Yoga’s Healing Path with Doug Keller
Dynamic Alignment and Vitality Doug Keller
November 6-8, 2026, Arlington, MA
A Rare Opportunity to Study with Doug Keller, one of the world’s foremost yoga therapists!
Each session will include an asana and pranayama practice aligned with the theme, along with a full-color, detailed PDF to support your practice.
The Arlington Center, 369 Mass Ave, Arlington, MA
• Friday, 6:00-8:30 pm
• Saturday, 12:00-3:00 pm and 4:00-7:00 pm
(1-hour lunch break)
• Sunday, 9:00 am-12:00 pm and 1:30-4:30 pm
(1.5-hour lunch break)
• Each session includes a full-color, detailed PDF
Cost: $375. Class size is limited to 35 participants, with priority given to those registering for the complete workshop. Space permitting, individual sessions will open after October 23rd — to join that waitlist, please contact Daniel Orlansky. Sign up early, as space is limited!
Register
This weekend with Doug Keller offers both profound wisdom and practical tools for healthier living. Each session blends clear teaching, guided practice, and take-home resources, making it invaluable for both:
• Seasoned practitioners and teachers seeking depth and therapeutic insights.
• Newer students who want a safe, empowering foundation for a lifelong yoga practice.
• You may register for the full weekend or for individual sessions/days
• Each session will include an asana and pranayama practice aligned with the theme, along with a full-color, detailed PDF to support your practice.
What makes a joint, or a body, truly vital?
This weekend we’ll bring movement into the body using resistance bands (provided, yours to keep), reaching past gravity’s favorites, the muscles already strong and tight, to wake the quieter muscles that guard our joints.
Alignment in yoga has traditionally been taught as something static, bones “stacked” just so, held in a fixed relationship to gravity. But your joints don’t thrive on being held still. They thrive on being moved well. A pose held in “perfect alignment” can still leave your joints undernourished, missing what the practice can truly give them.
Dynamic alignment teaches the asanas as movement, not sculpture — training your joints toward greater ease, less inflammation, and freedom from the pain patterns that come from parts of the body that have simply stopped moving the way they were built to.
This weekend, we’ll bring that movement into the body directly, using resistance bands (provided, and yours to keep). Gravity alone tends to favor the muscles that are already strong and already tight, leaving the smaller, quieter muscles that guard our joints underused. Bands change that equation; they let us draw movement through the body from new angles, waking up the muscles gravity forgets.
Underneath all of this is a bigger question: what makes a joint, or a body, truly vital? The weekend’s deeper thread is Prana, the current of vitality itself, and how it moves through pranayama, mudra, and drishti. At the center of it all is the nadis, the subtle channels through which prana flows, understood here not as ancient abstraction, but in terms that will change how you feel your practice, session by session.
Friday Evening ~ Dynamic Alignment, Dynamic Foundations for Movement
We’ll begin where the body meets the ground: the feet. Most yoga teaches the feet to root — spread, planted, still. But the feet were built to move, and it’s in that movement that real grounding happens, sending its effects up through the ankles into the knees and hips.
The pain that gathers in the feet, knees, and hips often traces back to movement patterns that went quiet over years of standing still in “good form.” Resistance bands give us a way back in — a gentle resistance to work against as we wake the feet, unlock the ankles, and bring intelligence back to the knees and hips they support.
You’ll come away with a bounce back in your step and clues for addressing the most common pain syndromes that arise in the lower body through simple, sweet asana practice.
Saturday, Session One ~ Resistance Is Not Futile: Maintaining Upper Body Strength and Shoulder Health
Props have long had a place in yoga — but usually as a crutch, something to lean on when flexibility runs short. Here, we ask more of them. As we age, the real work becomes strength: the kind that keeps the shoulders moving freely, without pain, without risk.
Working with resistance bands through standing poses and floor poses alike, we’ll train the shoulder and core actions that give the joint both power and range — the coordination that lets the shoulders move with ease instead of guarding against strain. From there, we’ll carry that strength into a broader arc of poses, including backbends, and feel how the morning’s foundation reshapes the way they open.
Strong shoulders also mean a fuller breath — and that opening carries us naturally into the afternoon’s work with pranayama.
Saturday, Session Two ~ The Power of Mudra: Vital Support for Your Breath and Meditation Practice
Mudra has been part of hatha yoga since its beginnings — and it was never just the hands. It included asana, bandha, the gaze of the eyes, even the quality of meditation itself. It is a thread running through every part of the practice, and one of its quietest, most essential tools.
This session focuses on the mudras of the hands, and their direct, felt connection to the breath. We’ll explore fundamental breath practices alongside them — how each supports relaxation, and opens the door to meditation.
You’ll find this support more tangible than you’d expect: a bridge between the Vayus of Prana and mudra, working together in simple pranayama to calm the nervous system and clear the mind.
Sunday Morning ~ Balance Is Equanimity: At Play in the Field of Gravity
Balance grows more elusive with age — that’s nearly universal. But not all of it is lost ground. Much of what we call balance can still be trained, and it starts deeper than the legs.
True balance depends on the subtle mobility of the sacrum and pelvis — the small twisting movements woven into every step we take. Yoga asanas train exactly this, reinforcing the patterns that keep us steady in motion, not just standing still.
Working with resistance bands, we’ll build hip strength and mobility, and explore the movement patterns that support balance while easing low back pain, sacroiliac trouble, and sciatica. The practice includes supported balancing poses — Tree Pose and its variations — and carries what they teach into the standing poses.
But balance isn’t only in the legs. In the floor poses, we’ll bring attention to the sit bones, their quiet relationship to the health of the low back, and the equanimity they can offer in seated breath practice.
The deeper theme, throughout, is equanimity in motion — balance not as a static hold, but as a way of being at play in the field of gravity.
Sunday Afternoon ~ The Wisdom of the Nadis: Breath Practices for Health and Vitality
Prana is vitality itself — the body’s capacity to renew and repair, to keep flourishing as we age, not just physically but in clarity of mind and depth of wisdom.
From the Upanishads through the texts of hatha yoga, this vitality has always been understood to move through the nadis — the subtle channels of the body. Modern yoga rarely explores this anymore, even though we now have more ways than ever to understand the kinds of circulation, on every level, that keep us vital.
The nadis are about more than clearing the nose. We’ll build a deeper, fuller understanding of them in breath practice, supported by mudra and drishti, with a focus on simple pranayamas — for health, and for the natural unfolding of deeper states of meditation and yoga nidra.
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Doug Keller has been teaching workshops and trainings in the therapeutic applications of yoga for over thirty years, and is known not only for his effectiveness in communicating this ever-evolving approach in these workshops, but also for his extensive writing on the topic in magazines, journals, and his two-volume work on ‘Yoga As Therapy.
In addition to traveling and teaching, he is a Distinguished Professor at the Maryland University of Integrative Health in their Master’s Degree program in Yoga Therapy. This program is state-approved and accredited for granting a Master’s degree in this field, and is fully accredited by the International Association of Yoga Therapists.
Visit Doug at www.doyoga.com