Hospitals are centers for healing, but one new form of yoga is hoping to prevent hospital stays.

For yoga therapist Jasmyn Joyce, therapy is her calling, but you might be surprised to know she hasn’t been doing it for that long. She became a licensed nurse six years ago, but for the last year she’s been practicing yoga therapy full-time. After seeing so many people come in with ailments that could have been prevented, she wanted to help people before they needed a hospital.

“I started to realize that it’s like taking the tool of yoga and using it in your everyday life to prevent illness and injury and disease in the first place,” says Joyce.

Yoga therapy is relatively new form of wellness that incorporates the breathing and stretching practices of yoga with massage, and the therapist’s knowledge of kinesiology.

One of Joyce's clients suffers from severe back pain and credits her renewed range of motion to yoga therapy.

“I’ve lost my ability to stand straight ... and just in the last six weeks of working with her I’ve gone from being hunched over like that to being able to stand upright,” says her client Debbie.

Becoming a certified yoga teacher typically requires 200 hours of teaching, but to become a yoga therapist requires significantly more time - 500 hours.

In a market saturated with all forms of yoga, advanced certifications are becoming more necessary to stand out. Schools such as Loyola Marymount University are offering advanced programs, like a master’s program in Yogic Studies, to help teachers stand out.

“It was definitely a little scary, and a lot of family and friends still don’t understand how I could have made that decision,” says Joyce, who believes that the science of yoga is finally catching up with the practice's spirituality.