Change Your Body to Change Your Mind:
How Yoga Can Help Foster Greater Mental
and Emotional Balance

In recent years, a great deal of research attention has focused on how yoga can help enhance well-being and support a healthy mental and emotional balance.

In this 3-part online course, Senior Iyengar yoga teacher Marla Apt shares the principles used in recent successful studies on yoga for depression to show how yoga asanas and other yogic practices can help balance our thoughts and emotions.

The course draws on a yoga research intervention for depression and generalized anxiety disorder, which Marla designed under the guidance of BKS Iyengar. She will highlight the principles that were used in these studies to select the tools to enhance and elevate our mood.

The ancient yogis understood the intimate connection between posture, breath, and emotions. The emotional sheath is part of our body and through yoga asana, we can reach and transform that sheath.

Learn how various aspects of the yoga practice affect our mental state and how a targeted yoga practice can address the symptoms of distress, moodiness, or mild depression that manifest in the body. 

What You Will Learn:

• The three different types of asana practice that can support a healthy mental and emotional balance.
• How we can understand our mood and emotions through the lens of yoga’s goal of liberation. 
• How the ancient texts refer to our moods as well as to the symptoms of challenging emotions in the body and mind and offer ways to free ourselves from oppressive thought patterns.
• Results of research studies using these principles.

This is a course with deep insights and self-care techniques using the tools of yoga that can help foster greater self-empowerment. Whether a novice or seasoned practitioner, you will learn to apply the principles as appropriate for your level of practice.​​

Take a Sneak Peek at Marla's Slides: