Ananda Yoga Therapy

Ananda Yoga Therapy Ananda Yoga Therapy offers evidence-based yoga for healing, balance, and overall well-being. 🧘‍♀️💙

12/29/2025

What is a yoga instructor vs a yoga teacher vs a yoga therapist? Let me explain…

A perfectly shaped pose means nothing if your mind isn’t present.Yoga therapy isn’t about chasing shapes or aesthetics. ...
12/20/2025

A perfectly shaped pose means nothing if your mind isn’t present.

Yoga therapy isn’t about chasing shapes or aesthetics. It’s about aligning awareness with the body, breath with intention, and action with what actually supports healing.

Sometimes that looks like movement.
Sometimes it looks like breath, rest, or stillness.
Sometimes it looks nothing like what social media calls “yoga.”

Presence is the practice.
Regulation is the goal.
Healing is what follows.



12/13/2025

My non-negotiables as a yoga therapist 🤍

Yoga is more than poses — it’s a way of living.

• Ahimsa matters. Non-violence isn’t just physical. It includes the direct and indirect harm of our choices, on and off the mat.
• Karma is real. Intention doesn’t erase impact. What we support, consume, and normalize creates ripples — personally and collectively.
• Breath + meditation are daily. Even five minutes. Asana doesn’t happen every day, and that’s okay — regulation and awareness do.
• Practice must adapt. My yoga shifts with seasons, cycles, and specific needs. Healing work serves the body in front of me, not a rigid rulebook.
• Yoga leaves the mat. It shows up in boundaries, rest, relationships, and how I move through the world.

Integrity over perfection.
Presence over performance.
This is yoga therapy.




11/21/2025

You spend so much time bracing for the worst that you forget something important:

The best-case scenario is just as possible.

And here’s another truth you need to remember:

You don’t control the outcome. But you do control the story you tell yourself on the way there.

Save this post for the next time you need to hear this ❤️

10/31/2025

A slight anterior tilt at the start of your fold is healthy — it allows you to hinge properly at the hips and maintain length through the spine. But as you fold deeper, your pelvis naturally shifts toward a posterior tilt, helping re-engage the core and support the spine.

And here’s the part many people miss:
👉 Bend your knees.

When you soften the knees, you reduce tension in the hamstrings and fascia along the posterior chain. This takes unnecessary pull off the pelvis, allows for a more functional hip hinge, and gives you the space to keep the spine long instead of rounding through the low back.

A forward fold isn’t about how close your hands get to the floor — it’s about how well you maintain length, stability, and breath.

So the next time you fold forward, think:

“Hinge from my hips, engage my core, bend my knees, and move with integrity.”

Your spine will thank you. 💫

10/24/2025

Most of us move almost exclusively in the sagittal plane — forward and backward — sitting, walking, and bending.
But the spine is a multi-planar structure designed to move in seven directions, and when we don’t use them, we lose mobility, hydration, and neuromuscular control.

Those seven movements are:
Flexion and extension — rounding and arching to mobilize the vertebral joints.
Lateral flexion right and left — side bending that opens the intercostal muscles and improves rib cage expansion.
Rotation right and left — twisting that activates deep spinal stabilizers and enhances organ circulation.
And axial extension — the elongation of the spine that decompresses the vertebrae and optimizes posture.

Moving through all seven each day increases synovial fluid exchange, maintains disc hydration, stimulates proprioceptive feedback, and balances the autonomic nervous system.

Your spine isn’t built for one plane — it’s built for three.
So move it in every direction, every day.

10/23/2025

Your shoulders are built for graceful, fluid movement — to lift, reach, rotate, and expand. Yet so often, we live in only a small part of that range — hunched forward at desks, steering wheels, and screens.

From a yoga therapy perspective, shoulder health is not just about stretching farther — it’s about restoring harmony between mobility and stability. Each direction of movement brings warmth and life to a different part of the shoulder complex:
• Elevation and depression soften the neck and release tension from the upper back.
• Protraction and retraction awaken the shoulder blades, helping them glide smoothly across the ribs.
• Internal and external rotation create healthy space in the joints and reconnect arm movement with the breath.

When we move the shoulders with mindfulness — through asana, breath, and embodied awareness — we rekindle communication between the shoulders, spine, and nervous system.

Freeing the shoulders becomes more than physical — it’s an act of release. As you open this space, you invite the heart to unburden, the breath to deepen, and your energy to flow with warmth and ease once again.

10/20/2025

When something overwhelming happens and isn’t fully processed, your system adapts. That adaptation may look like bracing or rigidity in the annamaya kosha, shortness of breath in pranamaya kosha, collapse or withdrawal into the manomaya kosha, or disconnection, a disturbance in vijnanamaya and/or anandamaya kosha. Over time, these adaptations become deeply ingrained patterns—chronic tension, shallow breathing, gripping, or numbness in certain areas.

Because the hips are a central hub for stability, mobility, and emotional expression, those protective patterns often surface there. But this doesn’t mean trauma is “stored” in the hips—it means the hips are participating in a conditioned response loop.

So when your hips release and you become tearful, shaky, or vulnerable, it’s not trauma leaking out like poison. It’s your nervous system saying: This feels familiar—are we safe now?

And this is the space where yoga therapy supports healing: not by trying to “get rid” of something, but by meeting the body with ahimsā (non-harm), breath regulation (prānāyāma), and compassionate awareness. Here, you invite the nervous system to choose a new response.

💡 When we say “I store trauma in my hips,” we unintentionally pathologize a wise, adaptive process.
👉 It frames the body as broken rather than intelligent.
👉 It pushes us toward expelling trauma from one region instead of cultivating equanimity across the system.

This mindset often creates aversion toward the hips—when in truth, they are just a messenger.

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Omaha, NE

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