Remedial or Corrective yoga & yoga therapy

Doing yoga is practicing self-therapy, and is a wonderful tool of self empowerment.
In the hands of an experienced and properly trained yoga therapist remedial, or corrective yoga, can be applied to improve and even cure a wide variety of illnesses and disease.

Yoga offers relief from a variety of common disorders, ranging from depression, gaining control of ones emotional life, curbing hyperactivity, curing bronchitis or sleeplessness. Yoga therapy rehabilitates the ailing body, it strengthens the mind – helping the individual to get fit to attempt a new lease on life.

Remedial yoga can be practiced by both ill and healthy individuals, by the complete novice as well as the advanced yogi. Improved posture and mobility, better breathing is a natural outcome of yoga practice. But not all people can do the exercises; illness, injury or stiffness may prevent one from doing the kind of yoga that the fit and strong can.

Remedial yoga exercises are especially adapted to make them accessible to individuals that are already physically limited by their condition. A surprising amount of ‘normal’ postures can be done in a chair, lying down or using props like cushions and walls for support. In this way yoga can be enjoyed by older and unfit individuals in accordance with their capacity.

Remedial yoga constitutes a form of therapy that is very conducive to deep healing, and correcting disease patterns in individuals where the disease has already set in, or when still dormant before manifesting as illness. To be really effective remedial lessons are normally done on a one-on one basis, although the principles can be taught in ordinary classes.

The awareness aspect intrinsic to yoga practice makes it ideal to provide both the patient and the expert alike with a method to become aware of the problem area, and then learning how to remedy the situation with own effort. Of course not all conditions can be fixed, but yoga can do much to alleviate a particular situation, or help the individual to come to terms with and accepting the condition.

Because all yoga has the health of the ‘whole’ of the body in and mind as its prime focus remedial yoga will more often than not benefit the practicing individual in more ways than bargained for.
The patient with a lung problem might, for example, not cure the lung completely, but through the breathing exercises inadvertently learn to handle a stress problem.

Generally speaking, yoga can be of benefit to all individuals, and anything from hard earned ‘miracle’ cures (you have to do the prescribed exercises, and believe in them to some extent) of disease pronounced incurable by the medical profession to simple improvement of general health that can contribute to dramatic revitalisation of the whole body unit.

Examples of adapted yoga postures

Examples of adapted yoga postures