About Leila’s Teaching

With her medical background, Leila’s teaching bridges the worlds of Yoga Therapy, manual therapy and movement education.  Her workshops are suitable for Yoga and Pilates students and teachers, personal trainers, dancers and athletes, as well as physical therapists, chiropractors, and somatic practitioners.  Whether a teacher, practitioner or student, anyone who wants to live in their body with greater ease,  grace, and stability, would benefit from Leila’s workshops.

The material Leila teaches in her workshops is drawn from the 600+ page teaching manual she wrote for The Anatomy of Yoga Therapy, a 300 hour certificate training she taught from 2001 to 2015.  In this training and her workshops, she focuses on experiential anatomy and movement repatterning to develop students’ kinesthetic sense of the location of anatomical structures and how they work together to align and balance the body.  By experimenting in the “laboratory of the body” students learn to live more from their Wholeness through a compassionate and functional understanding of the body that touches the deepest aspects of the self.

Workshop students can expect to learn some of the following competencies:

• Experiential anatomy that integrates intellectual information with kinesthetic experience
• Assessment of patterns of breath, movement and alignment
• Preliminary movements to increase awareness and range of motion to prepare the body for more complex movement
• Developmental movement patterns that underlie all human movement
• Application of therapeutic movement and yoga therapy principles to facilitate improved physical function without injury; increased relaxation response and; mental and emotional equanimity
• Adaptation of yoga postures and movements for individuals with varying movement capability
• Planning safe and effective therapeutic programs for individuals with specific pathologies
• Practical applications of yogic philosophy
• Teaching models with an emphasis on the student’s responsibility and involvement in the process of healing
• Strategies for moving students from a mindset of separation to one of Wholeness, and from helplessness to empowerment
• Application of the koshic model as the foundation for self-healing
• Refinement of the student’ s own personal practice from the perspective of anatomical awareness and intelligence, individual requirements and the application of the tools of Yoga