: not performance, not aesthetics, a system built to actually work on a real problem.