Nurturing Interoception: Yoga's Mindful Journey

Transcript

hi everyone kelly mahler here occupational therapist and i want to take the time to talk about the power of introception informed yoga and we know that yoga is known by many people from all around the world it's an ancient practice it's a mind-body practice there's so many different forms of yoga yoga is utilized in so many different settings from schools to therapy clinics to formal yoga studios and yoga is amazing because it can be adapted to meet the needs of a wide variety of learners it can be adapted for many different ages many different learning styles and many different backgrounds and so forth one of the good things we know about yoga we know that has a lot of benefits one of those benefits is improving intraceptive awareness or nurturing that interceptive awareness and we wanted to give some tips on how to use yoga in an introception informed way so that you can get the best interception outcomes so so tip number one is all about really thinking about the way that we're using yoga to nurture intraceptive growth and we know that there are different types of teaching there's implicit teaching and there's explicit teaching so implicit teaching really assumes that a person is going to pick up or gain skill naturally by just the active participation in whatever activity it is in this case it's yoga so assuming that a person is going to naturally just connect and be more aware of their internal interceptive sensations through a yoga practice and what we're trying to get better at is using some more explicit methods of instruction to nurture someone's interceptive growth through the use of yoga and so what this looks more like is inviting someone rather than focusing on them assuming a pose say downward facing dog we are shifting that making it more explicit intraceptively to asking them and inviting them to pay attention to how certain body parts feel while they are assuming downward facing dog so really tuning in to that intraceptive feeling how do your hands feel while they're pressing into the mat or during child's pose how does the skin on your forehead feel when you are in this pose just invitations to nurturing and noticing your interceptive sensations during a yoga practice that's what makes it even more of an explicit interception journey so shifting from a focus from assuming the pose to a focus on noticing the way your body feels during that pose makes it more of an explicit interception learning activity so tip number two always as with all interception work always always always be trauma informed and i could speak on this for a really long time but just in a really quick nutshell what do we mean by this so first of all yoga as with all of our other interceptive awareness builders are always presented in an invitation to participate it is never a demand that we're placing on someone and requiring them to do this we want to also ensure that our learners are feeling safe and regulated within their environments within their bodies before we can expect them to feel safe enough to tune in and start to notice how their bodies are feeling so really giving someone control over their yoga practice encouraging them to make their practice their own to always be thinking about promoting safety promoting feelings of safety promoting feelings of regulation and empowering people with a choice to make their practice their own is always trauma informed and then lastly tip number three is to think about the language supports that you may need to provide to certain learners if you are using explicit introception methods of teaching and asking them and inviting them to pay attention to the way certain parts of their body feel many times people that are not in touch with their bodies are overwhelmed by their bodies they don't develop the language to describe what it is that they notice and this is even the case for our most brilliant learners and so providing some form of a language-based support can be really helpful in inspiring people to learn to describe and understand what it is they are beginning to notice during our yoga practice so hopefully this gets your wheels spinning thinking about how to use yoga in an interception informed way to nurture that interception growth that we know is important for every single one of us so until next time