The Science of Yoga

association’s executive director, wrote an editorial arguing that registration with his group “should be amark of high accomplishment, acceptable to those steeped in the Yoga tradition and credible to integrative health care providers.” His article made repeated references to Registered Yoga Therapists.
    But as of 2011, after more than a decade of discussion, nothing had come of the registration idea. Yoga therapy remains a free spirit. Anyone can claim to be a yoga therapist.
    Individual schools have sought to fill this void (and their bank accounts) by teaching courses in healing and graduating what they call Certified Yoga Therapists. But the schools make up their own curriculum and teach whatever they deem appropriate, as does, for example, the Namaste Institute for Holistic Studies, in Rockport, Maine. Namaste is a Hindu greeting meaning “I bow to the divine in you.” The school’s program for certified therapists “provides in-depth training,” runs for a month, and costs nearly four thousand dollars. As is the case with registration, no national body administers tests, awards certifications, polices the field, or sets rules for what constitutes minimal education requirements for Certified Yoga Therapists. Once again, anything goes.
    “There is no such thing as a Registered Yoga Therapist,” Kepner of the International Association told me. “And the schools offering certifications in yoga therapy provide widely different types and amounts of training—say, from eighty to eight hundred hours.” Kepner also disparaged the registry idea as a “weak form of accreditation and credentialing, and not really sufficient to develop a credible professional field.”
    He said his group was investigating the conventional route to professional accreditation—as nutritionists, chiropractors, and acupuncturists have done successfully over the years. As a first step, he said, the association was supporting the formation of a council of schools that would establish a standard academic curriculum for the training of yoga therapists.
    All that may sound quite reasonable and forward-looking. But the association has long engaged in activities that have helped blur the issue of what constitutes a genuine credential.
    Every time members pay their annual dues to the association, they receive a fancy certificate suitable for framing that looks very much like a school diploma. It is personalized, too. I’ve gotten a number of them—one when I joined and others when I have renewed my membership (which now costs ninety dollars). The first one hangson the door of my home office.
    It looks quite elegant. The certificate is printed on parchment-colored paper and bears a gold border in a fine geometric pattern. The whole idea of a certificate—which the dictionary defines as “a document proving that the named individual has fulfilled the requirements of a particular field and may engage in its practice”—is evocative of professional accomplishment. The certificate’s reference to an “award,” and its twin signatures at the bottom, reinforce that idea. But a quick read shows that the document is in fact quite meaningless. In my case, it says I received the certificate “in recognition of supporting Yoga as an established and respected therapy in the West.”
    The certificate is signed at the bottom by Kepner, the group’s director, and Veronica Zador, its president. I’ve seen similar ones displayed prominently in yoga studios—framed and lending an air of authority to the teaching and healing enterprise.
    The phony credential does an injustice to the talented yoga therapists who have labored for years and decades to develop their healing expertise and have helped countless people. From what I saw, Nina Patella in Fishman’s office ministered to a patient needing special attention with great skill and compassion. So did Amy Weintraub, the yogini who specializes in treating depression. The organizational ups and downs of the field reveal its troubled development but say little about the genuine therapeutic abilities of particular individuals.
    Even so, the continuing lack of regulation and the hundreds of false claims that aspiring healers make about their credentials are helping fuel the field’s rapid growth. The International Association of Yoga Therapists has seen its membership rolls increase from hundreds to thousands of members. Dozens of books hail yoga therapy as a sound treatment for most every kind