Neuroscience & Yoga Therapy

I feel like I’ve been a sponge the last few weeks and months. You know the good kind of sponge. Soaking up new learnings left and right. It’s left me in this interesting, almost oversaturated, marination state where I am eager to integrate and apply and share yet also a little overwhelmed on where and how to start. This blog post is my highlight data dump (with some of the topics to likely be explored in more depth at a later date) if you will on recent learnings and insights from life and more specifically from an insightful “Calming an Overactive Brain” seminar with William Sieber as well as an incredible “Deepening Your Relationship” weekend couples retreat at Kripalu with Michael Lee, the founder of Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy. Without further ado …

1) 20-second reset: This was a great tip from the “Calming an Overactive Brain” seminar. The premise is we are absolutely able to handle a good amount of stress (Remember? The thing we’re told is not good for us?) provided we take short breaks between stressors. This will give our brains a chance to reset and better be able to handle the next stressor. Dr. Sieber suggested a 20-second reset, basically just taking about 20 seconds to take a few long, slow inhale and exhale breaths, where the exhale is ideally longer than the inhale. He suggested picking something like after hitting send on each email, between meetings, every time you use the bathroom or go from one room to another, or any repetitive daily task to build the habit and increase the chances of remembering to do the reset after the next stressor.

2) Worry box: This is another idea from the “Calming an Overactive Brain” seminar. Have an anxiety or worry that starts consuming you at inopportune times? Um yes definitely raising my hand here. The idea with a worry box is that I would write down that worry on a piece of paper and schedule when I can worry about it. Then I put it in a box and keep adding for each additional worry. Each day I check the box and see what I am allowed to worry about when. Funnily enough, I rarely want to worry about that once all-consuming worry during the scheduled worry time! Dr. Sieber talked about the value of this from a perspective of delaying gratification (worrying about what I want to worry about now in this case) being a much smarter approach than denial. Denial after all is rough – it says no I can’t ever worry about this thing! Then that denial feels impossible, so I cave in and worry now. Delaying the worry means I’m not dismissing my worries; I’m just saying hey maybe now isn’t the necessary moment for that worry. It gives me a choice.

3) Calm down by getting hyped up: I found this one especially fascinating. Dr. Sieber shared that if you’re really anxious, don’t try to calm down right away. It will work better if you first do a few minutes of some kind of intense activity (say a minute of jumping jacks) that will raise your heartrate above what it currently is and then you’ll have an easier time calming down and relaxing after that.

4) Trust & allow: Flowing from the brain seminar to the yoga therapy retreat a few weeks later, the learning style shifted away from didactic to experiential and somatic, a style incredibly powerful and also difficult for me to put into words. Trust and allow came to me near the end of the retreat after the first night, full next day followed by an individual yoga therapy session on the second day. These words feel like a culmination of trying to verbalize a profound embodied experience. I felt like for maybe the first time in my life, my mind took a back seat and allowed my body wisdom to be in charge and in that I felt a deep sense of self-trust in my body, something that I have been disconnected from. Allow whispered into my body as well since I had to allow whatever was coming up in the embodied present and not push away and resist discomfort whether physical or emotional or mental and also not cling to pleasure or positive things and then judge other moments harshly against that. Simply allow and trust in myself and the flow of life, finding perhaps a kind of equanimity. There is a lot more I could say about this retreat since felt it really was transformative and life-changing for me on many levels yet will save that for future writing integration experiments.

5) “I love you and I wish you well today”: I thought this was a simple and profound practice shared by Michael Lee in the Yoga Therapy Couple retreat. He shared that he started a practice where each morning he tells his partner he loves her and he wishes her well in her day in some way general or more specific. My husband and I have been practicing this since the retreat and have found it really nice. I’ve also been thinking about this in relation to my relationship with myself, with the idea of also wishing myself well today. With the idea of this becoming a loving kindness meditation for myself, my husband, family, friends, acquaintances, strangers, the whole world, an offering and prayer of love and wellbeing and peace.

6) Exhale: This ties in with both the brain seminar and yoga therapy retreat. It’s certainly not a new concept but rather is something I had an aha embodied moment of remembering oh wow this is what it feels like to exhale. I wrote the below poem to try to encapsulate that feeling just a little bit, a feeling I am trying to practice returning to again and again.

Exhale
Just exhale
Breathe out
Let go
Let God
Surrender
Flow
Fly
Be free

Trust
The inhale
Will happen
Just exhale
Again
And again
Until the final exhale
Of this life

We never know
How many exhales
We have left
In this life
Savor each one
Knowing
It is a gift
Exhale