Yoga Therapy in Mainstream Medical Care with Jen Peterson

After sustaining a severe back injury, yoga therapist Jen Peterson, C-IAYT, found herself completely ostracized by modern, fitness-based studio spaces that prioritized rigid, hyper-flexible physical shapes. That turning point sparked a lifelong vow: to champion the truth that the pose is meant to serve the body—not the other way around.

In this episode of This is Yoga Therapy, host Michele Lawrence sits down with Jen Peterson, C-IAYT, an Ayurvedic Health Counselor, Reiki Master, and the founder of Yoga Grace. Jen beautifully splits her time between her private practice and working as an integrated provider at the University of Vermont Medical Center’s Comprehensive Pain Program, treating patients with complex chronic conditions.

Together, they dive into why physical poses only scratch the surface of true healing, what happens when you bring bottom-up somatic tools into an allopathic hospital setting, and how the clinical application of yoga therapy can change the landscape of modern pain management.

In this conversation, we explore:

• The Injury Pivot: How feeling isolated by Western studio culture redefined Jen's clinical framework of what a "successful" practice looks like.
• Yoga in the Hospital System: The shifts that occur in patient outcomes when bottom-up tools like pranayama and gentle asana are woven into traditional medical pain management.
• Moving Beyond the Physical Layer: A multi-dimensional look at why long-term healing is impossible if we only address the physical body (Annamaya Kosha).
• The Intersect of Yoga & Ayurveda: How circadian medicine and lifestyle rhythms change the way we assess root causes like chronic insomnia, anxiety, and digestive unrest.
• Advice for Emerging Therapists: The single most critical mindset shift a fitness-focused yoga teacher needs to make to transition into safe, therapeutic work with complex populations.

Guest Links

• Connect with Jen Peterson: Explore her virtual practice library, register for asynchronous recordings, and book private yoga therapy or Ayurvedic consultations at YogaGraceVT.com.

Enjoyed this conversation? Please leave a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify! Share this episode with a healthcare provider, yoga teacher, or anyone navigating chronic pain who needs to hear that if they can breathe, they can practice.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome to This Is Yoga Therapy. I'm your host, Michelle Lawrence. Join me as we venture beyond the map into the fascinating intersections of yoga and health. Each episode brings you candid conversations with the visionary leaders and practitioners who are truly shaping this field, sharing their stories, insights, and the profound impact of yoga therapy in action. Hey everyone, Michelle here. I want to take a quick 60-second break from today's conversation to invite you to something incredibly special that we've been building behind the scenes. On July 18th and 19th, we're officially holding Science and Soul, the Yoga Therapy and Integrative Wellness Summit. If you love the deep dive conversations we have on this podcast, then this summit's your chance to experience that wisdom and action. You're going to learn live from absolute masters of the field, including Joseph LaPage, Maria Shamas, Neil Pearson, and Smith Amalaya. Best of all, tickets are completely free, and your registration includes a limited time replay pass. Head over to the show notes right here or go directly to InnerPeaceyogatherapy.com slash summit to claim your free ticket. And I can't wait to see you there. Now let's get back to today's episode. Well, welcome back to This Is Yoga Therapy. And today we're joined by a yoga therapist whose personal healing journey and clinical work beautifully illustrate the true multidimensional power of this lineage. Jen Peterson, who's a CIYT, also an Ayurvedic Health Counselor, Reiki master, and the founder of Yoga Grace. And after sustaining a severe back injury herself that left her feeling excluded by standard fitness-based yoga communities, Jen pivoted her life's work to champion a profound truth. If you can breathe, you can do yoga. Today she runs a thriving private practice and serves as an integrative provider at the University of Vermont's Medical Center's Comprehensive Pain Program, which was just highlighted in yoga therapy today, if you happen to see that. And there she works directly with patients navigating complex chronic conditions. Jen's here to talk with us about moving past the Western commercialization of yoga, the critical intersection of clinical hospital care, and why the physical poses are just scratching the surface of true structural and energetic liberation. Jen, it's such an absolute pleasure and honor to welcome you to the show and to meet you here today.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Thanks, Michelle. I'm really excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 3:03

So your entry into yoga therapy was deeply accelerated by your own personal journey navigating a major back injury, as I just alluded to. And you've written about how ostracized you felt by standard yoga spaces when you could no longer achieve rigid, hyper-flexible physical shapes, which sparked your vow to teach from the perspective that the pose is meant to serve the body and not the other way around. And so for our listeners who are managing chronic injuries or feel intimidated by modern studio culture, how does a yoga therapy framework redefine what a successful practice actually looks and feels like?

SPEAKER_01 3:48

I have to just say I love these questions. Like they really were fun to think about. And as you mentioned, this question sort of really resonates with me in my personal experience because I do think that a lot of the yoga studio culture today is focused on form, right, and what it looks like versus function. And we're so vulnerable to that in our culture overall as it is in terms of how we're perceived externally, and so much less sort of opportunity to think about and be encouraged to consider how we feel from the inside, right? And so I think that a yoga therapy framework, if you start to work practice from within that, does that shift from form to function, right? It's very personalized. It's what do you need right now? And so there's the first opportunity right there to think about what do I need, right? It's not like, am I doing this right? Right? It's what do I need? And so you get to increase your interoception, your ability to understand from within and to learn agency and learn wisdom about who you are and what you need. And that's sort of where the seeds of transformation really lie, I think, when we start to do a practice that's more from that framework.

SPEAKER_00 5:15

So true. Yeah. Beautiful. And I think it comes with time too, right? In our own experience with the practice. I recall when I first took on a yoga teacher training program, with of course, without the intention to teach, like so many people do, because I had a career in a totally different uh field. Um, I remember my teacher asking me, Why do you want to do this training? And one of the answers I gave was, well, because I want to make sure I'm doing the poses right. And now, like if I think back on that as to now, like now I have, I don't even know what that would mean, right? Or what that if someone came to me and kind of dropped that in my lap. So I think our experience and our years with yoga give us that understanding that it's not about that too. And if we can bring that to our students and our clients much earlier on, I think it becomes a much more liberating way to um embrace the practice, right? 100%.

SPEAKER_01 6:21

I feel like I hear that a lot in my work when I work with clients, particularly at the pain program and people that first start doing yoga. A lot of people that I see first are doing yoga for the first time and they'll come back for the second thing. They're like, I just want to make sure I'm doing it right. You know, and I love the comment that you made about it progresses the more we do the practice, right? And that's again, sort of the person, the that's when it becomes personal. That's it's meant to evolve with you. It's not meant to be the same sequence over and over again. In the same way, it's not meant to be a different sequence every single time, right? Like create a space for yourself, stay there as long as you need, learn what you need to know from the practice, which is really like my teacher, who Gary Kraftsau, who studied with Deskachar and Chris Macharya, said that they would say we do the asana to prepare the breath for pranayam, we do pranayam to prepare the mind for meditation, we meditate to prepare the heart for prayer, which connects us to the divine, which is no less than who we truly are. Right? And so it's it's always an evolution. We're always coming back to our own divinity, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And so your work today kind of looks like this split between your private studio and a major hospital system and part of integrative healthcare providers to treat chronic pain. And so bringing yoga therapy into an allopathic hospital environment requires a delicate balance, I'm sure. So, what shifts occur in a patient's clinical outcome when you introduce bottom-up tools like pranayama and gentle asana into their traditional pain management treatment plan?

SPEAKER_01 8:15

Yeah. Well, I think along the same lines, if you think about people who are in complex chronic pain, right, which is pain that doesn't necessarily come from just a motor vehicle injury or something like that. Like it can be there's a lot of autoimmune people with autoimmune disorders that are coming in, and people often have a lot of multiple conditions going on. Um, so they can feel really held hostage to their pain because their pain is totally compromising their life. And so giving them yoga is a practice-based system, right? So I can share something with them, but it has to be them taking it and doing it on their own to really get the full benefit. And when they can, when we can together find the entry point, right, they can do that practice and start to again get that interoception and realize they can have an understanding of what's going on with them, whether it's a path that will ultimately eliminate some of the pain or a path that will help them have a relationship to the pain that's not going to steal their whole life from them, right? So that they can be have happiness and have joy, even if they have an experience of chronic pain, that they are not their pain, I guess. And so I think that those even small nuggets of agency, especially in modern clinical care, where sometimes it's they have multiple providers, right, who may or may not be communicating with each other about what medication to take, and then there's surgery, right? And then there's injections you can get. And so this is something that's theirs, that they get to have sort of ownership of and feel real benefit from, even if it's just to calm themselves down with a short pranayam before they go to bed, you know. So I think that that's what, and to help them see that they're as in alignment with the idea that you are not your pain, right? That you are multidimensional. You can have this body that may not be doing what you wish it could do, but you can have a mind, you can have wisdom, you can have contentment and bliss, and there's a whole sort of world of yourself that you can understand and enjoy and live into.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

So really nice, thank you. Yeah, and you also have a beautiful, firm perspective on the commercialization of yoga in the West, often reminding your students that the physical poses just scratch the surface and that you emphasize real transformative power lies in the deeper layers, right? The breathwork, the meditation, the chanting, the prayer. I love that beautiful quote you offered in the beginning. So, from a multidimensional or kosher perspective, why is it harder to find true long-term healing if we're only treating the physical layer, the Anamaya kosha? It's a great question.

SPEAKER_01 11:29

And I think the first thing I would say is just focusing on the physical layer feels like our unsuccessful economic models of trickle up and trickle down, right? Like, why would you just focus on one? Why would you focus on just one thing? And, you know, using myself as an example, like you said, I navigated a major back injury into this world of yoga therapy, and in doing studies and practicing and building out a practice that's much more than asana, I came to be able to apply yoga to disordered eating and body image issues that I had, and to really, for the first time, sort of make some significant shifts for myself in how I had felt about who I was and a lot of not enoughness for a lot of my life. And then that became sort of like, well, it's not just about what I'm putting inside of my body as food, it's about how I'm showing up in my relationships, right? And so I think when you do the practice from a perspective of if you use the kosher model, right, like we have all these dimensions. I have the way that I learn, I have the level of energy that I tend to have in my body, right? I am I have a lot of kha, which is more Ayurvedic kind of understanding uh within myself. So I tend to be kind of low-key. I don't like to push myself too much, you know? And so I have figured out like what that means in terms of how to orient my life so that I have balance in my life and I'm getting what I need for activity, but I'm also staying within the pace of my life. And I feel like yoga helped me make the shift that I made from a career in nonprofit management, which I loved, to this, which feels like what I'm supposed to do because of that understanding of what kind of pace of life felt better for me, you know, in terms of helping me stay, feel like I'm able to like give as much as I can and get as much back, you know, in terms of feeling joy and happiness and contentment.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

Isn't that such a gift? How we learn so much about ourselves through our work to yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Yeah, and it's lifelong, right? There's always another layer to peel off and to realize.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Totally. Yeah. And so you you mentioned the Ayurvedic piece a little bit. Let's talk about that a little more. So, in addition to being a CIYT, you're also a certified Ayurvedic Health Counselor. And as many of us know, yoga and Ayurveda are sister sciences. And when you're assessing a client who's dealing with systemic issues like chronic insomnia, anxiety, digestive unrest, how does weaving Ayurvedic lifestyle and circadian rhythms together with the yoga therapy change how you assess and support their root dysregulation?

SPEAKER_01 14:38

Mm-hmm. I feel like getting that sort of broader perspective of the Ayurvedic system, which I will sort of put the clarity. For me, I feel like it's such a deep rich science. And I feel like I'm just kind of on the surface. I feel like the my deeper studies in yoga therapy feel a little bit more integrated for me. So I definitely ask a lot of questions when I'm doing assessments with people about what their lifestyle is, right? About how they handle stress, about how their relationships are going. And that gives a lot of broader feedback about, you know, in Ayurveda, the idea is that like increases like and opposites balance, right? So where is there an excess of things, right? So for somebody that's has a lot of vata in their constitution or is in the vata time of life, like when we go into our 50s and beyond, right? We're moving into the vata time of life. So you're going to see qualities expressed within yourself that are more around air and space, right? So we get drier, we get creakier, right? We get um hotter, all those sorts of things. We can feel a lot less grounded. Those are sort of the negatives, but we can also we have an opportunity to lighten our load, right? We don't have to feel so weighed down by. We're moving towards that transition away from being earthly, solid beings, right? So we can lean into the freedom that that might start to offer us in terms of considering things and turning towards our spiritual selves, right? Which is a little more subtle. So I like to take all of that into consideration when I'm thinking about sort of what's going on for them in terms of how they're showing up and what qualities they have that they're expressing, also that they're facing in their lives. So there's can be a lot of, you know, a lot of folks come to me and they're having a lot of transition in their lives, whether it's older like I am, and you know, starting to have more connection around taking care of our parents, right? I've moved out of like my kids are launched and on their way, and now it's I'm turning towards playing that role and what that does in your life. And so, how do you bring in balancing lifestyle and and yoga practices and teachings too, that I think could be um really supportive. I feel like the older folks that I'm working with now are much more um interested and receptive in doing studies of things like the yamas and niyamas, right? Or the koshas and um and are ready to sort of take the time to think about that. And they might have a little more space in their lives to do that.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Isn't that wonderful? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, these are whole integrated systems. And I think that we can go to a certain extent in the yoga therapy space with lifestyle, but as you mentioned, the just having that Ayurvedic perspective can help it land even more specifically.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

Yeah, there can be really simple things too. It doesn't have to be a whole huge protocol.

SPEAKER_00 18:00

Typically it's the simple, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 18:02

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 18:04

So your advanced studies are heavily anchored in the Vini Yoga lineage, and it inherently prioritizes absolute personalization and adaptation. And you're also highly passionate about mentoring the next generation of instructors, yoga therapists, teachers through continuing education. Probably they're all along that continuum somewhere, right? Yeah. And so for the yoga teachers listening who want to transition from leading general fitness-focused classes into yoga therapy and working safely and therapeutically with complex populations, what's the most critical shift in mindset they need to make?

SPEAKER_01 18:42

I would say that know that even though a lot of the studios where they're working may be um fitness-focused classes, there are more and more people that are coming to those classes that need personalized support, right? That it is gonna be really helpful if you can be sort of starting to watch that and where you might see people not having a hard time and thinking about ways to offer what you're teaching in the class that offers options, right? And not just if you can't do the full expression of the posture, but more like maybe some people need to do this. So, for example, if I'm teaching a class and I'm doing a bridge pose, right? If people can't get on the floor, I'll demonstrate something that they might do from the chair. If people are on the floor, some people with back problems who are still going to yoga classes need to lift their whole back up and not roll up and roll down. So just being mindful of presenting it as there's all different ways to do this. I also think that, so this is what I did was I started to go down this path and I was like, nobody's gonna want to hire me as a teacher because I don't teach that, right? And I tried to teach it and I was terrible at it because it didn't feel like the right thing. It felt weird, it felt hard, even though that's where I started. I started as an Ashtanga practitioner, but it just didn't feel like the right way to sort of show up. But don't assume that people don't want what you have to offer or what yoga therapy has to offer because people do. Um, and there's more people we can reach who are afraid to come into the studio because they don't think they look like the people that are in the studio, and they don't think that they're flexible enough or strong enough. That's definitely one that I get a lot, um, who love yoga if you can show them how to do it in a way that really gives them what they need. And this is a little bit farther down the road example, but when I first started working six years ago at the pain program, I was like, okay, most people are just gonna want to have physical practice. So that's what I'll focus on. And I don't know what the doctors are gonna say if I say something about chanting, right? Nobody's gonna want to chant. It's gonna make them feel too weird, even though I at that time was like really getting into chanting in my personal practice and really excited about you know what was happening when I was chanting. And so I didn't for a long time. And then I started to say more, more, I'd started with teachings, right? Like, you know, in yoga, when you know this comes up in terms of where you are, how you're thinking about things, you know, you might think about it this way, right? Like we are infinitely abundant, right? And you have the resources that you need. Sometimes The stories that you tell yourself help you don't understand that that's true, kind of thing. So, anyway, I started to offer teaching folks chanting while they're doing some movement or while they're doing you know silent chanting in pranayam. And the appreciation that people have for their practice, I think when they get more of an emotionally personal connection to what they're doing, they do it more often because it feels more meaningful to them, right? And sometimes it's we don't go to the Sanskrit chant, right? That just feels that does feel too foreign. It doesn't have meaning for people, but they can have their own mantras that they'll say while they chant. And so I would say half the time now, I'll go right to like, let's try some chanting. And people are way more game than you would think. So I had this whole story about what was going to be okay, what people were gonna think about it. And so, and now when we have we have case management meetings every week, and everybody's invited to take turns doing kind of an opening thing. And so now sometimes I'm like, let's just chant, you know, and so everybody's chanting now, and it and people love it. And I would have never thought that. I would have thought, nope, that's gonna have to be sort of the spiritual side of things that I'll just say for my personal or my private practice with people. And it's really, you know, so just don't assume what people want or need. Like people need yoga therapy, and I think more doctors and health coaches and even physical therapists that I have referral relationships with are, you know, people are coming to me and they're like, they said you can help me with gentle yoga. My doctor says I need gentle yoga. My doctor said restorative is really good for me. So I think there's a growing understanding of the real value that like slow, breath-oriented, introsceptive work that yoga offers can be really, really helpful.

SPEAKER_00 24:18

Yeah. Wow, you said a lot of things there. I just comment on a couple. I I one thing that stood out for me was yeah, we do often get in our own way as yoga teachers and yoga therapists about what we think people want and don't want. So that was really refreshing to hear. You kind of flip the script on that a bit and see how it's been received. And then the other thing is, you know, we do know now because there's some data behind it, that people are showing up at regular yoga classes, whether it's at the studio or their gym, and they're in pain already. They have they're going because their doctor said, or because they've heard that yoga is good for pain management. And that's just the one place, right? And there's all these other people that haven't stepped inside a yoga studio that we can serve. And so, you know, for me, it's about yes, the gentle, breath-oriented, interoceptive practices that are gonna help find that space for healing. But it's also like this language and cueing, and I learned this from Neil Pearson around his pain work is that if we're telling people like, don't do it if it hurts, and yet everything hurts all the time, it's very disempowering. And that is often the language in the yoga studio. So I think there's lots of opportunities there, and we, you know, chronic pain is this huge problem affecting so many people.

SPEAKER_01 25:55

So true. So true. Yeah, I think that that's true. I also think uh related to this, but I also think going back to the idea of the kosher, too, like pain is just a signal from the brain, right? And and I listened to the Neil Pearson podcast, and he talked a little bit about this, right? Like, there's a whole other host of things going on that you don't know about, that you can't see in the studio. And so being really inclusive and thoughtful and you know, gentle about how you're offering what you're offering, and it just it's really, I think, important. And I yeah, I want yoga to be accessible to everybody, the people that show up and then the people that don't show up, right? It's uh there's so many people that come to their first session with me at the pain program, and they're like, I'm coming because they told me I should try everything, because they get the opportunity to do a lot of different things when they're going through this kind of 16-week journey with us through the pain program, and and they're like, Yeah, I'm just I'm just I've never done it before, but I'm not really flexible, I'm not strong, I can't get down on the floor. But they told me to try it because they said that you could do other things besides, you know, whatever they see, you know, in social media or on the TV or whatever in terms of yoga. So, and they're really surprised, right? At what what's possible and how it can help them. Well, how wonderful that you've got this program going. Yeah. It's my favorite place I've ever worked.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

How long have you been there? Six years. Okay. Yeah. And the program's been living there that whole time?

SPEAKER_01 27:52

Um, it started about two years before I started working there. Um, they had a little bit of challenge figuring out how to integrate the practices that insurance traditionally doesn't cover, right? So yoga therapy and massage and reiki aren't billable sort of as separate entities. So they had to figure out a different billing model, but they kind of got the hang of that.

SPEAKER_00 28:18

And they figured it out. They figured it out. Yeah. Well, maybe that can be such a model that we can utilize elsewhere. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:25

I hope so. I hope so. Wonderful. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

Well, I love to close our conversations on the podcast to just know a little bit more about you and your own personal practice, which I'm sure has evolved through the years. 100%. And really as a foundational piece to what you do, right? So your own personal practice comes first. It really helps all everything else that you do in the world. So, would you be able to give us a little taste or picture of what your personal yoga practice looks like?

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Yeah. I love that you asked that question for everybody because I do feel like, and that was sort of definitely encouraged very strongly in my training programs. Like, you have to practice to be able to teach this. Um, because you you won't know what you don't know. You know? Yeah. Um, I, thanks to the teach the therapy training that I've done, have a practice that is really um it has asana, it has pranayam, and it has meditation. It tends to be between 30 and 45 minutes. I do it in the morning. I am usually using it, uh I'm always using teachings. Um, because I've been really trying since graduating to do more in-depth training and understanding of just the rich teachings that are there. So, for example, right now I'm working with saucha, the first niyama of the yamas and niyamas, and the idea of purity and clarity and just clearing the clutter out so I can understand what I need to know. Um, and so I will do so. I have the chant for saucha, which is om aim umdaya namaha, and I'll chant with the asanas. I will do a silent chant with pranayam, and then I sit in meditation and just open, I guess, to sort of receive what I meant to receive, right? So that's like I want to get to that deeper layer of myself where I think we're whole, right? And we have a truth that gets clogged up by all of our conditioning, you know, from our life and our ancestors' lives and past lives, if you believe um in that and and try to understand what I need to know. So, right, and that's yoga, right? It's getting to know what you need to know about yourself, and getting to know what you need to know about yourself is what we need to do for everybody else too, right? Like when we show up as our true selves, we bring that out in others, and then we start to live into the abundance of the universe, right? That we are all connected and we are all meant to offer our whole pure, beautiful selves to the world, right? That's what's gonna lead us forward, you know, into better times.

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Well, thank you so much, really, for taking the time today and for your commitment to the practice, your gentle presence, and really for showing us how to build genuine accessible pathways within modern medicine. I think it's a real example of that, what you're doing in Vermont. And I'll include this in the show notes too. But if you are interested in uh reaching out to Jen, learning more about what she does, you can see her virtual practice library. She's got asynchronous recordings, and you can schedule private sessions or Ayurvedic consultations by visiting yogagracevt as invermont.com. So thank you so much, Jen, for walking this path with us today. Thank you, Michelle. That was really fun. Thanks again for listening. If you're interested to learn more about who we are and what we do, check us out at innerpeaceyogatherapy.com.