Sherry’s yoga therapy background emerged organically from her physical therapy practice. While running her first clinic in New Mexico in the early 1970s, she began teaching yoga to patients in small group settings using the original Richard Hittelman text—long before yoga therapy was formally recognized within healthcare. During this same period, she was studying walking as the template for all other movement, observing how subtle gait patterns reflected injury history, habits, and emotional life.

This exploration led to her foundational work in gait therapy and the publication of Walk Yourself Well, which offers tools for self-exploration, personal gait cues, and simple practices that support self-healing through walking. As bodily awareness increased through gait and yoga practice, Sherry observed that psychological and emotional awareness naturally followed—an insight that continues to shape her work.

For a decade, Sherry taught an international course for healthcare professionals entitled Using Yoga Therapeutically, offering clinicians practical frameworks for integrating yoga-based principles into rehabilitation and pain care. She also taught functional anatomy for the first university-level yoga therapy program at Loyola Marymount University, developed by Dr. Larry Payne.

Today, Sherry’s yoga therapy work reflects a whole-being approach informed by pain science, biomechanics, and the multi-kosha framework. With yoga therapy as the integrator, self-awareness and self-compassion, nervous system regulation, and agency support movement decisions based on sensation detection rather than prescription. Through bodily presence and natural flow, this process develops overall presence—allowing movement to arise from awareness rather than instruction.