B (3:51)
Well, thanks for this invitation to talk about what I love and what I am just passionate about. Because after years of psychotherapy and some training in it, although I'm not a licensed mental health professional professional, I am trained in internal family systems therapy and some other modalities, but my primary basis has been yoga. But after years of psychotherapy which really helped me understand family of origin issues, my own depression was not lifting and I had also been a meditator for many years. But it was when I began an embodied practice of yoga in the mid-80s that my, my whole life transformed and I became passionate about sharing what had really saved my life with others. And I began to do create alliances with researchers and develop protocols and publish. I think I wrote it. I did actually write the first article on yoga and mental Health in 1999 in Yoga Journal. It was called Yoga the Natural Prozac. And then since then I've written a number of books and articles and chapters on yoga and mental health and, and specifically how to integrate yoga into psychotherapeutic settings and healthcare settings in general. The latest book being the Norton W.W. norton book, Yoga Skills for Therapists. And that really covers a number of practices. I think there are 52 practices with clinical uses, case studies, and not just from my own work, but from the many life force yoga practitioners who are mental health providers whom I've trained. And we do trainings. That's the primary work is research which we have some of it's on the, it's on the Yoga for Depression website under Research and Training for Health Professionals and yoga Teachers. So that they feel. So yoga teachers feel confident in working with people who have mood disorders and because people come with for example neck issues or hip issues or knee issues and they think they're coming because they want adjustments or help in managing their chronic pain in particular body areas. And there's always an emotional component. I mean it's the body mind connection. So yoga teachers often find themselves with people crying on the mat or released, having cathartic releases, so giving them the competency and the confidence to hold a safe and sacred container for emotions and to help people manage and regulate their moods. That's important for yoga teachers as well as mental health professionals. And mental health professionals are finding that when they integrate. And we probably should define yoga therapy as something other than what we're talking about because yoga therapy is specific. There are standards now from the International association of Yoga Therapists. 800 in order to call yourself a yoga therapist you need to have taken that training. 800 a training and life force Yoga practitioner training is a component in many of the 800 hour programs. So that's the designation of the title yoga therapy. So what people who take our trainings or read the book or you know, come to workshops do who are mental health professionals is begin to integrate practices that are from the yogic tradition but are made extremely accessible so that people who may have a resistance to the idea of say chanting Sanskrit or doing a pranayama breathing practice are given tools that are not specific to any kind of religious tradition. So for example, one of the primary practices we teach is stair step practice breath. Now that's based on an ancient tradition of analoma and Voloma krama, but we call it stair step breath because I don't know about you, but as a yoga teacher I find even just as recently as a few weeks ago, my cousin said to me, I was visiting and she said, oh, I really like the yoga, the stretching part, but I hate that breathing too stuff. And that's because people often are upper chest breathers. And there's a good reason for that. There's usually either and it's usually both a physiological component, but there's often a repression of material tamping down of material that the the person is not ready to deal with. And so if you invite for example, what most yoga teachers and classes are offer the very first practice yogic three part breath dirga pranayama, which is breathing to the bottom of the lungs, midsection, top of the lungs. Some people will either not be able to do it. So immediately you've introduced a practice that your client is going to fail at or they're going to have emotional flooding. And if this is your first session, it could be scary, shameful. The therapeutic container, the safe and sacred container, has not yet been established. So that's why, for example, we introduce a practice like stair step breath which is much easier to accomplish and meets that upper chest breathing style. I can go on and give you a couple other examples. For example, sometimes people who've done mindfulness training may invite their client to simply watch the breath at the beginning of a session if someone is highly agitated. If someone is highly has a history of trauma or you know, general anxiety disorder and that, that anxiety is really present at that moment. It may be very challenging to simply watch the breath. Whereas if you give them a strategy from the yogic tradition that we teach in the Life Force Yoga practitioner training that goes specifically to giving the mind a bone, giving the mind something to do, whether it's a tone and we don't call it mantra chanting, but we have some universal sounds that we use, a mudra hand gesture or a breathing practice like the one I just mentioned, stair step breath, then that gives the mind something to do and there's, and you're, you're meeting that busy, overstimulated, hyper aroused state with something and then, then mindfulness, then a watching of the breath can occur, but it's often too, it actually creates more agitation to simply sit and watch the breath at the beginning of a session for someone who's anxious. So we teach a number of tools that come from the yogic tradition, but again we make them accessible. And I could go over more of those tools. I've also written, I mean just in terms of my own work, I've written a number of books. Yoga for Depression was the first book on yoga and mental health and that was published in 2004. I've had Broadway Books, Random House and it's still selling well, so it's still available. And lots of CDs and DVDs of practices, a lot of them are available for free on our website yogafordepression.com under get help. And they can also find practitioners who've taken the training, mental health practitioners who combined these strategies into their clinical practice. You can also find people who've trained in both internal family systems, which I'm, I think is such a good fit with Life Force Yoga and yoga in general. Because if those of you who may be IFS practitioners know how important it is to find ways to help a client find that place of self energy where they can feel some curiosity, some compassion towards the parts that may be troubling them, the manager parts or the firefighter parts or the exiles. So it's really important to find self energy and then also in terms of working with parts, if a part has not yet been unburdened, an exile, a wounded part, a younger part, and the session is complete, complete, it may be appropriate to check in with the client and say check in with that part and say with that part, feel comfortable with a soothing practice that we can give it until, so that you can, you can bring a soothing practice to that part when you're working with it at home this week and you can invite then the client to try on a practice and co create, create a take home practice with the client rather than prescribe it but rather co create a practice based on the tools that we offer both in the book, the Yoga skills for Therapists book and in our trainings. Wow.
