Prema Yoga Institute Is Now Part of a Larger Home for Bioenergetic Medicine
Prema Yoga Institute has spent over a decade building one of the most respected yoga therapy trainings in the country, IAYT-accredited, evidence-informed, and grounded in the work Dana Slamp built starting in 2012. That foundation is not changing. What is changing, and what we are glad to share, is the company PYI now keeps.
PYI is becoming a sister institution to the New England School of Bioenergetic Medicine (NESBEM). If you have not come across NESBEM yet, it is a professional training institution devoted to bioenergetic medicine: the study and practice of how a person's physical, mental, emotional, and energetic systems work together to create health, or to break down when they fall out of coherence with one another. Like PYI, NESBEM trains practitioners, not hobbyists, and it takes the science behind its methods just as seriously as PYI always has. It also trains something broader: leaders and change agents equipped to carry this work into the wider world, not just into a treatment room.
This is more than an announcement, it changes something for the better. Yoga therapy has always been a bioenergetic practice, even before anyone in the yoga world used that word for it. Every breath pattern, every pose, every technique a yoga therapist uses to calm an overwhelmed nervous system is, in NESBEM's language, a way of restoring coherence between a person's body, mind, and the energetic systems that keep them well. Bringing these two institutions together under one roof means PYI students and graduates now have access to a wider curriculum, additional faculty, and a broader community of practitioners who share this same underlying belief: that the body's own intelligence, properly supported, is the most powerful tool either school can teach a practitioner to work with.
For current students and graduates, this means you now have a real, accessible path to build on your yoga therapy training with coursework in bioenergetic medicine, nature-based therapeutics, and coherent living, should that call to you. For prospective students, it means that choosing PYI now means joining a larger community of practitioners across two disciplines who are asking the same fundamental question from different angles: what does it take to help a person's body and mind come back into balance, and how do we teach that skill responsibly and well.
Dana Slamp's work built the foundation this is standing on. Her expertise remains part of PYI's faculty and curriculum, and her legacy is not being set aside, it is being built on. What is opening now is room. Room for graduates to go further if they want to, room for new students to find their way in through more than one door, and room for two schools that have always been teaching different expressions of the same conviction, that the body heals through coherence, to finally stand together and say so.
If you are a PYI graduate curious about what NESBEM offers, or a prospective student weighing where to begin, reach out through premayogainstitute.com and we will help you find the right program.
Interested In Learning More About Bioenergetic Medicine? Click here.
Why Yoga Therapy Is Becoming Essential Health Infrastructure
More Americans are living with chronic illness than at any point on record. As of 2023, roughly 194 million U.S. adults reported at least one chronic condition, and that number climbs with every life stage: 6 in 10 young adults, 8 in 10 midlife adults, 9 in 10 older adults (CDC). Heart disease and stroke alone took more than 850,000 lives in 2024, over a quarter of all U.S. deaths (CDC). Behind every one of those numbers is a person, a family, a daily life being reorganized around a body that needs more from them than it used to. That is the world yoga therapy was built to serve, and it is why the field exists at all.
But there is a second story unfolding alongside that one, and it deserves just as much attention, because it is still in its early chapters.
As more of daily life moves onto screens, something quieter is happening to our relationship with our own bodies. Teens themselves are noticing it: 45% now say they spend too much time on social media, up sharply from 27% just two years earlier, and 45% say it has hurt their sleep (Pew Research Center). Nearly half of teens describe social media's effect on their peers as mostly negative, almost double the share who said so in 2022. These are self-reports from young people who are living it, not outside observers guessing at the effect.
What makes this worth our real attention is not just the hours logged, it is what those hours may be quietly training us out of: the practice of noticing our own bodies at all. Recent research on problematic internet use found something worth sitting with: people who had a harder time tolerating discomfort in their bodies, and who trusted their own bodily signals less, were more likely to struggle with compulsive digital use (Simkuté, Wang & Griskova-Bulanova, 2025). Read the other direction, that finding is a gentle but real warning: the less practiced we are at listening to our bodies, the more vulnerable we may become to the pull of a screen that never asks us to feel anything we don't want to feel.
This matters more, not less, as we look ahead. Technology is not leveling off. It is becoming more immersive, more constant, more woven into how people work, learn, and connect with one another, and each of those advances asks a little more of our attention and gives a little less of it back to our own physical and emotional experience. This is not alarmism. It comes from watching anxiety, disconnection, and a kind of low-grade emotional static become some of the most common things people bring into a yoga room. If that trend continues, and there is real reason to think it will, the ability to come back into one's own body, to feel breath, sensation, and emotion clearly enough to work with them, will only become more valuable, not less.
This is precisely the terrain yoga therapy was built for. A yoga therapist trained to work with breath, movement, and nervous system regulation is not just addressing a stiff shoulder or a chronic pain condition. They are teaching a skill that is quietly becoming harder to come by on its own: how to notice what is happening in your body and mind before it becomes a crisis, and how to meet it with something other than another notification. That is physical health. It is also mental and emotional health, and increasingly, it is hard to separate the two.
Alongside this, the clinical workforce meant to support all of this is stretched thin. Physician burnout touched 41.9% of physicians in 2025, easing slightly from prior years but still affecting two in five doctors (AMA), leaving less time per visit for the unhurried, whole-person attention that chronic conditions and emotional overwhelm both require. Yoga therapists cannot replace that care, and should never try to. But they can be part of what fills the space conventional medicine has less and less room for: the ongoing, relational, body-literate work of helping someone live well inside a body and a mind that are managing more than either was built to hold alone, in an increasingly disembodied world.
That is the case, in full, for training as a yoga therapist now. Not because the field is trending, but because the need it meets, in the body, in the mind, and in the quiet space between the two, is only growing. Prema Yoga Institute's IAYT-accredited Yoga Therapy Certification and Yoga in Healthcare training exist to build the workforce this moment is asking for: practitioners who can speak the language of clinicians, understand the evidence, and help people find their way back into their own bodies before the disconnection deepens further. Learn more about PYI's certification pathways.
Interested Yoga in Healthcare Class (Oct 2 - Nov 14)? Click here.
Prescribing Yoga: What Every Healthcare Provider Should Know About Evidence-Based Yoga Therapy
The conversation in integrative medicine has shifted. It is no longer whether yoga has clinical utility — the evidence for that is now robust and growing. The question is how to apply it well: which practices, for which conditions, prescribed with what level of specificity, and taught by practitioners with what kind of training.
A vague suggestion to "try yoga" is not a clinical prescription. A specific, evidence-informed recommendation — the right practice, appropriately modified, with an understanding of contraindications and realistic expectations — is. This blog is for the healthcare provider who wants to move from the former to the latter.
“📚 The Evidence Base at a Glance
Peer-reviewed research supports yoga as an intervention for: chronic low back pain (evidence comparable to physical therapy in multiple RCTs); hypertension (significant blood pressure reductions in controlled studies); anxiety and depression (efficacy comparable to medication and psychotherapy in several trials); PTSD (VA-funded trials demonstrate significant symptom reduction with Yoga Nidra and trauma-sensitive yoga); cancer-related fatigue and quality of life; neurological conditions including MS and Parkinson’s.”
What Prescribing Yoga Actually Means
Yoga, when applied clinically, is a specific intervention with indications, contraindications, dosing considerations, modification requirements, and integration factors — the same dimensions applied to any evidence-based recommendation. A healthcare provider who understands these can recommend yoga with confidence and specificity. One who does not risks either dismissing a valuable tool or making recommendations that are too vague to be useful.
Where the Evidence Is Strongest
Chronic Pain
Multiple RCTs demonstrate yoga's efficacy for chronic low back pain, with effects comparable to or exceeding physical therapy at 12-month follow-up in several studies. Mechanisms include cortisol reduction, improved movement quality and proprioception, central sensitization modulation through mindfulness-based training, and the psychological benefits of agency and self-efficacy.
Anxiety, Depression, and PTSD
Yoga's direct activation of the vagus nerve produces measurable improvements in HRV, consistently dysregulated in anxiety, depression, and PTSD. VA-funded research on Yoga Nidra with veterans demonstrates significant reductions in PTSD symptom severity and sleep disturbance — with effect sizes comparable to first-line pharmacological interventions and without the side effect profile.
Cardiovascular and Metabolic Health
Research demonstrates significant reductions in blood pressure, improvements in lipid profiles, and reductions in markers of systemic inflammation following consistent yoga practice in hypertensive and metabolic syndrome populations — mediated by reduced sympathetic nervous system activity, lower cortisol and inflammatory markers, and the behavioral effects of regular movement.
Developing the Skills to Prescribe Well
PYI's Yoga in Healthcare training develops this competency — in a curriculum taught by Dr. Loren Fishman (MD, Columbia University) and Dr. Chris Walling (PsyD, C-IAYT), alongside master yoga therapists with deep clinical experience. It is the training that equips healthcare providers to prescribe yoga the way they prescribe anything else: with evidence, specificity, and confidence.
🏅 What You Earn — Healthcare Professionals
• 100 hours of clinical yoga training with world-class medical faculty • Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credits (CEs) — reportable directly to YA • IAYT Continuing Education credit available upon request • Foundational hours toward PYI's IAYT-Accredited Yoga Therapist Certification (additional prerequisites apply) Healthcare Course dates: October 2 – November 14, 2026. Live online with optional in-person NYC session.
“→ Learn to Prescribe Yoga With Clinical Confidence
PYI’s Yoga in Healthcare is a 100-hour evidence-based training for healthcare professionals who want to integrate yoga into patient care with precision and credibility. Taught by Dr. Loren Fishman, Dr. Chris Walling, and master yoga therapists. Live online, October 2 – November 14, 2026, with an optional in-person NYC session. Learn more at Prema Yoga Institute.”