In this excerpt from Shira's Yoga Teacher's class, a journey through the five elements, the basis of Ayurvedic principles, and the Koshas, a pillar of Yoga therapy, she explains the functions of the mind and which major contributor causes mental health imbalance.

We look at how the left and right brain hemispheres, respectively Ida and Pingala nadi, each has needs, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities which we can affect through the 8 limbs of yoga.

Learn why it's so important to check our input and understand how we affect output effectively with a comprhensive practice using mudra, mantra, movement, Pranayama, Pratyahara, mindfulness concentration and meditation.

Join the next Yoga Teachers class starting in January

Montserrat G. Mukherjee, C-IAYT yoga therapist and founder of The Yoga Therapy Institute share with Shira, how an injury in a yoga class started her road to yoga therapy.

We discuss the importance of the client's story and how we need to adapt and change the practices to evolve our choices according to the person and present reality, how the state of our world reflects our hormonal state, and that following our evolution we will find the solutions.

Montserrat shares the wonderful work she, her amazing team and students, do through the Yoga Therapy Institute, and the results of completely adaptive work; if one way doesn't work then we find another way. Leading to life transformative changes, sometimes.

The essence of yoga therapy is the person and finding they way for the individual, never giving up, including the environment, and all relationships; food, family, money, work, sleep, and is often the path of the desperado. 

Montserrat eludes to an often overlooked link between health and dis-ease as our social connection; love, physical touch and the emotions relationships invite regulating hormonal homeostasis as an important aspect of healing.

We talk about the incredible importance of stories and how they connect connect us, the importance of critical thinking when a student to prevent power dynamics.

Study with Montserrat Mukherjee at the Yoga Therapy Institute

Work with Shira Cohen

Uma Dinsmore-Tuli's amazing book - Yoni Shakti

Dr. Vasant Lad's book The Yoga of Herbs

Blue Zones, Live Longer, Better

Berenice Miles is a certified yoga teacher and therapist, shares her story of, and passion for, yoga, and how helped her overcome PTSD and her eating disorder and sent her on her Yoga therapy quest, with Shira. 

Bernice explains meditation is a big part of the healing from eating disorders because living our minds most of the time, we realise we are not our thoughts. How yoga enables a new relationships with others and ourselves; through self-compassion and coming home in the body.

We talk about writing books and self-publishing, Berenice's book about busting yoga myths for the beginner so people feel more confident coming to a class.

Enabling clients to deal with stress with simple tools and teaching them how to regulate their autonomic nervous system, Berenice, like any good Yoga therapist, empowers the individual.

Shifting mind states, self-confidence and esteem, emotions and accepting the good the bad and the ugly of self and life, through specific yoga practices.

Work with Shira 

FB group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ShiraCohenYoga      YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKSzPo-SCftKExzMp6g0n_w

Heather Mason at The Minded Institute

Montserret Mukherjee at the Yoga Therapy Institute

Yoga Campus

Manuela Heider de Jahnsen at Society of Friends

Leila Stuart, certified clinical massage and yoga therapist, passionate pioneer of movement education, and author of the book Pathways to a Centred Body, shares with Shira how an injury led her to yoga as therapy back in the 70s, on a daily basis to keep the pain at bay.

Liela reveals how prana is conscious bio-electromagnetic energy, and needs to move through us to affect the quality of our emotions, energetic charge and how that effects physiology.

She explains how yoga therapy is a specialised training ensuring client safety and wellbeing through more education and understanding of the body, physiology and psyche, because many different causes can contribute to a specific issue.

A guided experiental anatomy practice that empowers. So self-knowledge leads to better habits, relationships and moods. And self-awareness, essential to lead us from unconscious incompetence, through conscious incompetence to conscious competence.

The importance of the multidimensional psoas; accessing our interic nervous system, connecting the entire upper body with lower body, enabling us to go deep within both viscerally and emotionally and mentally.

And how experience is knowledge and why being present and feeling what we experience leads to self-knowledge and empowered to change their health and wellbeing.

We talk about the importance of community and mentorship instead of yoga as commodity.

Work with Leila: www.leilastuart.com https://www.yogacampus.com/courses/events-and-continuing-professional-development/pelvic-balance-yoga-therapy-for-pelvic-realignment

Work with Shira: https://shiracohen.yoga

Mentioned during conversation:

Tom Myers

Handspring Press

Joanne Spence, a certified Yoga therapist and slow movement maven, M.A. and author of Trauma Informed Yoga- A Toolbox for Therapists, shares with Shira her yoga story. How chronic pain from a car accident, lack of sleep and associated depression led her to yoga classes and becoming a yoga therapist.

This podcast is about teaching only what we know, feel and intuitively experienced, how yoga increases our awareness to our inherent strength, power, complexity and adaptable system of our body as the hormonal changes during pregnancy and motherhood raising many issues and energy changes, asking us to be radically accepting of ourselves.

Yoga therapy is a specific way to apply yogic practice to our conditions to increase, decrease and change our energy and affecting mental health. Yoga therapists see these as intertwined and can create a customised practice according to individuals needs.

Joanne touches on why and how such a small but vital aspect such as movement co-ordinated with breath, changes our physiology, even just standing up! How breathing is a direct access to the nervous system, pathway into releasing tension, reinvigorating our physiological resources , and how yoga trains us to be more tolerant, resilient and be adaptable to different situations.

Joanne explains why physiological understanding and scientific language is important, such as; phenomenological reflection- first person experience. We need to know that the practices and results are duplicatable and measurable. These practicalities provide evidence to get programs funded.

In this beautiful conversation, Evan Soroka, certified yoga therapist and author of Yoga Therapy for Diabetes, shares her broad and deep knowledge and experience of diabetes with Shira and her story of living with it.

We talk about the challenges diabetes management entails, how yoga helps self-regulate, promotes autonomy and well-being, and why emotional fitness is vital for diabetes health.

Evan explains why glycemic control isn't sufficient to ensure positive outcomes and how yoga is a missing link in the standard of diabetes care. You'll learn about the different types of diabetes, how the doshas are related to the dis-ease process, and practices for supporting blood glucose regulation and energetic balance. 

Finally, we end with the essence of yoga and how it can translate into all these different yoga therapies to provide health and essential prerequisite to the actual practice of Yoga.

Work with Evan Soroka

Work with Shira Cohen

Beth Spindler, a teacher since 1976, has the highest certification in yoga therapy, and shares some of her wonderful wisdom and fun, muttley and varied tools for fear relief with Shira. She's also written Yoga Therapy for Fear, Treating Anxiety, Depression and Rage.

We talk about the benefits of integrating different yoga traditions, such as Iyengar, flow, viniyoga and power yoga. Finding the right teacher or teaching that resonates with us as we grow, and finding our own voice as a teacher, and adding things out that are off the beaten path into our toolbox.

How taking yoga therapy into the home is real because you can use what's in the home, instead of buying more expensive stuff. Beth gives us buckets of practices, first starting with something she learned from the Sri Vidya Tantra, which works directly on the vagus nerve, calming the mind through physiology, instead of wresting with the indominable mind.

She decribes how the vagal nerve cradles our organs and working with it is the easiest way to access relief from fear quickly. We discuss how the doshas, Vata, Kapha and Pitta, correspond to anxiety, depression and rage. And fear underlies all these as traumatic responses to stressors.

Here are a few of her interesting articles;

- A Short Practice to Help During a Panic Attacks

- Screen Apnea What it is and How Breath Work can Help 

Work with Beth Spindler

Work with Shira Cohen

This week a quick announcement;

Due to professionnal changes I'm changing weekly podcasts to bimonthly for the next few months, until more certainty and time manifests.

Posture is affected by muscular imbalances due to sedentary lifestyle, compounding our already compromised bodies and nervous systems. This practice improves posture, activates and strengthens core stabilizers to lift up the pelvic floor, massage internal organs, relieving our spine and supporting our central nervous system; beloved Uddiyana Bandha.

Work with Shira