478: Yoga for Depression with Amy Weintraub

Summary

Therapy Chat Episode 478: "Yoga for Depression" with Amy Weintraub
Podcast Date: April 14, 2025
Host: Laura Reagan, LCSW-C
Guest: Amy Weintraub, Founder of Life Force Yoga

---

Episode Overview

In this rich and insightful episode, Laura Reagan interviews Amy Weintraub, acclaimed author and pioneer in integrating yoga practices into mental health treatment. Amy shares the personal and professional journey that inspired her to develop Life Force Yoga and describes how specific yoga techniques, including movement, breathwork, sound, and intention, can be effectively and safely incorporated into psychotherapy—particularly to support clients dealing with depression, anxiety, and trauma. The conversation blends clinical wisdom, practical demonstrations, and thoughtful reflections on the mind-body connection.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Amy Weintraub’s Background and Mission (03:51–08:00)

• Amy shares how years of personal experience with depression and training in psychotherapy and Internal Family Systems (IFS) led her to yoga as a transformative, embodied healing modality.

  "After years of psychotherapy which really helped me understand family of origin issues, my own depression was not lifting...it was when I began an embodied practice of yoga in the mid-80s that my, my whole life transformed and I became passionate about sharing what had really saved my life with others." (Amy Weintraub, 03:53)

• She describes the early days of advocating for yoga in the mental health space, referencing her 1999 article "Yoga: The Natural Prozac" in Yoga Journal, and her ongoing work developing protocols, research, and trainings.

Making Yoga Accessible in Clinical Settings (09:00–13:45)

• Amy explains that Life Force Yoga adapts yogic concepts for psychotherapy, emphasizing safety, accessibility, and inclusivity. Techniques are stripped of religious language and tailored to meet clients “where they are.”
• She highlights the need for appropriate introductions of breathwork, cautioning that traditional practices (such as three-part breath) can be overwhelming or inaccessible to those with trauma or anxiety.

  "If you invite...the very first practice yogic three part breath...some people will either not be able to do it...or they're going to have emotional flooding. And if this is your first session, it could be scary, shameful." (Amy, 11:31)

• The importance of co-creating practices with clients, rather than prescribing, is underlined.

Integrating Life Force Yoga with Internal Family Systems (13:45–15:25)

• The compatibility of Life Force Yoga with IFS is explored—especially in helping clients build "self-energy" and compassion towards their internal "parts."
• Amy and Laura discuss the synergy found in combining these modalities for deeper healing.

  "It's really important to find self energy and then also...if a part has not yet been unburdened...it may be appropriate to check in with the client and say...would that part feel comfortable with a soothing practice that we can give it?" (Amy, 13:30)

• Amy mentions upcoming IFS-LFY trainings and ongoing collaborations.

Practical Demonstration: Stair Step Breath (15:45–18:46; 18:47–25:46)

• Amy introduces and leads Laura (and listeners) in the "Stair Step Breath," a gentle, accessible breathing practice ideal for clients with anxiety or difficulty connecting with the body.

• She explains why traditional breathwork can be distressing, and how “meeting the breath where it is” (e.g., with short, upper-chest inhales) supports safety and self-regulation.

  "Stair step breath is meeting that state of agitation. So it's taking little steps of breath...through the nostrils, as though you're climbing a mountain." (Amy, 18:47)

• The practice is described step-by-step, emphasizing grounding and gradual introduction of deeper breath. Amy shares adaptations for depressive states (adding “elevator” or “escalator” breath).

• Guidance on intention setting (Sankalpa) and the importance of grounding at the end of practices is included.

  "We want them to be present and grounded when they open their eyes." (Amy, 20:56)

• Amy cautions against inviting global body awareness too early, especially for trauma survivors, instead recommending cues to direct, specific sensations (e.g., fingers, palms, lips) as a bridge to embodiment.

  "To ask them to feel the sensations in their body can create even more distress. But if you direct them to specific, not global, sensation, they can find their way." (Amy, 25:56)

The Full Spectrum of Yoga in Therapy (27:01–32:20)

• Amy clarifies that yoga is more than movement; Life Force Yoga draws on:

  • Pranayama (breathwork, e.g., stair step breath)
  • Mantra and sound (using secular, universal tones)
  • Mudras (hand gestures that influence the nervous system and breath)
  • Meditation and Yoga Nidra (deep relaxation, exploration of opposites, and trauma resilience)

• She references powerful research supporting sound, mudra, and yoga nidra in clinical settings, sharing a personal example of pain management post-surgery.

  "The only thing that worked for me was yoga nidra practice." (Amy, 30:44)

• Movements used in therapy are accessible and not mat-based; can be integrated while seated or standing—a bridge for therapists not trained as yoga teachers.

• Amy describes the typical outcome of an energizing, grounding practice in therapy:

  "People tend to be...calmer, more centered, clearer and more focused. And they have greater access to emotions and more clarity around what would work in...that therapy session for them." (Amy, 32:01)

Resources & Training Opportunities (32:20–33:10)

• Laura encourages listeners to explore Amy's resources:
  • Books, including Yoga for Depression and Yoga Skills for Therapists
  • Free practices and information at yogafordepression.com
  • National and international trainings in Life Force Yoga

---

Notable Quotes & Highlights

• On adapting yoga for therapy:

  "Techniques are from the yogic tradition but are made extremely accessible so that people who may have a resistance to...chanting Sanskrit or doing a pranayama...are given tools that are not specific to any kind of religious tradition." (Amy, 10:37)

• On trauma-sensitive cues:

  "Cue to direct sensation, not global sensation...Sense into the palms, sense into the fingertips...that way you are grounding it. But you've also created a leap over...that mind's fear of being in the body." (Amy, 25:46)

• On the holistic health benefits of yoga in therapy:

  "Yoga nidra is very powerful for post traumatic stress disorder in helping people...see the memory without so much gripping, emotional gripping around it." (Amy, 29:55)

• On safety and clinical appropriateness:

  "Some of the more intense breathing...are not appropriate in a clinical setting...People can be overstimulated...whereas this one [stair step breath] is a little stimulating...but not over the top." (Amy, 21:41)

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:51 – Amy's personal and professional path to yoga for depression
• 09:00 – Making yogic practices accessible and inclusive
• 11:30 – Precautions and trauma-sensitive breathwork approaches
• 13:45 – Integrating IFS with Life Force Yoga
• 15:45 – Trainings, collaborations, and applications
• 18:46 – Guided demonstration: Stair Step Breath
• 25:46 – Directing clients to specific body sensations
• 27:01 – Broadening yoga in therapy: sound, mudra, meditation, and movement
• 29:55 – Yoga nidra and pain/emotion management
• 32:20 – Resources, books, and further learning

---

Closing Tone

The conversation is marked by deep empathy, clinical rigor, and practical inspiration. Both speakers are passionate, collaborative, and grounded in a trauma-informed, client-centered approach to healing.

---

For more resources, visit yogafordepression.com and explore Amy Weintraub’s trainings, books, and free practices.

Transcript

[A]

Therapynotes is the highest rated EHR practice management and billing software for mental health professionals. Its all in one platform is designed to streamline all aspects of your practice from connecting with clients via secure messages to scheduling, notes, billing and more. You can trust TherapyNotes has you covered and one of the best parts 24. 7 customer service with a live person, it's beyond easy to get help over the phone or by email at any time of day from their knowledgeable and friendly representatives. The best time to give TherapyNotes a try is now. Sign up for your free trial by going to therapynotes.com, clicking Start My Free Trial and accessing your first two months free with the promo code CHAT. See why TherapyNotes is the most trusted EHR for behavioral health professionals today. TherapyChat Podcast Episode 478 this is the Therapy Chat podcast with Laura Reagan, LCSWC.

[B]

The information shared in this podcast is.

[A]

Not a substitute for seeking help from a licensed mental health professional. And now here's your host, Laura Reagan, lcswc. Hi welcome back to Therapy Chat. I'm your host Laura Reagan and today I'm bringing you an interview with Amy Weintraub, who is the founder and creator of Life Force Yoga. She has authored books including Yoga for Depression and in this interview, which was before I trained with her and Rose Kress, who now owns Life Force Yoga, I talked with her about how yoga can help with our mood. Yoga and breath, work and movement and somatics have really been helping me over the years to be more embodied and in my healing journey. They've been important aspects of the healing process along with therapy and a lot of other stuff. So I wanted to bring this conversation back to share it with you because it was from many years ago. I want to let you know that the Trauma Therapist Network website has recently been revamped. We've created a page just for therapists where a number of discounts, including special discounts on pessi trainings with previous Therapy Chat guests and other training discounts and wearable tech and different things are found there. Just resources for therapists. We'll be gradually adding to this page as we go along, so I wanted to let you know about that. You can go to traumatherapistnetwork.com and click on 4 therapists to find that. So thank you as always for listening to Therapy Chat. Talk to you soon. Hi, welcome back to Therapy Chat Today. I'm super excited to have a very interesting guest with me. My guest today is Amy Weintraub. Amy, thank you so much for being.

[B]

Here oh, my pleasure, Laura, love to talk about what we do with life force yoga and psychotherapy.

[A]

Yes, I'm super excited because you are such an expert in the field of bringing yoga therapy into psychotherapy practice. And I mean from what I see on your website, you've been doing this for years and years. So I'd love to hear more about yourself and your work.

[B]

Well, thanks for this invitation to talk about what I love and what I am just passionate about. Because after years of psychotherapy and some training in it, although I'm not a licensed mental health professional professional, I am trained in internal family systems therapy and some other modalities, but my primary basis has been yoga. But after years of psychotherapy which really helped me understand family of origin issues, my own depression was not lifting and I had also been a meditator for many years. But it was when I began an embodied practice of yoga in the mid-80s that my, my whole life transformed and I became passionate about sharing what had really saved my life with others. And I began to do create alliances with researchers and develop protocols and publish. I think I wrote it. I did actually write the first article on yoga and mental Health in 1999 in Yoga Journal. It was called Yoga the Natural Prozac. And then since then I've written a number of books and articles and chapters on yoga and mental health and, and specifically how to integrate yoga into psychotherapeutic settings and healthcare settings in general. The latest book being the Norton W.W. norton book, Yoga Skills for Therapists. And that really covers a number of practices. I think there are 52 practices with clinical uses, case studies, and not just from my own work, but from the many life force yoga practitioners who are mental health providers whom I've trained. And we do trainings. That's the primary work is research which we have some of it's on the, it's on the Yoga for Depression website under Research and Training for Health Professionals and yoga Teachers. So that they feel. So yoga teachers feel confident in working with people who have mood disorders and because people come with for example neck issues or hip issues or knee issues and they think they're coming because they want adjustments or help in managing their chronic pain in particular body areas. And there's always an emotional component. I mean it's the body mind connection. So yoga teachers often find themselves with people crying on the mat or released, having cathartic releases, so giving them the competency and the confidence to hold a safe and sacred container for emotions and to help people manage and regulate their moods. That's important for yoga teachers as well as mental health professionals. And mental health professionals are finding that when they integrate. And we probably should define yoga therapy as something other than what we're talking about because yoga therapy is specific. There are standards now from the International association of Yoga Therapists. 800 in order to call yourself a yoga therapist you need to have taken that training. 800 a training and life force Yoga practitioner training is a component in many of the 800 hour programs. So that's the designation of the title yoga therapy. So what people who take our trainings or read the book or you know, come to workshops do who are mental health professionals is begin to integrate practices that are from the yogic tradition but are made extremely accessible so that people who may have a resistance to the idea of say chanting Sanskrit or doing a pranayama breathing practice are given tools that are not specific to any kind of religious tradition. So for example, one of the primary practices we teach is stair step practice breath. Now that's based on an ancient tradition of analoma and Voloma krama, but we call it stair step breath because I don't know about you, but as a yoga teacher I find even just as recently as a few weeks ago, my cousin said to me, I was visiting and she said, oh, I really like the yoga, the stretching part, but I hate that breathing too stuff. And that's because people often are upper chest breathers. And there's a good reason for that. There's usually either and it's usually both a physiological component, but there's often a repression of material tamping down of material that the the person is not ready to deal with. And so if you invite for example, what most yoga teachers and classes are offer the very first practice yogic three part breath dirga pranayama, which is breathing to the bottom of the lungs, midsection, top of the lungs. Some people will either not be able to do it. So immediately you've introduced a practice that your client is going to fail at or they're going to have emotional flooding. And if this is your first session, it could be scary, shameful. The therapeutic container, the safe and sacred container, has not yet been established. So that's why, for example, we introduce a practice like stair step breath which is much easier to accomplish and meets that upper chest breathing style. I can go on and give you a couple other examples. For example, sometimes people who've done mindfulness training may invite their client to simply watch the breath at the beginning of a session if someone is highly agitated. If someone is highly has a history of trauma or you know, general anxiety disorder and that, that anxiety is really present at that moment. It may be very challenging to simply watch the breath. Whereas if you give them a strategy from the yogic tradition that we teach in the Life Force Yoga practitioner training that goes specifically to giving the mind a bone, giving the mind something to do, whether it's a tone and we don't call it mantra chanting, but we have some universal sounds that we use, a mudra hand gesture or a breathing practice like the one I just mentioned, stair step breath, then that gives the mind something to do and there's, and you're, you're meeting that busy, overstimulated, hyper aroused state with something and then, then mindfulness, then a watching of the breath can occur, but it's often too, it actually creates more agitation to simply sit and watch the breath at the beginning of a session for someone who's anxious. So we teach a number of tools that come from the yogic tradition, but again we make them accessible. And I could go over more of those tools. I've also written, I mean just in terms of my own work, I've written a number of books. Yoga for Depression was the first book on yoga and mental health and that was published in 2004. I've had Broadway Books, Random House and it's still selling well, so it's still available. And lots of CDs and DVDs of practices, a lot of them are available for free on our website yogafordepression.com under get help. And they can also find practitioners who've taken the training, mental health practitioners who combined these strategies into their clinical practice. You can also find people who've trained in both internal family systems, which I'm, I think is such a good fit with Life Force Yoga and yoga in general. Because if those of you who may be IFS practitioners know how important it is to find ways to help a client find that place of self energy where they can feel some curiosity, some compassion towards the parts that may be troubling them, the manager parts or the firefighter parts or the exiles. So it's really important to find self energy and then also in terms of working with parts, if a part has not yet been unburdened, an exile, a wounded part, a younger part, and the session is complete, complete, it may be appropriate to check in with the client and say check in with that part and say with that part, feel comfortable with a soothing practice that we can give it until, so that you can, you can bring a soothing practice to that part when you're working with it at home this week and you can invite then the client to try on a practice and co create, create a take home practice with the client rather than prescribe it but rather co create a practice based on the tools that we offer both in the book, the Yoga skills for Therapists book and in our trainings. Wow.

[A]

Wow. Wow. You just really got me with that last part because parts work is so powerful and work in the body with the breath or, or you know with the emotions that are held in the body is so important in my work as a trauma therapist I'm just like, I'm wanting to buy everything you're talking about and read everything you've written but I can't do it all at once.

[B]

But no, but you know it's funny because I'm just preparing. I'm. Our Level 2 trainings for life Force Yoga. We're, we have one coming up next week called the. It's a trauma specialist Life Force Yoga trauma specialist training and I'm presenting a day of Internal Family Systems and Life Force Yoga and it's, it's just, I love that work because I think they go so beautifully hand in hand and I'm just, you know, it's, it's, it's just yeah, I love it when there's that kind of synergy between modalities and I think you will also be. We're actually preparing an IFS and Life Force Yoga module that will be rolling out at probably in 2017 with you know, with Internal Family Systems with the executive director John Schwartz and I are working on that.

[A]

Wow, that's amazing. I mean what I know and our listeners don't is that you just came back from, from teaching in Australia. You have so many trainings all around and I mean it's incredible. I'm just like I want to go to each one. I'm serious.

[B]

Well, thank you. We're actually doing, I'm flying next weekend to do a module on IFS and Life Force Yoga at Kripalu and Kripalu Center. I teach quite often on the east coast in the Berkshire's and I'm often in the D.C. area, you know at Willow street and also at the Psychotherapy Networker Symposium. And our main training is in Tucson. You can do module trainings but our main residential retreat trainings is in Tucson and at Yogaville and outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. But would you like to do a little a stair step breath since I mentioned it?

[A]

Sure. Because I'm really not familiar with what that is. Today's episode is sponsored by Psychotherapy Networker and Pessi. If you're a therapist, be sure to check out the Partner page, which is linked in the Show Notes where you can get discounted trainings with previous Therapy Chat guests like Courtney Armstrong, Dr. Leslie Korn, Dr. Arielle Schwartz, Dr. Tammy Nelson, Dr. Janina Fisher, Rebecca Case, Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Lindsay Gibson, Deb Dana, Lori Gottlieb and many, many others. You'll find the link in the Show Notes to my Partner page with Pessy and Psychotherapy Networker where you can find all these discounted training. If you need CES, this is a great place to go. TherapyNotes is consistently transforming the way therapists manage their practices with continuous updates designed to save money and improve efficiency. Their latest Game Changer Therapy Fuel, a powerful and fully integrated suite of AI tools that streamline documentation so you can focus more on your clients. With AI features that help by generating progress notes from summaries or transcriptions, creating contact notes directly from client secure messages, and automated summaries of client history forms, TherapyNotes users are already reporting hours of saved time and energy. Some other recent feature improvements include automated recurring client payments, electronic secondary insurance billing, and their constantly expanding library of outcome measures. The best time to give TherapyNotes a try is now. Sign up for your free trial by going to therapynotes.com, clicking Start My Free Trial and accessing your first two months free with the promo code CHAT. See why TherapyNotes is the most trusted EHR for behavioral health professionals today?

[B]

Sure. Well, so you probably anyone who's taken a yoga class has gone in and they, they've been led in Yoga three part breath. And that's sort of the Ujjayi Yogic three part breath. Those are the traditional breaths. Okay. And they're not really accessible to someone who's an upper chest breather. And so when you. And again, if you get someone to breathe to the bottom of their lungs and they're not, they, they're tamping down their emotion, there can be a catharsis. And that's fine when you've been working with someone for four or five sessions and you have that container. But initially that can be a little scary.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So stair step breath is meeting that state of agitation. So it's taking little steps of breath. We don't even talk about the breath. We talk about little steps through the nostrils as though you're climbing a mountain. So just follow along with me. So taking little steps through the nostrils and at your own Pace when you get to the top of the mountain sl. And again at your own pace, take little steps as though you're climbing a mountain. And when you get to the top, maybe look out for a moment and see something beautiful and slow. And one more time, just like that, little steps up, get to the top, look out, see something that lights you up inside. And slide and allow your natural breath to find you again. And inhale to the crown. I am. Exhale to the sits bones the seat here round. Inhale to the crown. I am. Exhale to your feet here. Ready. And as you're ready from this place of presence, you can allow your eyes to open a faith close, closed. So we just did part one of three parts of yogic three part breath. And that was, I mean of stair step breath. And that was to meet the anxious mind. If we were to to also be working with an.80% of the time anxiety coexists with depression. If we were to be working with depression, we would not only have taken the little steps up and then slide the breath out, we would have also then after a couple of rounds, two or three rounds taken, an elevator ride or an escalator up to the top of the mountain. Because at that point deeper breath is accessible after doing the first part. And then we'll take little steps down which creates a motion mild, what we call in yoga kriya or activating the solar plexus. Very good for anxiety and depression. Very good especially for diabetes too. And depressive states that it's a very mild and clinically appropriate more rapid breathing practice. And then we would have taken little steps up and then maybe pause depending on the client, see something beautiful and little steps down which is again more activating. You can feel your belly pumping as you do that. But it's mild, not like a big kapalabhati breath or noli. Some of the more intense breathing which is not appropriate in clinical setting because it's not grounded in a lot of other physical practices. And people can be overstimulated with some of the more intense breathing that many people know, like breath of fire and Apalabhati skull shining. Not appropriate in a clinical setting. Whereas this one is a little stimulating, especially the second and third parts, but not over the top. It's not going to. It's more grounding. And notice that I also also at the end invited you to inhale to the crown. I am exhale to the seat here and then exhale to the feet here. Because really we want to be grounding our clients. We don't want them to be overly agitated. We want them to be present and grounded when they open their eyes. Now, had we had more time or if this were a therapeutic session from that place of groundedness before I invited you to allow the eyes to open, I would have said from this place of connectedness, groundedness. Allow an intention for our work together to arise, or something like that, or an intention that. What's the burning bush in your heart, Art? Why are you here? Something that allows them to create a. What we call in yoga, Sankalpa, but an intention for the, the work that we're going to do together. And then when they open their eyes, I would check in and say, you know, did something rise? And then that would form the basis of, ah, our work together. And I could, I can go back to it. I would refer back to it again. If someone is really agitated, they may need help in probing and finding that. But that's. It's good to inquire and to then work with the client to frame an intention that feels authentic to them rather than layered on by the practitioner, the clinician. Yeah, there's one other aspect we haven't gotten to that is really important I think for clinicians and that is. And for yoga professionals to cue to direct sensation, not global sensation. That's a little confusing. But if you simply say so many clinicians do and so many yoga teachers do, feel the sensations in your body, inquire into them, feel the. It can actually be very agitating for someone who's living from the neck up, who's a trauma survivor, or even someone who just says general anxiety disorder. What am I supposed to feel? Kind of. So rather than that, after a PR leading a practice and I didn't have time to fit it in, but I think it's important to mention to cue to direct sensation, where there's a lot of sensation, sensation in the face, the lips, the fingertips, the palms. So sense into the palms, sense into the fingertips, sense into the energy shimmering around the hands and then do the inhale to the crown. I am exhale to the seat here present. And that way you are grounding it. But you've also created a leap over, over that mind's fear of being in the body.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. And that's a big thing for a lot of people, that they want to feel what's happening in their body, but they are very disconnected from it. And that's distressing.

[B]

Yes, yes. So to ask them to feel the sensations in their body can create even more distress. But if you direct Them to specific, not global, sensation. They can find their way. It's so empowering. It's so important because you're giving people a way to get to reoccupy their body. I think that's a key.

[A]

Yeah, it's like a route in. I'd like to just talk a little bit about something that I think people probably don't think about with when they think of yoga skills in therapy is you talk about how it's movements and sounds and meditations and the breath. So it's all of the things that encompass what yoga is. It's not just like you said about the friend who said, you know, I love the stretches or your cousin, you know, it's not just the physical movements. There's so much more to it. So can you. Can you talk briefly about that concept?

[B]

Sure. Many people, when they hear the word yoga, think of the postures, and that's a part of it. That's. That's a part of it, but it's only a part. There are many other parts that are ancient and, and, and yet we have made them accessible in Life Force Yoga for clinical work work. So we're talking about the pranayama, which is the breathing exercises. And as an example, I gave Stair step. So we've made it. We've used secular language rather than the Sanskrit. There are also mantra tones. There's more and more evidence for the efficacy of using sound not only to help people breathe more deeply, but the vibratory quality of the sound actually stimulates areas of the brain. Very effective for working with anxiety and depression. So we have a whole series of mantras that are not tied to any deity. So it's. So they're. Universal sounds. We have some energizing grounding sounds, and then we also have some calming, soothing sounds. So we move through the chakra system, the energy centers of the body, with these sounds. We also incorporate mudras, which are hand gestures. There are more nerve endings in the fingers and the fingertips than most other parts of the body. They directly create met send messages to the brain. They also affect breathing into the lobes of the lungs. So they're very. You know, in our trainings, we do an experiment where we touch different fingers together, and people are amazed to see that the breath actually moves to different areas in their body when different mudras are used. So, and they can be used in a way with where those mirror neurons pick them up. So if someone's quite agitated, there can be. The therapist can sit with a mudra that will deepen the breath to the bottom of the lungs. And perhaps the client will also mirror that mudra or can be invited to take that mudra. And the breath will generally deepen just from the placement of the fingertips. There are also a number of meditations. There's also yoga nidra, which is a deep, deep relaxation that also includes an exploration of opposites, both emotion, well, starting with physical sensation, but also emotion and belief system. So. And there's much research there too, that yoga nidra is very powerful for post traumatic stress disorder in helping people defuse, de. Kind of detach, see the memory without so much gripping, emotional gripping around it. It's also fabulous for chronic pain. I recently had major surgery and I'll tell you, I wouldn't take opioids and except they gave them to me in the hospital. So I had great meditations in the hospital, but once I got out, I didn't want to take them and I was in severe pain and I wasn't allowed to take ibuprofen or any of that kind of thing. I can only take aspirin. The only thing that worked for me was yoga nidra practice.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

So, yeah, it really helped. And it, you know, it wears off after a while, but I'd have an hour or two of that would be relatively pain free. And so it works very well with chronic pain and chronic emotional pain. So there are. And in our training, we do include all of what I've just mentioned, including movements that are appropriate in a clinical setting for mental health professionals who are not yoga teachers. So they're not mat based practices, but they are movement based. So you might have someone stand up and do other. A breathing practice standing up that, that also incorporates some movement and sound and that meets the agitated state. And then cueing them to direct sensation so that they're. And then cueing them to inhale to the crown, exhale to the feet so they're grounded and in the body. And what happens is, even if you're leading, if we are leading one of these energizing breathing practices to meet an agitated state of mind. If cueing to sensation occurs afterwards. And if there's that grounding, people tend to be, if you ask them how they're feeling, they feel calmer, more centered, clearer and more focused. And they have greater access to emotions and more clarity around what would work in the next in that therapy session for them, what they're there for. Yeah.

[A]

Wow, that's amazing. So in the interest of time, I'll go ahead and tell our audience that your latest book, as you mentioned is Yoga Skills for Therapists and Your website is yogafordepression.com and people can read up on everything you have there and see all the great trainings and articles and just it's a really a wealth of information on your website. So I think that'll be what our listeners are going to want to do after they listen to this. They're going to want to go there and, you know, check out everything you have going on. I appreciate Amy so much that you were on Therapy Chat today.

[B]

Thank you, Laura. I enjoyed my discussion with you and I hope to meet you on the yoga path, psychotherapy path, at some point in the future.

[A]

Yes, I hope so too. Thank you so much.

[B]

Okay. Namaste.

[A]

Namaste. TherapyNotes is the highest rated EHR practice management and billing software for mental health professionals. Its all in one platform is designed to streamline all aspects of your practice from connecting with clients via secure messages to scheduling, notes, billing and more. You can trust TherapyNotes has you covered and one of the best parts 24. 7 customer service with a live person, it's beyond easy to get help over the phone or by email at any time of day from their knowledgeable and friendly representatives. The best time to give TherapyNotes a try is now. Sign up for your free trial by going to therapynotes.com, clicking Start My Free Trial and accessing your first two months free with the promo code CHAT. See why TherapyNotes is the most trusted EHR for behavioral health professionals today. Thank you for listening to Therapy Chat.

[B]

With your host Laura Reagan, LCSWC.

[A]

For more information please visit therapychatpodcast.com.