Neuroplasticity, Yoga Therapy, and Interoception: How We Change

Transcript

so neuroplasticity is is such an exciting concept because we used to think that after the age of8 or nine it was all downhill that the brain really couldn't change and so it was one long process of degeneration ending in death and what we now know through Neuroscience is that the brain is changing every moment and has the capacity for Change and even past the moment of death so if you read a lot of the the studies by Elizabeth Keras and other people who look at near-death experience where clinical death has happened there are experiences that people are able to integrate and bring back into their life after they come back and so we could say that neuroplasticity extends beyond the moment of death and perhaps well beyond that moment so neuroplasticity is not only the science of change and how change happens but um I would also suggest looking at it as a framework for how we pattern things in more strongly so it's also the science of patterns and we know that the brain learns from new experience but if that experience is too different too disparate from what we know as our reality then the nervous system kind of kicks in and says this is too different too scary I've gone from point A over here to point Z over here and there's a little bit of what I might call a neural backlash so we kind of reverberate back to that initial pattern and wire it in more deeply so when we look at yoga therapy as being helpful in the process of of change you can look at how does a yoga therapist or yoga educator scaffold these new experiences in subtle ways but progressively over time so that they're integrated and um neuroplasticity really requires an understanding of how the nervous system integrates change so looking for a dramatic Improvement in one session or an amazing experience of transformation becomes less important and and perhaps even counterproductive but again it boils down to how do we bring people inside how do we cultivate the inner attention and awareness so that those changes can be small and able to be integrated over time and so using our knowledge of how the brain changes to bring about changes of all kinds and and when I look at neuroplastic it on that level it's such an encouraging no matter where we've come from whether it's post-traumatic stress disorder or a life of violence or anxiety or depression all we need are subtle experiences of not being anxious not being depressed repeatedly practiced over time in a very elegant scaffolding so that more is integrated as the person is able to integrate them that's what change is really about and for young therapists that are training to be yoga therapists there can be this pressure to offer something really big and really transformative when in fact for a client that's not so helpful to integrate and I I find that the dialogue between the yoga therapist and the yoga client if you will becomes more of a collaborative investigation and if you look at the studies on interoception this special form of body awareness um that to me is one of the most exciting New Frontiers of Y yoga therapy because interoception refers to this idea that we're not just bringing body awareness in so in ASA we know I I put my hand here and I put my leg here and this is we can move ourselves beautifully through space but interoception is actually the attention to fluctuating states of body awareness and most of us from a really early age learn to fix body awareness in one point this is how my body looks this is how it feels it's sick or it isn't sick or I have this issue with a shoulder and it's very comforting to Anchor the body as a a fixed thing and in reality our body is changing from one moment to the next but for example in post-traumatic stress disorder there is a A disruption in interoception and eating disorders as well and anxiety and depression and so if we can ourselves understand what it's like to go in our own bodies and be with that changing reality there's a lot of really important potential for transformation for ourselves and our clients you know when you think about the body it's extremely unpredictable and it's changing all the time in really scary ways and so if we're able to sort of be present in the wilderness of the body and and if we're able to do that enough so that the Wilderness itself starts to feel like home to us us then we create a kind of a visceral resilience a body-based resilience that is kind of a coraly to emotional resilience and that to me is one of the most exciting potentials for neuroplasticity and for change but I often find that as yoga therapist we execute a protocol so we follow a pattern and we give an intervention without the anchors for interoception that somebody necessarily needs and so when I think about neuroplasticity I think about how do we as practitioners ourselves begin to language and find anchors for ourselves to be present within that changing reality of the body and teach other people to do the same and when we do that together we start to expand this concept of neuroplasticity and it becomes not a a a construct for personal change like you can change and everyone around us can change but it becomes a social construct and we all change and evolve together and I really believe that the true meaning of neuroplasticity isn't simply the hope of individual change but the hope of societal change that we all change together and that yoga therapy becomes a medium for that change and so when we're able to to call together the most powerful elements of Neuroscience and in particular affective neur Neuroscience the Neuroscience of emotion and yoga and mindfulness and modern medicine we really have a powerful powerful tool for lasting change not only as individuals but as a society for Global change