Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Fort Collins. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Nick George helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around Fort Collins, Colorado.
Is your business serving the residents of Fort Collins? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpFortCollins.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: Fort Collins
E34: Healing Minds Through Movement: How Treetop Yoga Therapy Changes Lives
When yoga therapy meets mental health, something remarkable happens. Ena Rodriquez O'Rourke takes us on a profound journey through her 13-year practice at Treetop Yoga Therapy, where she's helping veterans with PTSD, individuals struggling with addiction, and people recovering from physical injuries find their way back to themselves.
"Yoga is not just exercise, and it's definitely not a religion," Ena explains, dismantling common misconceptions that have followed yoga across cultural boundaries. As someone who left Alabama seeking a more open-minded environment, she understands firsthand the barriers that can prevent people from experiencing yoga's therapeutic benefits. Her practice welcomes everyone—regardless of background, belief system, or age—creating a truly inclusive healing space.
What makes yoga therapy distinctive is its present-moment focus. Unlike traditional talk therapy that often requires revisiting painful histories, Ena's approach helps clients reconnect with their bodies right now. "We work with what's present in that moment," she shares, describing how this technique helps people move from dissociation (being "in the attic of your head") back into their bodies where healing can occur. This skill proved life-saving in her own family, helping her navigate parenting challenges with her neurodiverse child as a single mother. Through her certification in iRest Yoga Nidra—a technique adopted by the military in 2006—she's witnessed remarkable transformations in clients who previously felt stuck in trauma responses. Now balancing her therapy practice with a return to professional acting, Ena embodies the integration of mind, body, and creative expression she helps others achieve.
Curious about how yoga therapy might support your healing journey? Visit https://treetopyogatherapy.com/ to learn more, or find a certified yoga therapist in your area through the International Association of Yoga Therapists. Your path to reconnection might be closer than you think.
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Nick George.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. Are you in need of a yoga therapy experience that reaches the treetops and customer satisfaction? One might be closer than you think. Today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, Ina Rodriguez O'Rourke, with Treetop Yoga Therapy. Ina, how's it going?
Speaker 3:Wonderful Nick. How is it with you?
Speaker 2:Perfect, we're excited to learn all about your business. Tell us about your company or your practice.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you so much for having me on in the first place. I have been in business as a yoga therapist one-on-one for almost 13 years and have been teaching for 25. Yeah, how did you get into this business? I started as an actor in Los Angeles and I needed to take a break from it because I wanted to raise a family and one of my children had been diagnosed neurodiverse and because of that, there were some very specific challenges that needed some more of my time and actually some greater skill sets than I had. So I had begun teaching yoga for the calming of myself and my family and then I just continued to gain more knowledge, experience, certifications, etc. For the sake of my child.
Speaker 2:What are some myths or misconceptions in your industry?
Speaker 3:Oh, the first one I'll just name it is that yoga is specifically exercise. That is a great big myth and, I do have to say, by the same token, it's an excellent way to be introduced to it and you could even stop there if you want. There are plenty of amazing trainings in some of the more corporate lines of yoga that, having taken many of those as well, I find have excellent sequencing and can be a valuable part of an exercise routine. I also believe that there are a lot of folks, having grown up in the South myself I was raised in Alabama that believe yoga is a religion, and it's not. It predates Buddhism and Hinduism in books called the Vedas, this sort of thing, so there's absolutely no religion involved. You can, if you like, come to it from that mindset. Once again, another great way to go into it. But those are two myths.
Speaker 2:I find bandied about the most. I'm from Tennessee.
Speaker 3:Okay then have you noticed that there was kind of that idea that this is a religion when you were in Tennessee and in the South?
Speaker 2:Without going too far down that rabbit hole. It's the reason I moved here.
Speaker 3:Oh, gotcha, okay yeah.
Speaker 2:I needed a new environment with new types of thinkers around me, because I felt stifled or artificially contained by the reality that was prevalent there. But who are your target customers? How do you attract them now?
Speaker 3:So you know, starting from this point, working backward, I would say that primarily now I'm working with folks who have PTSD and it's become my specialty About. Well, I'm gonna say maybe it was 2010, that I became certified in something that's called iRest Yoga Nidra, short for integrative restoration, which is actually a training in Yoga Nidra, which is a form of theta wave state brainwave state and works a lot like hypnotherapy, and adopted by the military in 2006. So I've had contract work with the VA in Cheyenne and in Fort Collins for three and a half years working with groups of veterans, men and women who present with symptoms of PTSD, and then also addiction counseling. Same thing. A lot of addiction comes from having experienced traumas and just not feeling healed and using in some way because it works for a while until it doesn't any longer. So those two mental health states are my favorite and I have a lot of those, but I also really enjoy working with folks who have just had some surgeries or injuries and helping them to rehab.
Speaker 2:Ina, have you ever thought about doing your own podcast?
Speaker 3:I have actually as an actor especially, I thought about doing it yeah.
Speaker 2:Outside of work. What do you do for fun?
Speaker 3:Oh, I love to paddleboard. I hang with girlfriends like crazy and I am very much in love with travel, like I've been gone three weeks out of this month, probably four or five days, and I'm an actor, a professional actor. I went back to it. So I have two careers and I think that they dovetail beautifully into one another.
Speaker 2:Let's switch gears. Can you describe a hardship or life challenge that you overcame and how it made you stronger? What comes to mind?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's kind of sensitive, Nick, and I don't mind sharing.
Speaker 3:When I was going through these issues with my child becoming an adolescent and I was divorced, a single mom, there was a lot of episodes we'll call them episodes going on in the home.
Speaker 3:And in order to deescalate those those episodes and then deescalate myself and then deescalate my other child who was a part of that there had to be a real system in place.
Speaker 3:So my training in yoga nidra, my training in the iRest and in yoga therapy has helped me to systematically approach those things in such a way that I can, within I'm going to say quite easily, 30 minutes, get everybody down in the household from a 10 to a six, which is the ability to come out of the attic in your head where we dissociate when we're in the moment of trauma or fight or flight, and get back down into the body where there are so much, so many more bits of information coming in that you can utilize. It's just the human mechanism to dissociate. So I think that yoga therapy, I would have to say the thing that has really been life saving, foraving for me and for my family, has been that the knowledge that, oh my gosh, I'm not in my body. I need to now get into my body if I'm going to have a conversation that has more problem-solving compassion and love within it. And then to watch my children adopt some of these methods as well has been an incredible joy.
Speaker 2:I've got a couple of toddlers at home. I'm going to need some of these methods as well. Has been an incredible joy. I've got a couple of toddlers at home. I'm going to need some of that.
Speaker 3:Right, yes, tina, please tell our listeners one thing that they should absolutely remember about treetop yoga therapy Every culture, every background, every religion, every age is welcome within my office and within the offices of all yoga therapists. It is what we are geared for to really sit with whomever and with whatever they are feeling in the present moment, and no story need be told. So this is the difference between psychotherapy and yoga therapy we don't need to know a history. We work with what's present in that moment.
Speaker 2:And how can our listeners learn more about treetop yoga therapy?
Speaker 3:You can go to treetopyogatherapycom and it's very heavy on content, so that's the greatest place to go would be the website you can also, by the way. Oh sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. You can also go to the International Association of Yoga Therapists, which is a website, and their agency, which is based in the US, and find a yoga therapist who works in your neighborhood, and then most of us also work virtually.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, I really appreciate you being on the show. We wish you and your yoga therapy business the best moving forward.
Speaker 3:Thank you, nick, I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnpfortcollinscom. That's gnpfortcollinscom, or call 970-438-0825.