In the Beginning, In the Present Moment, In the Future, A Dream Realized, When Did Yoga Therapy Become a "Field?", Down the Road: Yoga Therapy in the Future, Looking Back Looking Forward

Abstract

In 1970, I began living an odyssey steeped in grace that has carried me these past 40 years. I've had the good fortune to mentor with experts in the fields of psychotherapy, Judeo-Christianity, Taoism, Buddhism, Yoga, and Western, Chinese, and Ayurvedic medicine., As the International Journal of Yoga Therapy celebrates its twentieth anniversary, I pause and take note of all that has happened over the past three decades and relish that sublime feeling of satisfaction one gets from seeing one's dream being realized., The day before I started to write this article I sat with eleven other Yoga teachers, each representing a member school of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, each a steward of their Yogic lineage and tradition, each a pioneer in bringing Yoga as a therapy into Western medicine. We met as a standards committee intended to create minimum requirements for Yoga therapist training., One of my favorite quotes states: Planning is absolutely necessary and completely impossible. Clearly, planning or predicting the future of such a new American profession as Yoga therapy is a difficult task. But it is made easier by thinking of this prediction in a new way., I have been on the IAYT board for five years, and I am currently serving as president for a one-year term. Twenty years ago, I was teaching a course called Psychology of Yoga (PSY 352) at Sonoma State University. I created the course in 1969 when I was first hired by the psychology department. When I arrived on campus, the chair of the department asked me, "If you could teach anything you wanted, what would you like to teach?"