Kathy Ward

Kathy Ward of Mindful Yoga Therapy, based near Alicante in Spain, has been practicing yoga for over thirty years but really became a serious yogini when she finally had no option but to listen to her body and make some big changes in her life.

Having already experienced some big challenges to her health, dealing with cancer at twenty leading to two miscarriages and a hysterectomy, she finally ended up in intensive care from a deep vein and pulmonary thrombosis brought on by a very stressful twenty-four-seven, seven-day-a-week job. It was at this point that she realized that the time had come to get off the treadmill, as maybe next time she would not be so lucky!

Therapeutic Hatha Yoga

Tuning into the call to heal body and soul, Kathy started looking for a yoga teacher training program, particularly one that focused on the therapeutic side of yoga. This led her to IYT Integrative Yoga Therapy, an organisation based in the USA and Brazil. Starting with their yoga home study course, Kathy subsequently travelled to Brazil and the USA for a 200-hour Therapeutic Hatha Yoga Teacher training program. Excited and inspired by her studies she then went to do the 500-hour and the 1000-hour training programs.

Kathy’s first hand experience of stress related illness combined with a family history of cancer has led her to specialize in therapeutic yoga. She teaches that yoga is all about tuning into your inner song and being mindful of which practices support you and which ones don’t.

Kathy teaches her students that the most important student they will ever work with is themselves and that they should work both from their hearts and with the first of the Yamas in Pantajali’s Yoga Sutras – Ahimsa (non-harming).

The Mind Body connection

With an in-depth interest in mind-body connection, Kathy has over twenty-seven years of prior work experience in running seminars, workshops and conferences as well as in motivational coaching and mind body therapies such as NLP, CBT and clinical hypnotherapy. Keeping abreast with current mind-body research, Kathy uses yoga based stress management techniques for the treatment of heart disease, positive visualizations for cancer and other chronic illnesses and brainwave entrainment and biofeedback for rapid and long lasting personal change and improved well-being.

She teaches that health and well-being is not about an absence of disease, and that her role is to select the appropriate tools and techniques from both yoga and modern mind-body practices, to empower the individual allowing them to take control of their lives and find balance in body, mind and spirit

Therapeutic Hatha Yoga Teacher Training

Kathy teaches yoga classes her studio in the village of Altea la Veija in the Costa Blanca, on the Spanish Mediterranean coast.

She runs the mindfulness-based 200-hour Therapeutic Hatha Yoga teacher training program a little further up the coast at the Solterreno Retreat Centre, run by one of the members of her training team, Bodhin (an ordained Buddhist priest.) Kathy will be adding a 500-hour Yoga Therapist program from October 2012.

All the trainings are in English and students come from as far afield as Australia, USA, Canada, Austria, France, Italy, Norway, UK and Spain.

For more information about Kathy’s teacher training programs or classes, Make an Enquiry.