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What Yoga Therapy Can (and Can't) Do for Mental Health — A Neurodivergent Perspective
- Angie Lamb
- May 21
- 5 min read
Reflections from practice and a case study on yoga therapy with late-identifying autistic adults
A lot of people find their way to yoga therapy through a mental health door.
They're burnt out, anxious, overwhelmed, or moving through a low period that hasn't responded to the things that are supposed to help. Some have tried talk therapy, medication, meditation apps. Some have tried regular yoga and found it didn't quite fit. They arrive curious, sometimes cautiously so, wondering if this is going to be more of the same.
The first thing I usually tell them is that yoga therapy isn't talk therapy — and that's not a limitation — it's the point.
What yoga therapy actually is
There's something that comes up in almost every first session. People want to talk — and that makes complete sense. Many have never had a space that felt quite right, and when they find one, there's a lot that wants to come out.
I listen. That's part of the work too. But I'm not a counsellor, and this isn't talk therapy. What someone shares — their history, what's feeling hard, what they're hoping for — that becomes the material we use to co-create the session together, to choose practices, to decide where to begin. The story informs, but the body leads the way.
Yoga therapy, at its core, is about learning to listen — to sensation, to breath, to the signals the nervous system is sending — and gradually building the capacity to be in the present moment rather than managed by it. Not reacting from a place of overwhelm or habit, but responding from a place of awareness and choice.
For neurodivergent people specifically, who have often spent years overriding those internal signals in order to function in environments not built for them, that listening can be genuinely new. And genuinely hard. And, over time, genuinely useful.
What my case study found about neurodivergent mental health — and what surprised me
Last year, I completed a case study on yoga therapy with late-identifying autistic adults — people who received their diagnosis later in life, often after decades of masking, adapting, and wondering why things felt harder than they seemed to for everyone else.
The mental health picture for this group was interconnected in the way it usually is: anxiety, overwhelm, burnout, and low mood weren't separate problems but threads in the same fabric. One participant put it plainly during intake: her regular state of living with anxiety was a 3 out of 5. "3 is my normal," she said. What I was looking at was whether and how yoga therapy could support that — not as a treatment, but as a practice that builds capacity over time.
A lot of what I found confirmed what I'd observed clinically. But one thing surprised me.
Community mattered more than I expected — and in a specific way.
Many of the group sessions I ran were largely silent. People moved, breathed, paused. There wasn't a lot of verbal sharing. And yet the feedback was consistent: people didn't feel so alone in their experience. One moment that stays with me is the group's experience of brahmari — humming bee breath. Most participants said they wouldn't have done it in an in-person class; making noise in a room full of people felt like too much. But online, with microphones off, everyone tried it — and it became one of the most helpful tools in the entire series. What started as a practice to quiet the mind became a moment of shared discovery, something they could connect over afterwards.
This makes a particular kind of sense for late-identifying autistic adults. Living undiagnosed for years, often masking heavily, often privately carrying the sense that something is fundamentally wrong with you — that's an isolating experience. Not the ordinary loneliness of being introverted or of moving through a new city. A deeper kind, rooted in not seeing yourself reflected anywhere. Shared silence, in a space built around your nervous system rather than against it, can be its own form of recognition.
The shift that matters
When I think about what mental health change looks like in this work — not on paper, but in the room — it rarely announces itself.
One participant described arriving at the study feeling like a "floating head" — disconnected from her body, uncertain how to even begin forming a relationship with it. By the end, she was noticing sensation while walking around her home, channelling awareness into her bare feet, saying to herself: I am here and I am grounded. Another put it simply in her exit interview: "It's really freeing to not have to give into reactions/stress responses."
That's the shift. Not dramatic. Not sudden.
It's also practical. In a session, I might offer two ways of doing something — sitting cross-legged on the floor, or kneeling, or placing a cushion under the seat — and invite someone to notice what feels better for their body today. That's a small moment. But for someone who has spent a lifetime being told how to sit, how to move, how to present themselves, being asked what works for them — and having that be the right answer — is something different.
That's what I mean by moving from reaction to response. It's not a dramatic shift. It's accumulated in small choices, in sessions, over time. The nervous system learns that it's allowed to have preferences. That those preferences are information. That there is, sometimes, room to pause before deciding.
What yoga therapy isn't — and what it can offer neurodivergent mental health
It's worth being clear: yoga therapy isn't a replacement for mental health treatment. It doesn't diagnose, prescribe, or substitute for therapy or psychiatry when those are what someone needs.
What it can do is work alongside those things — or offer something for people who are looking for a body-based approach to building resilience, self-awareness, and nervous system capacity. For neurodivergent people especially, who often find that standard mental health frameworks weren't designed with their experience in mind, that can be meaningful.
It can also offer community — the particular kind that comes from practicing alongside others who understand, without needing to explain themselves, what it is to move through the world the way they do.
If you're curious
If any of this resonates — if you're navigating anxiety, burnout, overwhelm, or low mood, and you're wondering whether a body-based approach might offer something you haven't found elsewhere — I'd gently invite you to keep reading, or to reach out.
There's no obligation and no fixed starting point. Just an open door.
REFERENCES
Lamb, A. (2025). Embodiment of a 'floating head': Trauma-informed yoga therapy for supporting the mental health of late-identifying female autistics [Unpublished case study]. Vancouver School of Healing Arts.
Walsh, N., & Giwa Onaiwu, M. (2026). Neurodivergent somatics in therapy: An anti-oppressive model for whole person care. W. W. Norton & Company.
About Angie
Angie Lamb is a Certified Yoga Therapist (C-IAYT) offering trauma-informed, neurodiversity-affirming yoga therapy online across Canada. Her work is built around safety, choice, and co-created practices — shaped by her own experience as a neurodivergent person and by years of working with late-identifying autistic and ADHD adults navigating a world not built for their nervous systems.
Want to explore this work?
Monthly community class A by-donation online class for late-identifying autistics and/or those with ADHD. Held monthly, low-pressure, and shaped around this community's needs.
1:1 yoga therapy Co-created sessions, available online across Canada. No fixed sequence — we work toward what actually matters to you.
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