LIVE Trauma-Informed Body-Positive Viniyoga Teacher Training and Advanced Yoga Teacher Training with Somatic Coaching. Includes 1:1 Mentoring with our Founder.
Certify to teach Vinyasa, Restorative, Yin, and Yoga Nidra in person, online, in groups or 1:1 through the foundations of the Eight Limbs of Yoga
At the heart of everything we do at the Life of Wellness Institute is a diverse and welcoming community of humans who have been touched by the experience of being human, which is the guiding light and fuel behind our work and our vision. We believe everybody deserves access to the tools and capacity to compassionately embrace our true selves with embodied wisdom as we navigate life’s experiences and challenges.
We sincerely believe that Vinyoga can help! Viniyoga is an ancient Sanskrit term that means appropriate application and implies differentiation and adaptation. Its teaching emphasizes a comprehensive and authentic transmission of yoga designed for everyone’s unique body and mind. It is a therapeutic approach to yoga that adapts the various means and methods of practice to each individual’s unique condition, needs, and interests – giving each practitioner the tools to individualize and actualize the process of self-discovery and personal transformation.
The Yoga Sutras tell us that genuinely taking care of ourselves, recognizing, and honoring our uniqueness comes from tapas (the disciplines we undertake to care for ourselves at a multi-dimensional level). At the Life of Wellness Institute, we believe we must also include self-compassion.
The practices of yoga provide the means to support each practitioner to embrace their life, health, and wellness fully and compassionately. This requires understanding a person’s present condition, personal potential, appropriate goals, and the means available. Just as every person is different, these aspects will vary with each individual.
Ultimately, our practice is designed to help us see who we genuinely are, in all our layers (koshas) of self, understanding our functional anatomy, physiology, emotional states, self-concept, beliefs about ourselves and the world around us, the direction of our future so that we can make choices that increase our sense of balance, harmony, and peacefulness—adapting our practice to our needs using the broad spectrum of yoga tools that are available to help us create sympathetic and parasympathetic regulation, love, compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, and clarity. Simultaneously improving our immune function, having structural integrity, sleeping better, and being clear about who we are and where we are heading in our life.
Logistically, Viniyoga is practiced through the offerings of the Yoga Sutras, such as āsana, prāṇāyāma, bandha, sound, chanting, meditation, personal ritual, and study of texts. However, there is an underlying context of appropriately applying these tools of yoga to the student’s Dharma (how each of us fulfills our responsibilities to ourselves, each other, the earth, the universe, and the divine; our purpose), Swadharma (practicing one’s dharma, a personal mission or purpose), with the understanding of a person’s swabhav (their innate traits, nature, and capacities as well as their present condition, potential, goals, and means. Which will differ and vary not only within the individual but also with each individual.)
The long-term goals of Yoga as Therapy include:
Reducing the symptoms of suffering that can be reduced
Managing the symptoms that cannot be reduced
Rooting out causes wherever possible
Improving life function
Shifting attitude and perspective in relationship to life’s challenges
Our training is led live with the supportive guidance of our founder and lead teacher Melanie Taylor.