← The Nourished Nervous System
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A
Welcome to the Nourished Nervous System, an exploration of stress, the nervous system, and resilience for parents and other humans through the lens of Ayurveda, somatics, herbs, and a whole lot more. I'm your host, Kristen Timchak, an Ayurvedic health counselor, stress and resilience coach, somatic stress release practitioner, and mother of a tiny human. Please join me for information and insights, deep thoughts, and small steps to help you nourish your nervous system. Hello, welcome, and welcome back to the Nourished Nervous System. So happy that you're here today. I hope you're doing well. I'm going to keep it short today. We're going to get right into this conversation with Lara Hyman, who is a physical therapist, yoga teacher, movement educator, and creator of the lit method, which we'll.
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Get into all of it.
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But I just really love this conversation. It's one of those conversations that I.
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Feel bridges so many of my interests.
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Movement, neuroplasticity, spirituality, presence. All of these things are all in here.
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The mix of the science and the profound. I just love it. So, that being said, I'm going to.
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A
Give you my friendly disclaimer that this podcast is purely for entertainment and educational purposes and should not be considered health or mental health advice. Anything said should not be taken as a replacement for medical, clinical, professional advice, diagnosis, or medical intervention. Okay. I hope you enjoy this conversation and I'll stop blabbing now. Welcome, Lara.
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B
So happy to have you on today.
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C
Thank you so much, Kristen. I'm happy to be here. Yay.
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B
So, to begin, I'd love if you could introduce yourself and talk about your path to where you are now.
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C
Well, my name is Laura Hyman. I am a physical therapist, yoga teacher, movement educator, mama, wife, all the things, lover of animals. The path that got me here is pretty much my whole life. I think I've always been curious and interested in movement and was lucky enough to not stray from that. To really follow my heart in a way and. And follow what made sense to me. I grew up in a household with three brothers. I'm a triplet and two of my brothers are my age, identical. And then an older brother. So I was always just moving, moving and grooving with them. A lot of sports. There was just a lot of good competitiveness in all the ways. We were also really encouraged to be curious seekers of knowledge. And my mom is one of probably the most intelligent people I know and is always, always bringing forth a lot of discussion and inquiry. And my dad was an orthopedic surgeon. So I was always interested in medic medicine and originally thought I wanted to be a doctor. But after I observed his lifestyle and also tried out about a week of pre med at Duke, I was like, I don't think I want to do this. So along that line, found a way to physical therapy, which satisfied all of those things because it offered me a job that has a lot of freedom and autonomy, but it's also, you can have a good lifestyle outside of it as well, versus being a surgeon. It's really hard to do that. But I had always been interested in the brain, and even though my dad was interested in the bones, he was also interested in neuroscience a lot. And so I then went and got my specialization in neurodevelopmental training, which is really neuroplasticity and how we can capitalize on that to change our movement, change our thought process, change everything. You know, at any point, it's always available to us. We don't have a, you know, a rigid brain. We have a plastic brain. So then I started to teach yoga right after I finished grad school. And then I started to just blend all of these elements together when I saw some gaps in. In both physical therapy, in terms of a clinical setting, there are limitations in how much time you can spend with the people. It's much worse than it was 20 years ago, but even there, there was some boundaries because of insurance. And then also the gaps in yoga that there wasn't as much attention to functional anatomy. It was more about poses and teaching people how to move through poses, but not really acknowledging that there are going to be different backgrounds and histories and anatomical differences, and that understanding functional anatomy would really enhance the experience of the practice of yoga. So with all that, I just started to create my own methodology, which we now call lit, the lit method. And lit stands for Lara's yoga technique. But it's also this concept of feeling really lit up in your spirit, in your body and your movement, in your life. And yeah, I started teacher training, open a studio, and then continued to grow with an online platform and online teacher trainings. And we have over 65 countries represented, over a thousand people gone through our online training. So it's really been very impactful and just so exciting to lead that charge.
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B
I love that so much. I love the emphasis on the neuroscience. I'm also really fascinated by neuroplasticity and how we can change our lives through changing our brains and the movement stuff. I'm a dancer and a mover as well, and I'VE done a lot of yoga in my life. I did yoga teacher training. And I really get that. That gap that exists, I think, especially in more traditional yoga styles. It comes from India, where there was a lot of men practicing. So it's not taking into consideration all the different body types and the female body types. So I love that you've brought that all together. And so can you talk a little bit about how movement, posture, and physical challenge can affect growth and brain health?
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C
Yes. I mean, you know, movement is the expression of posture in action. So we. We're in lit. We really just like in pt, it's very rooted in posture. And posture is not static. It isn't military style. It's how we hold ourselves in space and our. The energy along with that. Of course, we look at the biomechanics of that, the musculoskeletal positioning of posture, because that sets up the brain to give directions accordingly. So if our posture is more optimal, and that just means that the bones are stacked in a way that share the most surface area, and that creates a great channel for energy exchange. That also sets up the surrounding tissues to be more balanced. So then we move in more balanced way. The way we move habitually is how our brain starts to just recognize. You know, the brain is getting so much information all the time, it's gonna. It's gonna take the path of least resistance in a lot of ways. And that means, like, the ways we move the most, that's our first line of fire. So in other words, when I was teaching for a bit, vinyasa, Classical vinyasa, you know, you come in, you might do a little grounding work, and then you start flowing. And what I started to recognize is that people are coming in, often with a little bit of suboptimal posture. You know, you've been sitting at a desk, you've been working, you get in a car, you drive to yoga class, and that's what your brain has identified. You've been in this position with movement. You're going to lubricate joints, you're going to get warmer, you are going to get out of that position. But the movement that has been kind of directed by that starting point is still there. So in other words, if you're rounded in the shoulders and your response to that is, oh, if I push my ribs forward, Doug, that'll help my shoulders up. You're going to continue to do that in your yoga practice and reinforce these movement pathways, brain pathways, so we can change first the way we stand, the way we hold ourselves in space and the way we move, when we pay better attention and that will change. It's called neurogenesis, neuroplasticity. We are summoning our brain to pay attention to novelty, to pay attention to new messaging, and therefore to lay down different pathways for the expression of posture or movement. When we stand taller, it helps regulate our mood. Because poor posture is very much associated with this feeling of not being secure, being small. Upright posture helps us improve our mood, it helps helps our breathing, it helps the spinal alignment and nerve function, which then is going to help the brain. You know, it's just going to give more blood and more clarity to the brain and that firing is clear as well. And then with the movement itself, if we add more challenge, you know, this is another thing that would happen in traditional yoga is you do the same sequences or very similar. Your brain craves novelty. It craves it. Think about when you're doing a puzzle or something like that, you really focus. So similar physical challenge is really important too. And that means it needs to be. There needs to be some diversity, there needs to be some level of like, well, I'm pressing the edges of what I'm comfortable with because that's actually what grows the brain. It really pays attention, it starts to light up. And with that we develop stress tolerance. We develop stronger connections to our coordination center and our other motor skills. So there's an interplay. When we understand how to hold ourselves, better and better means again, it's not what it looks like. It's really the feeling. Good posture feels great and it's less stress on everything. The musculoskeletal system, the respiratory system, the digestive system and the brain. When we stand and sit and move with more balance and more grace, and then we add challenge to that, we're improving our ability to focus, we're improving our coordination, our motor firing. So that means how quickly we can respond. So if you're, you know, getting out of the bathtub and you slip, there's a response that should happen. And the quicker that response of being able to self correct, that means that that brain, body coordination and communication is really strong. So all of that can be improved. I've seen it improved from, you know, 20 year olds who have not great posture, not great movement to 80 year olds. So the idea with neuroplasticity is it's always available to change and the body is such a direct channel to create that change. Yes, it's wonderful to do memory puzzles and all that, but they've shown in neuroscience that there's nothing greater than exercise and movement to create that neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.
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I love that. That makes so much sense. I do somatic work as well. So I'm keyed into how important it is to tune into our bodies and how wise our bodies are and how much information there is that our brains can't always pick up on. But I haven't thought about it specifically in the ways with the posture and the functional movement and how that also is going to affect our neuroplasticity and brain generation. That is really, really cool. And I see it in people. I kind of left the not left. I still practice yoga, I still love yoga. But I got really interested also in different types of improvisational dance forms and contemporary dance forms where I felt like, what you're saying that it challenged my body and my brain in different ways. And I notice after doing those types of practices just how much more alive I feel.
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C
So I love that we learn something. I always reference, like when you're learning to drive, you know that for these first couple times you get in, you're like, yes, get your seat adjusted, your rear view mirror, you're going really slowly turning. Everything is like, I'm connecting all the dots. And then, you know, 20 years in, you're doing it, you're listening to music, you're drinking your coffee, and it's automatic. But automatic is not bad. But we don't tend to be as present and just focused. And so we need to give ourselves little shots of novelty. Because that's like you said, when you're doing something different, the experience of it is that you're. You're inhabiting it very differently. You're paying attention. And that's why we need challenge in our movement. When people say, oh, I could never do that or something is it. It's more about like, well, do it for your brain. Yes, it's great to be strong. Yes, it's. The goal is not to be able to do a handstand, for instance, I teach handstands, but the process of it. Because handstand is the pose, but getting into it is this process and this alignment and this awareness and the challenge of. And the patience required to kind of go through those steps and feel yourself in space and understand how your breath and your alignment all contribute to that. That's where you're again laying down better pathways so that even if you never achieve a vertical handstand, who cares? The actual work of doing it is growing you.
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B
Definitely. And I love how the lit method is this combination of the physical therapy and the yoga and the neuroscience. And it feels like these different worlds being bridged, both the functional movement and then the spiritual connection that yoga brings. Can you talk about how those things. Things inform each other in the lit method?
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C
Yeah, and I love that you ask it like that because often people immediately separate them. Like, a lot of the approach has been that are very disparate. I've had people say, oh, I'm used to a very spiritual practice. And it's like, there's nothing more spiritual than inhabiting your body in space. We have been doing this since the beginning of civilization, gathering together with music. Movement is the channeling of all of that energy. In those earlier times, it was a individual experience as well as a collective experience. And so the way I look at it is movement is both. We have the anatomy and biomechanics, but anatomy, its actual definition is the understanding of what's happening underneath. Right. It's the internal workings of the body. And to me, that's really fascinating because that's not just, you know, the. Where the joints are in space or what muscles are contributing, contributing to an action. It's what else is happening. And that is the flow of your energy. The flow of, you know, we call it different things in different practices. But we all understand that this is not woo. This is science. We are bodies of energy. And when we combine these two, like, one affects the other. It's not like we have to be like, okay, and now we're going to sit and do some spiritual work, right? They're absolutely integrated. And it's really the intention that you bring into it. The movement is becoming a celebration of spirit when you pay attention. And that's what I will often compare it to. Like, there's nothing wrong with running on a treadmill, listening to music or watching a show, but that's kind of trying to get. Get you out of the experience. Like, okay, this has got 30 minutes and you don't want to feel everything, so you're distracted. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. You're still going to get benefits to your cardiopulmonary system, all that. But that, to me, truly is exercise versus movement with intention. Is this science meets spirit, which I think lit really is, because it's like we're learning more about ourselves. We're learning more about this beautiful home that we inhabit, a home that we will never leave. It is our longest relationship we'll ever have, and many of us never got educated about it, right? Schools don't educate about it. It's so sad. Even our sexual education is very much like. Like we're all in a, you know, giggling about it. It seems like something to be a little ashamed of. It's not something to be celebrated. And in that same way, we should be learning about the workings in the. The anatomy, the workings of our body, because within, we learn how to manage ourselves, managing our nervous system, managing our emotions, feeling, not stuffing something down, but also not reacting in ways that are out of our control or the way we want to. We can regulate our nervous system by working on strengthening our body and strengthening our connection between our brain and body. Because when you work it and you challenge it, you also are training it how to better calm down because it understands this spectrum. Oh, what do you need me to do? So it's like we're having this constant dialogue of what is needed right now, what's our energy like, and how do we pay attention to it when we also pay attention to our alignment? We're not just aligning joints. We're aligning our energy and our intentions and our focus. And it's not about perfection. It's about stringing more and more of those moments where we're really fully present and embodied and doing that as much as we can and bringing that into our lives. We kind of teach that without preaching it, if that makes sense. It becomes the lesson. They're learning it because it's already within us. We're just. We're revealing there. We're also kind of relearning things that we might not have learned the first time around in our aging. So it's really a wonderful way just to celebrate life and spirit with movement.
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So beautiful.
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Yeah. I'm an Ayurvedic practitioner as well, and something that came up for me when you were talking was something that we say a lot and might be a yoga concept as well. But just that prana, which is our life force, follows attention. And so wherever we put our attention, that's where our life force is going to follow and fill and move in. And so, like you said, it's like, yeah, when we're doing these things where we're trying to check out of whatever it is we're doing, whether it's running on the treadmill or walking or. I definitely do that when I do dishes. I like to put on a podcast or a story or something while I'm doing my dishes. But the more that we can actually be present in whatever it is that we're doing, the more that Our life force is going to be there with us in our bodies. And I love the simplicity that there doesn't even be a big deal made about it. This is just how it is. When you can bring your full awareness, full attention into your body, then you're connecting with spirit. You're connecting with something bigger.
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C
Exactly. And to all the things you were just saying, it isn't like we have to do it all the time. It's fine to be entertained. It's lovely to wash dishes and listen to music or listen to a podcast and get some kind of other information. It's. It's more. And the same thing with posture. All these are along the same lines. It's like, does the intelligence of your body and spirit understand how to get there when you need to? Right. You don't have to always be there, but in all the different moments in life, you know, does it understand that? So when people talk about posture, do you have to be in this perfect posture all the time? Which. There's not a perfect posture. It's the. The most optimal posture. And the answer is no. But does your body understand how to get there when it needs to? Right.
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Yes, exactly. So before, you were talking about the differentiating between something that's just exercise and about when you're doing that movement with presence. And I think it sounds like what the lit method is about is creating a more holistic, sustainable lifestyle. It's not just about the movement, but how that affects everything. So can you speak to this in the role of this movement in cultivating resilience?
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C
Yeah, great question. I mean, yes. So what we want to teach on the mat is teaching the principles of, you know, understanding postural training, core training, which is not your abdominals. It's how your center holds you well and adapts to the challenges. That's really the core's job is to stabilize against you against the impact of gravity. So. And all of those things are building this tenacity that you didn't take off of the mat. You don't ne. Again, it's not one of those conscious things. It's just. It becomes integrated. So it's not like clothes that you take on and take off, and it naturally transfers into your daily life so that it could be such that when you're sitting in the car, you're more present of how that feels. Well, when. I know that's kind of hokey, but when you're sitting in the car in a different way, it. You probably will respond to stresses around you differently, too. You know, you're not going to be like getting angry at everybody that cuts in front of you or having that kind of road rage, or just more. The feeling might come, but it moves through you. It's not going to immediately make you respond. So that adaptation to stress is really what we're teaching because the movement challenges the body to adapt by strengthening muscles, strengthening the bones, strengthening the cardiovascular system. And that physical robustness translates into different areas of our lives so that we have a greater capacity to handle challenge. We also can recover in a calmer way from those moments that inevitably are going to happen because we're carrying over that practice as well. Like when I was mentioning, our nervous system knows when it needs to rile up, when we have some challenge physically. It's also going to learn how to, you know, calm down. And that recovery is really important for resilience. Because resilience is not about never falling down or never stumbling or never having, you know, a down period. It's about how quickly you can get back up and not just be held down by whatever is weighing you down. And that could be anything. It could be mental stress, emotional stress, grief, you know, social, whatever it is, you're going to be able to have that greater capacity to handle the challenges. And you know, the other thing is we, like you mentioned when you were dancing with expression of it in lit, what everybody will often say is the clarity that you feel afterwards because of the engaged focus, the awareness of alignment of biomechanics and breathing and all these things. That cognitive clarity improves our ability to handle stress and improves our problem solving. And all of those things are known to contribute to greater resilience. It's again that tenacity that we want. We can get stretched. Life can pile on a lot of things, but when we have more cognitive clarity, we're able to manage it a lot better. We all have that moment where we just feel like overwhelmed and things just pop. And those moments will happen less and less as we get more resilient.
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B
That makes so much sense. It's working both with the physical resilience, like you said, making your body stronger, more able to adapt to challenges, but also through that re patterning the movements affecting your neuroplasticity, which I think neuroplasticity is such a huge part of resilience. Being able to shift our mindset around things and be able to move in and out of different ideas and problem solving skills and creativity and curiosity, all those things. So I love how it brings all that in. And then with the presence of I Feel like presence is such a part of it too, because when we can be present and feel what's happening in our bodies and aware of, oh, I might be coming into some dysregulation right now, or, oh, I feel like my posture is in a way that's making me feel down or stressed, we can make those shifts more quickly.
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C
And being able to make that really is rooted in education. If you haven't gotten this education, and that's really coming back full circle to how I even started doing this. I had no desire to become a business person, an entrepreneur. It was really seeing that I wanted to empower yoga teachers because they loved this practice. They went through training, and many of them did not have the education to be able to for their own practice, but for to in their teachings, to offer that to others. Empowerment is education. Education is giving you the competence to really understand yourself and understand movement and your body. And all of that translates again into being not only more empowered, but more empowered is more resilient.
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B
Yes, I agree. Yeah, that is beautiful. And what does a typical lit class look like?
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C
So the format I created based on my neurodevelopmental training, which is if you think of the developmental stages we all went through from birth to becoming bipedal, we went through those, and that was what really grew our brain. That is what grew our connection of the brain to the body. We developed postural muscles to help stabilize so that we could go from being like a floppy baby to becoming one quadruped and then half kneeling and then rising up. So I was doing that in my training. We would do this with stroke patients, with anyone that had had some kind of brain insult and that whatever injury was, had rendered them, had some kind of motor deficit. So we would go back to this very early programming of the brain for these developmental patterns. And there's a lot of reasons for that. But one reason that would make sense is when you get on the ground, a, you get a lot of feedback energy from the ground, but you also have a lot more support to the center of your mass, which is your pelvis. So when you start from there, you can start to retrain more optimal movement habits that we might not have when we get up with a lot less support and moving around. So every lit class, we start with what's called a reset. And that was going back to the place where when people would come in and with their already existing imbalances, which we all have, it's not about being perfect. We're going to just create balance in such A way that gives us more energy. Because when we are operating with more energy, we are more joyful, we're more generous, we're just nicer, you know. And so it. That reset is reestablishing that connection to our center. It's reestablishing our neutral spine and neutral pelvis. And how we really rely on that a lot. When we start mobilizing our bigger joints of our shoulders and hips. So we go through that reset that can be anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes, depending on the length of the class. And then we take that into some sequences. And what's also a real signature of lit is we stream these. And as a dancer, you'll really appreciate this. We have a stream, and the stream is streaming those sequences together. Because anybody that's taken dance knows you do things and you repeat and you repeat and you repeat. And you're not repeating in the way, like, you never change it, but you repeat it in that time period so that it is laid down. It's like going into the hardware versus the floppy disk. It's really laid down in your brain. So we take those sequences and we bring them together in this lovely stream which is bringing the sequences and they might change. What's really wonderful is the. The blueprint. What we call it the lip blueprint, is very analytical. It's always, this is what happens. But with that, you know, very analytical blueprint, there's lots of creativity. So we have, again, thousands of teachers, and everyone can express those things differently. So it really gives the empowerment and education and then this blueprint to the teachers to Then, you know, we have themes like, this morning I taught a class called the Dynamic Diaphragm. And it was really about how important it is to have this back area of our ribcage broad. Because when we're pushing our ribs forward, which many people do, we're decreasing the capacity for the diaphragm to really take in air. Well, that doesn't just affect our breathing and our energy. It also affects our mood. It also affects our nervous system. And so, you know, that entire theme was about that we're doing a lot of movement. But if your mind is focused on, like, how do I keep that broadness there? How do I cultivate my center and then express larger movement? It was beautiful to see people do that. So that's kind of what you can expect. We have all levels. Originally, when I had the platform, the reason most people didn't stay was they said it was too difficult. And I only knew what I knew because I had Created this Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey with 10 years at a studio. And I had people of all ages and levels, but because they were so consistent and I always kind of hold the bar high because the challenge is really important. That's what I saw. And then I realized actually many people are not even ready for this at all. And so we have foundational classes, we have beginner classes, we have some kind of prehab things for people who have been injured. We have thousands of classes. So yeah, come and take a class.
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B
It sounds so fun. I'm going to come take a class. Yeah, I can tell. I'm just like, oh, that sounds so good. I love that it starts with a reset. I really love the concept in general of resetting our diets, resetting our nervous systems, just coming back to that simple place, to that clean slate. And yeah, like you said, so many yoga classes we just start with movement right away and so then we're carrying all those patterns in. So I really, I love that. So fun.
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C
Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
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B
And can you talk about if people are interested in taking a class? The easiest way to do that?
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C
Yeah. So the easiest way is just to go to the website lityoga.com l y-t yoga.com and on there you'll see free trial or all these little buttons and that'll take you to our online platform and we have a free trial. And that's the best way to try. Go try it out with that. You're going to get sequence emails that and really open them and read them because it's really to escort you in and say, hey, here's what we would suggest. There's an introductory video but the emails also will say these are the ones that are really great. That way you set yourself up for success because first of all it can be overwhelming. There are a lot of classes, it is very well organized. But even so if you don't have a plan, you could just get or you know, it's like Netflix conundrum. Like you could be overwhelmed. So follow what the email says and try some of those things out and, and then you can go crazy and like look all over you. Do a search button. We have a posture challenge, which is a 20 day posture challenge. We've got so many classes but really just take advantage of that free trial and see what it's like for you. And then you could always write me with any questions. You can also reach out to me on Instagram. I'm active there. I have a direct message me. It's Lara HYMAN. Or lit method is the brand's IG page.
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B
Awesome. I'll have all your information in the show notes so people can access it really easily. And so would you be willing to give listeners a small action step that they can take into their lives?
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C
I would say the small action step is part of this reframing. Like maybe you don't need it, but maybe you do reframe movement not as a chore, but as something that is a celebration of you and therefore you need to celebrate yourself every day. Right. It doesn't have to be because somebody told you this is the best thing to do or you want to lose weight or whatever. It's because we are bodies that are made to move and our spirits need that, if that helps at all. I think sometimes we all need that reframing like this is really a celebration and not a chore. So it's some something to do daily and, and start paying attention while you're doing it. And if you feel like, gosh, I want to know more, then go explore more and know that it's never too late. At any, any age. You can improve your posture, your breathing, your movement patterns.
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A
I love it.
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B
Yes. We are animals. Our animal bodies want to move.
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C
They do absolutely.
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B
Well. I absolutely loved this conversation. Thank you so much. This was so rich and just so much great information and that information and spiritual connection, which I love that combo.
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C
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Kristen. You were a delightful host.
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B
Thank you.
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A
Hi, it's me again. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. I'll have all of Lara's information in the show notes, so check her out, check out the platform and I hope you have a wonderful week. Hey there. Thanks again for listening. I want to let you know about a couple of resources that I'm offering if you're interested in going a little deeper. I have a deep rest meditation as well as a nourished for resilience workbook. There'll be links in the show notes if you're interested in checking them out. And I'm also currently offering one on one coaching around nervous system health, self care, resilience. I like to weave in Ayurveda herbs, somatics if it makes sense, as well as ayurvedic consultation. So if you're interested in seeing if we're a good fit, I have a schedule for booking an exploratory call in the show notes. Hope to connect with you soon.
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C
Have a great weekend.