Yoga & Somatics for Immune & Respiratory Health
Online course - with option for extra live content towards full certification
Prices will increase on all trainings on January 1st, 2026. Purchase a 2026 course now at 2025 prices and save 15%.
Learn the nature of breath in relation to our natural defences and how it contributes to the health of our immune and respiratory systems.
This online, self-study course accompanies the book Yoga & Somatics for Immune & Respiratory Health which is laid out along the same six themes within this very course that it evolved from: Healthy Defences, Stress and Inflammation, Fluid Adaptation, Mindful Boundaries, Embodied Awareness and Good Vibrations. This follows an arc alongside the practices for each part, that together build up a complete cycle – from the ground up to standing and back down again, to bring in sound at the end, a final resonance.
Together these in-depth and rich resources take you through the functions of the immune and respiratory systems and how they orchestrate in the body with each other (and other body systems). You will explore how modern psycho-social stress, trauma, fascial movement and lymphatic flow affect these and other aspects of our health.
Through personal practice and bringing theory to life with compassionate, embodied awareness, you will explore how to design and teach practices to support optimal immune and respiratory function.
This content is a wonderful addition to studying the Somatic Therapeutic Yoga Training, which does include live hours with Charlotte.Â
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Purely self-study using the online materials and book:
- Designed to be studied alongside the book of the same name – course themes follow the six chapters
- All content is available once you’ve signed up – to make your way through in the time and pace that suits you
- Lifetime access
- Does not include any live content - works well alongside Charlotte's other courses.Â
30 CPD hours:
- Course presentations, practice videos and audios - 16 hours
- Own reading, self-study and self-enquiry questions - 14 hours minimum
What is covered in this course?
Over six themes you will explore the immune and respiratory systems and how they relate to movement, embodied awareness and self-compassion. We will also explore a range of practices incorporating movement, meditation and breath to develop a sound understanding of how to structure effective sequences.
The relationship between our immunity and how safe or unsafe we feel is tied into our breath, which becomes faster and shallower when we enter protective modes. This highlights the importance of a stress and trauma-informed framework for understanding how to support regulation in the nervous system, which so intimately links our breath and immunity. Healing becomes compromised when we are get stuck in heightened stress responses - we cannot be in survival and growth at the same time.
Understanding how our immune system shapes our boundaries between the outside world and our internal landscape is key to supporting it, so it can respond to perceived threat and danger. Our respiratory system has a similar response to the internal and external; constantly taking in nourishment through the inhalation and releasing that which does not serve us through the exhalation. These two systems are intrinsically linked in our function and health, and how we relate to the world around us.
COURSE STRUCTURE
Over each of the six themes you will receive the following course materials that follow content on the book (relevant page numbers are given) for more in-depth support:
Detailed presentation
on an area of physiology and how the yoga system can support this. This will be pre-recorded in video format (self-study) for you to refer back to, with a PDF of the slides to make notes on.
Pre-recorded Physical Practice
to support respiratory and immune health in different planes and with a different relationship to gravity, presence and self – video format for you to be able to revisit and explore the practices (self-study), with a PDF of images from the video to make notes on.
Supportive Practice
as an audio resource to bring in other aspects of the yoga path or related, more modern, complementary techniques (self-study).
Each theme will require 4-6 hrs of personal study and practice.
COURSE OUTLINE
Includes 6 themes, explored in the format shared below.
See the intro video for each section to get an idea of the course content.
1: Healthy defences
Presentation focus: Supporting our boundaries and breath – the territory. The mouth, nose and throat as gateway for immune defence. The rhythm of the breath and its anatomy.
Physical practice: Loosening and Somatic - grounding, self-regulation and recognising boundaries
Supportive practice: Mindfulness of breathing practices
2: Stress and Inflammation
Presentation focus: The autonomic nervous system in relation to breath and immunity; how inflammation is part of chronic stress patterns. How stress responses upset polarity and balance; how yoga can help restore these for immune and respiratory health.
Physical practice: Twisting and Undulating - for diaphragmatic movement, fascial release and lymphatic movement
Supportive practice: Cooling Heightened Responses - three stress-reducing practices; embodiment & release
3: Fluid Adaptation
Presentation focus: How bodily fluids and fascia are part of the whole orchestration of breath and immunity. Connections of the vagus nerve and nasal breathing on adaptive regulation and responses.
Physical practice: Lunging, Stepping and Squatting – basic, primal patterns for optimal breath and immunity that support how we rise up from ankles, knees and hips to support the upper body
Supportive practice: Heart-based Mudra meditations
4: Mindful Boundaries
Presentation focus: Appropriate containment for body fluids and our sense of cohesion, safety and a home to breathe fully. Clear distinction between our internal and external worlds that is part of boundaries and self-protection.
Physical practice: Standing into Full Breathing and Protective Support - full groundedness and relation to gravity for mobilising breath, fluid flow through all systems and self-protection through awareness
Supportive practice: Body Scan & Autogenic Release
5:Â Embodied Awareness
Presentation focus: How to support body self-regulation and homeostasis with interoception; tuning in and kind attention. Focus on the flow of prana and the vayus for movement of the breath body and immune fluids. How active relaxation and natural autonomic release support these aspects.
Physical practice: Rest and Recovery - consciously coming into full restorative modes for the space for breath and healing
Supportive practice: Traditional pranayama practices
6: Good Vibrations
Presentation focus: The mouth and throat as entry – health and softening as key to breath and immunity. How sound and mantra can support respiratory and immune health through vibration and support of tissues in the throat and mouth as first defence and gateway to the vitality of the breath.
Physical practice: Bringing it all together – a full sequence incorporating all of the aspects above, with sounding including
Supportive practice: Sounding and simple mantra
HOW THIS COURSE RELATES TO CHARLOTTE'S OTHER YOGA TEACHER TRAININGS
The Yoga & Somatics for Respiratory & Immune Health course is a perfect addition to Charlotte's other courses. There's overlap in ways that the courses will feed into each other but lots of new information and new practices to both.
The Yoga & Somatics for Respiratory & Immune Health course focuses on the ways these body systems work and how physical and subtle yoga practices and mindful, embodied attention affect them.
In relation to Charlotte's two Somatic courses:
Somatics for Yoga Teachers course:
As the Immune and Respiratory course is more about therapeutic considerations, the theoretical information in it differs quite a lot from this more practical course, which emphasises how to practice and teach. There's also many more subtle practices, such as pranayama and autogenic practices, etc.
Yoga & Somatics for Healing & Recovery course:
This course differs from the Immune and Respiratory as a much more general overview about how to work therapeutically from many different angles. The Yoga & Somatics for Respiratory & Immune Health course goes more into those two body systems and so goes more deeply into aspects such as nasal breathing, lymphatics, fascial connections and the anatomical considerations there. There's overlap in ways that the courses will feed into each other but lots of new information and new practices to both.
PURCHASE THE COURSE
Prices will increase on all trainings on January 1st, 2026. Purchase a 2026 course now at 2025 prices and save 15%.
Meet Charlotte
Charlotte's work as a yoga teacher, yoga teacher trainer and nutritional therapist over the last few decades has had a focus on how we bring together our whole selves in movement, nourishment, expression and self-care. This includes a recognition of the psychosocial stresses so prevalent in our modern world and the traumas that we hold in our tissues, as well as our emotional states.
In her yoga and movement work, this has meant shifting towards a more somatic framework, with an emphasis on exploring boundaries and processing of the stories we hold in our bodies. Using yoga philosophy and psycho-neuro-endo-immunology as a framework to hold kind, curious exploration, trains, yoga, teaches and other health professionals, movement and subtle practices that support whole health.
For yoga teachers and other health professionals, she runs courses, training, teachers, in somatic, therapeutic and mindful ways of holding space for others so that they have the curiosity and agency to support themselves. Charlotte runs courses and teaches for Yogacampus, London, and is a guest lecturer for The Minded Institute.
She teaches how to use movement, not simply in the context of what we can do physically, but as a way to attune, listen and respond to our deeper, often unconscious needs. In her more specifically, health-focussed courses, (digestion, immune and respiratory health and books on these subjects), she weaves how the relationships between body, breath, fluids and our structure are part of one highly responsive organisation.
Charlotte is an author with many published books, including Yoga and Somatics for Immune and Respiratory Health (Singing Dragon 2022), Yoga Therapy for Digestive Health (Singing Dragon 2018), Good Mood Food (Nourish 2018) and The De-Stress Effect (2015).
