The Yogic Path for Health, Healing, and Personal Transformation

Português / English

Join physician, author, and yogi Dr. Timothy McCall to discover — or deepen your appreciation of — the healing potential of yoga for everything from depression to infertility to heart disease. Explore yoga’s vast toolbox, including postures, breathing techniques, relaxation, chanting, visualization, meditation, and philosophical ideas, and learn how these tools can be adapted to meet everyone’s needs—young or old, fit or unfit, healthy or seriously ill. Beyond relieving symptoms or even curing disease, yoga as medicine is a path to high-level physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing. Areas of focus will include:

• The ancient yogic formula for changing dysfunctional habits
• Anatomical principles that deepen yoga practice and make it safer
• The vital link between breath, nervous system, and mind
• Reconciling yoga and modern science
• Practicing safely with various health challenges
• Ayurvedic insights that deepen yoga’s therapeutic potential.

In addition to lecturing and leading participants through a variety of yoga practices, Dr. McCall will personally conduct a private yoga therapy session on one of the students from the workshop in front of the group for teaching purposes. There will also be group yoga therapy exercises, with some participants serving as patients, and others acting as yoga therapists, under the supervision of Timothy and his assistants.

For yoga students of all levels, yoga teachers, and health-care professionals.

Timothy McCall, M.D., is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine and a dedicated yoga practitioner who has traveled to India and throughout the United States observing, training with, and interviewing many of the world’s leading yoga teachers and therapists. He is the medical editor of Yoga Journal, and is the author of Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing (Bantam). Timothy studies with a traditional Ayurvedic Vaidhya (doctor) in Kerala, India and with a Tantric master in Bangalore. His primary yoga teacher in the United States since 1995 has been Patricia Walden.

The Yoga as Medicine workshops are designed to immerse you in the science and practice of yoga therapy. Yoga therapy is the use of yoga and its vast toolbox to help treat and prevent a wide range of health conditions. It is holistic, considering every aspect of the mind, body and spirit; it is integrative, seeking to work harmoniously with both conventional and complementary and alternative medical systems; and it is informed by the ancient teachings of yoga as well as by modern scientific knowledge and research.

The Yoga as Medicine workshops explore yoga therapy through hands-on training, with the majority of the time spent actually doing yoga therapy in a small group setting, under the supervision of Timothy and his assistants.

After providing a general introduction to yoga and yoga therapy, including such questions such as: how to evaluate the student, how to structure a yoga therapy session and choose practices to help move them in the right direction, Timothy conducts a sample yoga therapy session on one of the attendees in front of the group. This is something of an “annotated” session, in that Timothy often explains what he’s doing and why he’s doing it along the way. The format of evaluating the individual in depth and providing a multi-facted yogic

plan—which might include such yogic tools as asana, pranayama, meditation, yoga nidra, dietary and lifestyle advice, as well as a prescription for moving forward—provides the template we’ll follow when we break into small groups to do our yoga therapy work.

In Yoga as Medicine, the evaluation of each student involves consideration of four major areas: Structural Energetic Psychological/Emotional Spiritual.

First we’ll evaluate structure, including such issues as postural habits, and muscular weakness and/or holding. Next, we evaluate the student energetically focusing on Ayurvedic balance, as well as the Prana Vayus (it’s okay if you have little or no prior knowledge of these). After that, we assess the student’s psychological and emotional state, with particular attention paid to the balance of the Autonomic Nervous System, the quality of the breath, as well as the Gunas (rajas, tamas and sattva).Again, no prior knowledge is assumed. Finally, we evaluate spiritual issues, such as whether the student has an understanding of their life purpose, a connection to something larger than themselves, as well as the discipline and faith to brings their desires into reality. Not all students, of course, will want to address all four areas, but the teacher/therapist will want to consider them in formulating a plan.

While Timothy will give several lectures during the week, the bulk of the teaching comes during group work, as well as in more in-depth analysis of selected cases. Thus, most of the learning comes directly out of whatever cases we see, and since that’s different every time, it’s never the same workshop twice. In the past, YAM workshops have attracted a wide variety of health care professionals, including physicians, physical and occupational therapists, nurses and psychotherapists. Serious yoga students and teachers of different lineages are also part of the regular mix, as are people seeking yoga therapy for a wide variety of conditions including back pain, arthritis, cancer, heart problems, Parkinson’s disease, anxiety and depression. The wide variety of attendees deepens the experience in both the group work and case discussions, as there’s always a lively exchange, and we all learn from each other.

Ultimately, in order to be an effective yoga therapist, you need to walk the path of yoga. Thus, in addition to learning how to do yoga therapy on others, we’ll also each focus on our own journey over the course the workshop, leaving with a personalized plan of action for moving toward health, healing and personal transformation.

Praise for the book, Yoga as Medicine

Yoga como Medicina

“This is a landmark book. Yoga as Medicine provides a remarkable perspective on the breadth and depth of Yoga therapy, and many leading practitioners, both in the West and India, in a uniquely educational, engaging, and inspiring way.”
John Kepner, Executive Director, International Association of Yoga Therapists

“If you care about your body and want to learn to listen more carefully to its messages, and to take good care of it over the long haul, you will find this book a godsend, whether you are young or old, firm or infirm, a new-comer to yoga or an old-timer. It is the first comprehensive medical look at the benefits of yoga and its therapeutic uses. Timothy McCall has done a great service to the field of mind/body medicine”.
Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Professor of Medicine emeritus, University of Massachusetts Medical School, author of Wherever You Go, There You Are and Full Catastrophe Living

Testimonial From Recent Workshop Attendee

“You are a gem in the yoga community. The mixture of your medical background, yoga knowledge, and your down to earth way of presenting is much appreciated. Helping people is what this is all about for me, and knowledge such as yours provides me with deeper resources, and science to back it. Thank you for all you do! Namaste!”