New Yoga Therapy Clinic Will Give You a ‘Yoga Prescription’ to Treat Everything from Anxiety to Injury 

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“I started off thinking of a model for an urgent care clinic, where you can go for something that’s not super serious, like a sore throat, and leave with a plan for how to treat it,” Theresa Conroy, yoga therapist and owner of Roxborough’s Yoga on the Ridge, tells me of her latest yoga-related endeavor: a walk-in yoga therapy clinic designed to help people treat everything from anxiety to a sprained ankle with — what else? — yoga.

The clinic, held at Yoga on the Ridge, will be open on Saturdays from 12 to 3 p.m. starting September 12th, and anyone is welcome to walk in (or, if you, like me, need everything to be penciled into your calendar, you can also make an appointment). The idea is this: For $45, you’ll get 30 minutes of one-on-one time with Conroy to talk about whatever’s ailing you — stress, osteoporosis, a recovering injury — and get a treatment plan from Conroy consisting of whatever fits, from breath work to yoga postures. “Like a yoga prescription?” I asked Conroy when she explained the concept to me. “Right, like a yoga prescription,” she said.

In her life as a yoga therapist, Conroy works with people suffering from a wide range of ailments: spinal cord injury, chronic pain, PTSD, athletic injuries, and so on. “Yoga is so fabulous for people who have injury or disease, or people going through cancer recovery. But, “she explains, “it’s also intimidating. This way, people can take a yoga prescription and work it into their life, and it won’t be a scary experience.”

To get an idea of what one can expect in one of these yoga therapy clinic sessions, I asked Conroy what she would tell me if I walked in and said, “I have terrible anxiety. HELP!” As she explains, first and foremost, it’s about getting in tune with the “life rhythm” of the person she’s treating and seeing if fast flows, like a Vinyasa sequence, are going to be effective or if more static poses are the answer. As a (former) fellow anxiety-ridden human, Conroy says she’s found that relaxing poses didn’t do much for her, but challenging poses where she had to maintain a strong, deep breath when she wasn’t necessarily physically comfortable did. So if it seemed fitting, she might prescribe a sequence of challenging poses to practice throughout the week and encourage me to focus on my breath. But in the end, “people are different,” she says. Like any other prescription, a yoga prescription is never going to be one-size-fits-all.

To start, it will just be Conroy doing the clinic sessions, but if things go well and a good amount of people are into it, she’s hoping to expand the hours and get one or two more yoga therapists on board. You can find out more about the yoga therapy clinic here.

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