About

Stacey Filice Headshot

Stacey A. Filice, C-IAYT, ERYT500, Reiki Master

Stacey teaches various styles of yoga including Vinyasa, Hatha, Yin/Restorative, and more therapeutic forms of Yoga, meditation and sound healing. She obtained her Yoga Therapy training at the Soul of Yoga in Encinitas, trained through YogaWorks, and is certified in mat pilates. She is also a Reiki Master, trained under Erika Lee. Her many years of teaching have included studios throughout San Diego, full-time staff instructor and Specialty Presenter at Rancho La Puerta in Tecate, BC, Mexico, and working with students one-on-one on a more therapeutic basis. Stacey enjoys empowering her students to go inward and connect to the state of calm that exists within them.

What is Yoga Therapy?

The aim of Yoga Therapy is to promote good health and re-establish balance for the person as a whole – the emphasis of this work may be towards the body, the mind, the emotions or a combination of these. Yoga Therapy may be viewed as a holistic approach to physical therapy, with an aspect of life-coaching and spiritual counseling. For example, back pain may be a primary concern and could be caused by poor posture. Yoga Therapy would focus on working with the body using Yoga poses to relieve the pain and discomfort, but also to address the postural issues from dysfunctional patterns. If the back pain is exacerbated by stress, then including tools to help calm the mind (ie, breathing techniques or meditation) may be very useful too.

Dis-Ease

In yogic philosophy, the simple view of disease is that we have forgotten who we are. We focus on the external aspects of our lives and allow them to be the definition or identity of who we think we are. That can be a job title, a house, a desired dress size, marital status, or even an injury or illness. These are just illusions – we are not the material, the labels nor are we the diseases. As we identify ourselves with the ever changing aspects of the external world we get further away from who we are and this misidentification leads to suffering. These external factors are real but we can shift our relationship with them and change our lives. In yoga, we strive to learn to identify with the internal, to reside in the stillness of the heart and we find health there.

Disease or illness of the body and mind starts at a subtle energy level and works its way outward until it manifests at the physical level. As such, in Yoga therapy we often start to work with the physical body first and go inward to the more subtle energy body as if we are retracing the steps of the development of the physical disease until we come to a place in which we can finally recognize we are not our physical bodies or our minds.

“Stacey is a gentle soul who is extremely knowledgeable, compassionate, and intuitive. She is beyond effective as a teacher. With her guidance, I have learned that yoga is much more than physical practice; it is about how to approach each day in a healthy, positive way, paying attention to mind, body, and emotions and making healthy personal decisions based on these observations.” – Brian T.