How Therapeutic Yoga Supports Chronic Pain
If you're living with chronic pain, you've likely already tried several approaches to relieve your pain — medications, physical therapy, rest, pushing through, or alternative care paths. While yoga therapy isn't a replacement or a cure, it can be a complementary approach that is grounded in real research and works alongside your existing support networks and methods.
It's worth being honest about the evidence rather than overselling it.
The strongest evidence comes from chronic low back pain research. A widely cited systematic review and meta-analysis found solid short-term evidence and moderate longer-term evidence that yoga improves pain and pain-related disability. A more recent review of the research, published in 2023, reached a similar conclusion; this one evaluated over a dozen systematic reviews. Yoga is now frequently recommended as an additional therapy for people managing chronic low back pain.
Newer research has also looked at how yoga compares to standard exercise-based treatment. A 2025 meta-analysis found that yoga wasn't necessarily superior to exercise for pain intensity specifically, but it showed a meaningful edge for physical function and mobility. In other words: yoga isn't magic. It isn't guaranteed to outperform other movement-based approaches on every measure, but it holds up as a genuinely evidence-supported option. It’s not just an alternative-medicine trend.
More recent - and more directly relevant here - is a 2025 meta-analysis of chronic pain. Here, yoga meaningfully improved pain as well as depression, anxiety, and overall quality of life without an increase in adverse effects. For many people living with persistent pain, the combination of physical relief alongside improvements in mood and daily functioning is substantial.
What the Research Shows
How Yoga Therapy Differs from a Yoga Class
There are a number of distinctions between taking a general yoga class and working with a certified yoga therapist. A studio class is created for a room full of people with a wide range of bodies and goals. Yoga therapy is often a private session (though it can be done in groups). It’s a therapeutically-informed practice tailored specifically to you, your body, your personal history and diagnosis, and your nervous system. It works at the pace set by you each day that we meet and it’s collaborative by nature.
I've been a certified yoga therapist since 2018, teaching yoga since 2009, and for over a decade I've worked alongside physical therapists, occupational therapists, and vestibular therapists to integrate yoga therapy into real, integrative patient care. I also co-facilitated the ARISE Program for Persistent Pain and Dizziness at Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley alongside Ben Boyd, PT, DPT. Because chronic pain and the nervous system are deeply connected, addressing both together supports deeper, more lasting relief.
Sessions are shaped around what your body and nervous system actually need, which might mean a gentle restorative practice during a flare-up or something more active when you have more capacity. Yoga therapy helps increase nervous system regulation, interoceptive and proprioceptive awareness (or, your felt sense of what’s happening inside your body and where your body is in space), and mindfulness. You’ll also explore more tools to use outside of session.
I may also weave in pain neuroscience education. Together, we'll explore how persistent pain actually works in the nervous system. Some research suggests this understanding can itself begin to soothe a nervous system that's stuck in chronic pain. It also gives us a shared language for what you're experiencing.
Chronic pain isn’t purely physical, even though we feel it (intensely); it’s systemic. Finding ways to access it, talk about it, and understand it are all different avenues for being with it and managing it.
Working through the body can also bring up sensations or emotions you weren't expecting, sometimes increasing protection before decreasing it. That's a normal part of the process, and something we'd navigate together in session.
Sessions are $145 for 50 minutes, the same rate as individual therapy, and are available online anywhere in California or in person in Livermore, CA.
What It Looks Like in Practice
This approach tends to be a strong fit if:
You're managing chronic pain, chronic illness, or persistent dizziness and want an approach that treats the body and the nervous system together
You've found that talk therapy alone doesn't fully address the physical experience of your pain
You're curious about mind-body approaches but want something more individualized than a general yoga class
You're already working with other providers (a PT, a physician, a specialist) and want a therapist who understands how to coordinate with that care
If any of this sounds like you or you’re just curious, I'd love to talk with you. Feel free to reach out.
Is Yoga Therapy Right for You?
Learn more about individual therapy
Learn more about persistent dizziness and somatic therapy
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