Introduction to Integrative Yoga Counselling
I co-teach Integrative Yoga Therapy Counselling with Heather Mason, a long-term colleague, collaborator and friend. Our relationship began during my studies at The Minded Institute and has evolved through years of shared clinical teaching, supervision and curriculum development. This training arises directly from the realities of one-to-one work, where emotional material, relational dynamics and nervous system states inevitably come into the room.
The course brings together person-centred counselling, applied physiology, somatic awareness, and yogic philosophy and psychology as a unified approach to relational practice. Rather than focusing on technique alone, the emphasis is on ethical clarity, regulation and embodied presence. The training is designed for yoga teachers, yoga therapists and health professionals, and no prior counselling training is required.
Yoga Therapy: An Embodied Framework for Therapeutic Work
Yoga therapy is a therapeutic discipline that works directly with physiological regulation, embodied experience, and meaning-making. It attends to the nervous system states that underpin emotional experience and relational capacity, rather than relying on cognitive insight or behavioural change alone.
Yoga therapy uses the kosha model as a diagnostic and organising framework, understanding the human being as comprised of interrelated dimensions of body, breath, mind, meaning, and the capacity for insight and connection. This enables emotional material to be approached through regulation, embodiment, and lived experience.
Within this training, yoga therapy provides a trauma-informed, regulation-based foundation for relational work. Counselling skills bring structure, ethical precision, and psychological clarity to this foundation, supporting practitioners to respond skilfully as emotional material arises in one-to-one settings. Together, yoga therapy and counselling skills form an integrated, clinically grounded approach to relational practice.
What Makes This Training Distinct
Physiological literacy as a foundation
Counselling skills are taught through an applied understanding of psychophysiological states, polyvagal theory, embodied attunement, and neuroplasticity. This enables practitioners to recognise shifts in regulation, safety, and engagement as they occur, and to respond with precision rather than assumption.
The joint use of bottom-up and top-down approaches
Embodied awareness and regulation accompany the development of counselling skills. Breath, grounded movement, and somatic attunement support cognitive and relational processes, allowing therapeutic presence to arise in real time rather than through cognitive effort alone.
Wisdom traditions as an integrated foundation
Yogic and Buddhist wisdom traditions are included not as belief systems, but because they contribute in two specific and functionally distinct ways to relational practice:
- These traditions provide concrete, time-tested methods for developing the qualities associated with effective counselling skills, including sustained attention, ethical sensitivity, emotional steadiness, and reflective self-awareness. Rather than assuming these capacities emerge automatically through practice, the training draws on structured methods for cultivating and stabilising them over time. This supports practitioners to remain present, responsive, and accountable when emotional intensity rises, not through technique selection, but through developed capacity.
- Training designed for genuine integration.Some practitioners arrive with embodied and somatic experience and need counselling skills; others arrive with relational or clinical training and need physiology and somatic understanding. By integrating counselling skills with regulation and embodied awareness, the training enhances the effectiveness of both, creating a coherent whole that is more clinically useful than either approach in isolation.
Course Structure
Day 1: Presence, Attending, and Listening
Foundations of therapeutic attention, embodied listening, nervous system regulation, and dharana (focused attention).
Day 2: Empathy, Acceptance, and Warmth
Unconditional positive regard, the physiology of empathy, co-regulation, and ahimsa (non-harming).
Day 3: Truthfulness and Therapeutic Integrity
Congruence, embodied authenticity, physiological alignment, and satya (truthfulness).
Day 4: Clarifying and Deepening Understanding
Reflective inquiry, somatic markers, attunement to dysregulation, and svadhyaya (self-inquiry).
Day 5: Integration, Challenge, and Reflection
Summarisation, nervous system integration, compassionate challenge through tapas, and samadhi (wholeness).
5 Days | 32.5 Contact Hours | Live Online
What You Will Leave With
- Practise counselling skills as embodied and relational processes, working with attention, sensation, emotion, and relationship as an integrated whole.
- Demonstrate therapeutic presence through attending, deep listening, and attunement, recognising how posture, breath, regulation, and self-awareness shape relational safety and trust.
- Listen accurately and reflectively, with awareness of how personal history, projection, and unconscious bias influence perception, and develop the capacity to suspend judgement in relational work.
- Cultivate empathy, acceptance, and warmth as lived qualities of presence, understanding how these support regulation, safety, and ethical connection without emotional merging or over-identification.
- Work with truthfulness and therapeutic integrity, recognising how congruence, discernment, and ethical self-awareness support authenticity, appropriate self-disclosure, and responsible communication.
- Use questioning, clarification, and reflective enquiry to support clients in deepening their understanding, without leading, interpreting, or imposing meaning.
- Recognise and respond to relational feedback, including resonance, rupture, fatigue, and countertransference, as informative signals rather than indicators of failure.
- Apply compassionate challenge and summarisation to support integration and meaning-making, with sensitivity to timing, safety, and relational balance.
- Integrate learning into reflective practice, developing the capacity to review experience, recognise personal patterns, and remain accountable to ethical and embodied presence.
- Translate insight into responsible action, bringing presence, clarity, and relational awareness into professional contexts with sensitivity to difference, culture, and lived experience.
Course Structure
5 Days | 32.5 Contact Hours | Live Online
Day 1: Presence, Attending, and Listening
Foundations of therapeutic attention, embodied listening, nervous system regulation, and dharana (focused attention).
Day 2: Empathy, Acceptance, and Warmth
Unconditional positive regard, the physiology of empathy, co-regulation, and ahimsa (non-harming).
Day 3: Truthfulness and Therapeutic Integrity
Congruence, embodied authenticity, physiological alignment, and satya (truthfulness).
Day 4: Clarifying and Deepening Understanding
Reflective inquiry, somatic markers, attunement to dysregulation, and svadhyaya (self-inquiry).
Day 5: Integration, Challenge, and Reflection
Summarisation, nervous system integration, compassionate challenge through tapas, and samadhi (wholeness).
Format: Live online via Zoom, with supporting materials provided through a learning platform
Dates & Investment
Dates: 22-26th April 2026
Time: 09:00–17:00 GMT
You can review the Terms and Conditions for courses with the Minded Institute here.
Assessment and Accreditation
This is an experiential, skills-based training. Assessment includes reflective journalling, observed practice, peer and self-evaluation, and group reflection on safety, inclusivity, and professional responsibility.
Participants receive CPD hours accredited by the International Association of Yoga Therapists (IAYT) and the National Council of Integrative Psychotherapists (NCIP).
This training serves as one of the optional CPDs for Minded Students on the IAYT path
Tutors
Heather Mason, MA, MA, MSc, C-IAYT
Founder, The Minded Institute
Heather Mason has trained yoga therapists and health professionals for over fifteen years. She holds master’s degrees in Buddhist Studies, Psychotherapy, and Medical Physiology, with extensive training in neuroscience. She has taught at Harvard Medical School, Boston University School of Medicine, and the Maryland University of Integrative Health, and is a founding trustee of the Yoga in Healthcare Alliance.
Shaura Hall, C-IAYT, NCIP
Founder, The Pilamaya Centre for Integration Psychotherapy
Shaura Hall is a Neurosomatic Psychotherapist, Certified Yoga Therapist, Therapeutic Supervisor, and Interfaith Minister. She is Course Director of the Level 5 Diploma in Integration Psychotherapy and has been a senior lecturer and supervisor at The Minded Institute for over a decade.
