Do you or someone you know suffer from depression or anxiety? You’re not alone. Depression affects 121 million people worldwide. And 80% of people who struggle with depression also suffer from anxiety. Antidepressants are now one of the most commonly prescribed drugs in the U.S., but are we getting any better?
Yoga teaches us that when we feel alone, alienated or depressed, we’ve lost our connection to who we really are. Simply medicating unhappiness often isn’t enough, and in many cases, drugs may even mask intuitive promptings telling us that we need to be making changes in our lives.
Yoga offers a tremendous path for bringing natural relief for depression, anxiety, and other mood orders, notes Amy Weintraub, founder of LifeForce Yoga. Practicing yoga regularly helps us begin to reconnect with our true nature, the wholeness we are beneath our current mood.
And Amy Weintraub would know. She is the author of Yoga for Depression (Broadway Books) in which she chronicles her own struggles with depression and how yoga helped her find a way out of it. She founded LifeForce Yoga to offer Yoga tools specifically targeting depression, which are not always taught in regular classes. Many of these are simple enough to do in a chair or while lying down. These practices help you strip away the obstacles that separate you from your source of well-being.
In this two-part recorded webinar download, Amy Weintraub illuminates the many ways yoga offers natural relief for depression and how it currently is being integrated into mental health care, individual psychotherapy, yoga therapy and in group classes for special populations, including those suffering from mood disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of domestic violence. She talks about the yogic principles that support yoga for depression and anxiety and introduces the specific yoga strategies she has found to be most useful in assessing and resetting mood.
What You Will Learn
Session One:
Amy focuses on creating a safe container, a necessary first-step in working with mood and mind states (manomaya kosha and vijnanamaya kosha). She then explores the evidence for yoga as a treatment modality, as well as the different types of depressed states (tamasic and rajasic), and how to work with them.
Session Two:
This session focuses of the use of yoga for people recovering from trauma and PTSD with specific examples drawn from LifeForce Yoga Practitioner’s individual work with clients. Amy goes more deeply into the yoga practices used for people struggling with different issue/mood states, the yoga practices used, and their therapeutic outcome.
Throughout both sessions, Amy weaves in yoga practices targeting mood, including pranayama, kriya, mudra, mantra, bhavana, sankalpa, and simple movement and discuss the appropriate applications and contraindications.
This Course Also Includes:
- Interview with Amy Weintraub: In this interview, Amy shares her own experiences about how yoga changed her life and how she has witnessed thousands of people get their life transformed by practicing yoga for depression. Amy explains how different people need different approaches based on their personality and physiology and gives specific practice pointers.
AMY WEINTRAUB, MFA, E-RYT500, author of Yoga for Depression and the forthcoming Yoga Tools for You and Your Clients (Norton Professionals). She is the founding director of the LifeForce Yoga Healing Institute, and is a leader in the field of yoga and mental health. She offers professional certification trainings in LifeForce Yoga for Mood Management and speaks at medical and psychological conferences internationally. The evidence-based Yoga protocol for managing mood is featured on the LifeForce Yoga CD series and the first DVD home Yoga practice series for mood management, the award-winning LifeForce Yoga to Beat the Blues. For more information see www.yogafordepression.com
This course qualifies for 2 CEs with Yoga Alliance.
