By Arliss Kurtz MSW, RSW, RYT 200

Thank you for providing therapy for people who have engaged in harmful sexual behavior. Your work is integral to helping them lead safe, healthy, and productive lives. 

In our work, we know it is important for the people we help to have a greater awareness of their mind/body connection. To take pause before choices are made that hopefully lead toward health and recovery and away from harm to self or others.

As in the Viktor Frankl quote, “between the stimulus and the response there is a space (pause). In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” We help our clientele calm the biological fight, flight, or freeze threat response so that they may safely respond - rather than impulsively react - to urges, stress, and negative thought patterns related to their histories, themselves, and the people in their lives.

Do we pause to do this ourselves?

Might I encourage you to consider yoga? The ancient practice of Raja yoga can be a powerful guide to navigating the stressors of life through moral interactions with others, acts of self-discipline and selfcare, physically strengthening the body, breath control to calm the nervous system ,mindful awareness yet detachment from sensory stimuli, focused attention, quieting the fluctuations of the mind, and connecting to one’s higher self or power. This is the eight-limbed path of Raja yoga.

We then walk the path of growth we want our clientele to follow. Let’s light the way.

 Arliss Kurtz runs a private clinical social work practice in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada with part of her work focusing on providing adolescent sex-offense-specific assessment and treatment. She attained her 200-hour Raja yoga teacher training (YTT) in Costa Rica in September 2023 and will complete her 300-hour Raja YTT in Nashville, Tennessee in October 2024.