The Mind-Body Connection: Healing Through Combined Talk Therapy & Yoga
By Alex Luber
So you know that craze about the mind-body connection? That’s what I’m all about. I can treat the mind-body connection so that it makes a transformative impact in people’s lives. However, a persistent challenge of my career has been to accurately describe it. Identifying it is simple. I am a psychotherapist and yoga instructor who can combine the two. Getting people to understand this is tricky.
What I’ve noticed is that while people accept the mind-body connection, they don’t necessarily understand, appreciate, or even know what to do with it. This is because it’s incredibly hard to pinpoint the nature of the interaction. How do you identify how something in the mind impacts something else in the body? How exactly are your stressors giving you physical ailments?
Well, this is where I come in and where our work begins.
I specialize in working with those who have physical ailments and/or emotional struggles and who want to make a permanent lifestyle shift. You don’t really need to know exactly what the problem is or even the nature of your pain. Sometimes it’s just the problem itself you are trying to understand.
While doing yoga work with clients, I help them recover from trauma that might include abuse, anxiety, or grief. Because of my psychotherapy background, I can also help with all five elements of traumatic recovery including the most important, constructive dialogue. When the body has been hurt in some way and you get help at a physician’s office, that’s great; but you’re eventually going to need to process what happened.
The issues that we address vary from depression to trauma to chronic stress to herniated disks in the back. Half of this work is discovering how you’re handling this mentally: what is the story I’m telling myself about my suffering? Am I lying about what I really have control over or whose fault this is? Once there is more understanding and structure around your healing, physically and mentally, solution focused and present moment focused, the stage is set for healing.
The final and most important facet to share about this practice is the empowerment it can provide. This is what makes me such an advocate of this particular brand of mind-body healing. When we work together, I am going to teach you strategic stretches, mind-body solutions, and improved mindsets to adopt. We’re going to work together to discover what needs to be addressed and put your healing in your own hands by teaching you how to heal yourself.
If your back is hurting you while on vacation, you won’t need a chiropractor because you’ll have your belts (a prop used in yoga to help with stretching). If you are feeling stressed and it’s having an impact on your gastrointestinal functioning, you’ll know the mindset shift that you need to adopt along with other helpful stretches to feel better all on your own. After deeply experiencing yoga-based mind body healing, you won’t need to run to another healer because you’ll be your own healer.
Alex Luber is a Mental Health Therapist and Yoga Instructor at Elle who runs our Yoga as Medicine program. Learn more about Alex on his profile: ellewellstudio.com/who-we-are/alex-luber and buy a session of
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