Somatic Practice in Yoga Therapy by Jaime Stover Schmitt

As the founding director of Spanda (R) Yoga Movement Therapy's accredited yoga therapist and teacher trainings, Jaime Stover Schmitt EdD, CMA, SME, IDME, E-RYT500, C-IAYT is devoted to the education and mentoring of yoga therapists and teachers in somatic practice. She believes safe embodiment to be the ground for insight and positive change.


Dr. Schmitt holds certifications in a variety of hands-on and somatic practices. She began the practice of yoga at age five accompanying her mother to class-this well-suited her introspective nature. Discovering dance to be "traveling yoga poses" she earned her doctorate in Dance at Temple University in Philadelphia-a hotbed of somatic investigation at that time. This confluence inspired her to develop her own approach to the therapeutic use of yoga, movement, and hands-on technique. Throughout her thirty years of private practice, she refined her perspective recognizing Rudolph Ballentine, M.D., Joan Shivarpita Harrigan, Psy.D., H.H. Sri Swami Rama, and H.H. Sri Swami Chandrasekharanand Saraswati, along with Aileen Crow and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as her mentors in this endeavor.


Dr. Schmitt serves on the International Association of Yoga Therapists Accreditation Committee having also been a past board of director member of Yoga Alliance. A contributor to Yoga Journal, Yoga International, and A Moving Journal, she is the past editor-in-chief of The Journal of Authentic Movement and Somatic Inquiry. She's also written Yoga for Pregnancy (HI Press), Yogini's Kitchen: A Recipe Book of Healthy Vegetarian Cuisine, and Every Woman's Yoga (Prima/Random House), which has been translated into several languages.