Irene Ais and her discovery with yoga
We chat with Irene Ais, creator of the Unite Health Therapeutic Yoga Series, on when she first discovered yoga. And why yoga is so important for health professionals.
How did your physiotherapy career lead you to Therapeutic yoga?
Once I felt the benefits myself, I started sharing breath and yoga exercises with clients with great results.
I also found that many patients who were stressed and had poor self-awareness tended to be more challenging to treat, even when they presented with simple musculoskeletal issues. I became increasingly interested in the mind-body connection. Eventually, I felt that I wanted to help people take responsibility for themselves and gain the awareness in order to prevent injuries in their body and manage them more easily when they occurred.
Why is yoga so important for health professionals?
I think health professionals are perfectly placed to offer yoga to the community. Our skills in clinical reasoning, communication, observation and knowledge of anatomy and pathophysiology ensures that we can create a safe environment for people to navigate yoga poses and to match people with the graded level of exercise that they need.
We also live in a time of rising stress, mental health issues and simply people reporting being too busy to look after themselves. Yoga and meditation are tools to help people calm the mind, explore themselves and generally enhance their self awareness and mental and physical health. It is a growing industry however it is often intimidating for people to begin learning yoga and meditation in large class environments. Health professionals are perfectly placed to offer supportive and smaller environments for students and their professional credibility can also enhance trust for new students who see the often overwhelming number of different options in the industry.
What’s been the proudest moment in your career?
The day that I ran the Therapeutic Yoga Level 2 course has to be one of the proudest days I have experienced. I was so happy to hear the stories of how yoga, breath and meditation had benefited their lives however, I was overwhelmed with the stories of how these tools had benefited current clients with their treatment programs and how yoga and meditation were being shared within health professionals' businesses across Australia and New Zealand.
What will the Therapeutic Yoga series help you to achieve and why?
Health professionals will gain the knowledge to understand the benefits of breath, meditation and yoga postures. These tools are then explored practically within the course so that all participants can experience the benefits for themselves. With this practical foundation, poses, techniques and tools are work-shopped extensively in order to understand how to modify and grade yoga and meditation for students.
This allows all course participants to understand how to include these tools within their current management plans but also to begin to share group classes and courses for students to attend.
