Search

YT 203: Decolonizing Care | 35-Hours

Course ID: YT 203
Title: Decolonizing Care
Instructors: Melissa & Alex

Course Objectives
  • Exploring relational, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive approaches to health, healing, and care.
  • Integrating embodied, reflective, and community-centred approaches into yoga therapy and helping professional practice.
  • Applying principles of cultural humility, relational accountability, and anti-oppressive care within therapeutic and educational spaces.

Lessons
  • Welcome & Orientation
  • Centring Indigenous Worldviews
  • Awakening Critical Consciousness
  • Fostering Cultural Safety
  • Strengthening Cultural Empowerment
  • Relating with Reciprocity
  • Embracing Wise Practices
  • Co-Creating Meso & Macrolevel Change
  • Co-Creating Microlevel Change
  • Closing Integration Reflection
  • Certification Program Mentorship Support with Alex

Program Frameworks & Guiding Philosophies
  • Patanjali’s Eight Limbs of Yoga: Emphasis on relational and embodied approaches to care through self-study (Svadhyaya), ethical living (Yamas and Niyamas), breath awareness (Pranayama), meditation (Dhyana), and interconnected well-being.
  • Etuaptmumk (Two-Eyed Seeing): Invites learners to engage with multiple ways of knowing and understanding through relational, reflective, and culturally responsive approaches to care.
  • Trauma-Informed and Decolonial Practice: Supports learners in exploring care through relational accountability, community, accessibility, cultural humility, and anti-oppressive practice.

Grounding in Teachings
  • Relational, Community-Centred Care: Consider how relationship, reciprocity, and community shape helping and learning spaces.
  • Embodied, Reflective Learning:  Self-study, nervous system awareness, and embodied practices to support meaningful learning.
  • Relational Accountability: Exploration of positionality, power, and culturally responsive care practices within helping professions.
  • Theory into Practice: Learners are invited to consider how relational, trauma-informed, and decolonial approaches inform care. 

Program Integration
​This course supports learners in deepening their understanding of relational, culturally responsive, and trauma-informed approaches to yoga therapy and helping professional practice. The teachings within this course are woven throughout the Yoga Therapy Diploma and support learners in integrating ethical, reflective, embodied, and community-centred approaches into their ongoing work and learning journey.

Canmore Location:

109-705 10th Street Canmore, AB T1W2A3
We're next to Communitea & Vermelho, 
​on the corner of 10th St. and 6th Ave.

Established in 2014.
​Copyright © 2026 by
Canmore Counselling & Trauma-Informed Yoga Psychology School is an Indigenous and Black-owned family business, co-created by Melissa Jay and Michael Yudcovitch. 

​Our team lives across Turtle Island, and we honour the Nations who continue to nurture these lands. Our primary office is located in Châ Ûpchîchîyen Kudebi (translated from Îyârhe Nakoda as “shooting at the willows”), colonially known as Canmore, on Treaty 7 territory and the current and ancestral lands of the Îyârhe Nakoda (Stoney Nakoda), Tsuut’ina First Nation, and Blackfoot Confederacy. These lands are also home to the Rocky View Métis District 4 within the Battle River Territory. 

We are grateful to be students, practitioners, and guides of yoga, an Indigenous wisdom tradition with roots in India and across South Asia and parts of Africa. We are committed to learning from and amplifying South Asian teachers and practitioners while continuing to learn alongside our own students, faculty, and alumni. We believe trauma-informed care requires an active commitment to community, social justice, decolonization, anti-oppression, anti-racism, reciprocity, and meaningful care for people and communities who have been intentionally and historically marginalized.

As a team, we are committed to uplifting Truth, language, culture, and relationship as essential to right relations and to our ongoing work of reconciliation and decolonization. Thank you for being here :)