TF05: Designing for Adherence in Yoga Therapy: Empowering and Supporting Clients’ Daily Decisions to Practice

Speaker bio: Jaime Stover Schmitt, EdD, E-RYT 500, C-IAYT

Supporting adherence to yoga therapy practice is one of the most significant challenges faced by yoga therapists and clients alike. Despite the potential for yoga therapy to offer profound physical, emotional, and mental health benefits, many clients struggle to maintain a consistent practice outside therapy sessions. This issue is multifaceted, involving physiological, logistical, and practical barriers. Common issues such as lack of motivation or time, perceived complexity of practice, hazy understanding of benefits, poor personal connection, accessibility, cultural barriers, and other emotional or mental factors contribute to this dilemma.

This session will address some of these obstacles and offer practical suggestions and tools along with creative and engaging ways of designing personalized, accessible, and motivating practices that clients can integrate into their daily lives. Together, we’ll consider the common barriers to adherence and compliance, and discuss the subtle difference between these terms, in yoga therapy practice. Then, we will explore strategies to foster daily decisions to engage with familiar wellness directives through lenses of equity, accessibility, and cultural competence. Case examples demonstrating features such as micro-practices and portability will be available for review and reflection, and attendees can expect large- and small-group discussion as well as partner or small-group practices.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand barriers to adherence and compliance, and the subtle difference between these two terms, in yoga therapy practice.
2. Appraise strategies that foster daily decisions to adhere to wellness directives commonly known and given.
3. Initiate development of therapeutic design features of yoga therapist practice that promote adherence in clients and patients.