Healing the Body is as important as the mind
Welcome everyone to my new website!! I am studying yoga this year completing a teacher training course. Why? Well part of my motivation is deeply personal….Wanting to look after my physical body as well as my psychological growth. Part of it is a logical direction in my profession. Psychologists are trained to focus on the mind firstly, then dealing with emotion and I think the body often only gets lip service! And yet the longer I have worked in my profession the more I see it as important to approach a person's growth and healing holistically.
As a young therapist and trainer the best learning I had was how to think systemically -not in a linear or sequential way or even just the intra-psychic world shaped by family of origin - but looking at context - no person or thing exists in isolation. Everything is connected. Therefore to look at a whole person we need to attend to all aspects - intellectual, emotional, physical, sexual and spiritual - not privilege one over the other.
Some people get leery about including the spiritual but by this I don't mean religion, although if that is how a client finds meaning that is fine, I mean a broader definition of spirituality that represents how people find meaning. Even if you have no spiritual traditions or belief it is still useful to explore psychologically how you give meaning to your life. That is why I have chosen a type of yoga that is grounded in centuries old spiritual traditions with a focus of going inward and using our breath to connect with the divine, a Universal flow that is pure energy, rather than seeing Yoga as a series of physical exercises. Whilst yoga strengthens the body with rigorous poses it also strengthens all aspects of self.
Mindfulness has become the flavour of the decade, as people search for meaning as an antidote to the increased stress and busy-ness of most peoples’ lives and the imposition of consumerism as a shallow religion for the masses. Yet psychology goes to some effort to divorce mindfulness from spiritual traditions, which is interesting as compartmentalisation is actually a defence mechanism that limits people's capacity to reach their potential! I guess it's the same as reducing yoga to a series of physical exercises - it is helpful but not the whole approach.
So for me to learn yoga from a teaching perspective is also about helping my clients tune into their body and breathing to understand what is happening for them. There is no doubt in my mind that the body locks in trauma and creates physical manifestations of psychological defences. For example if every time you feel vulnerable your defence is to cut off your feeling you will also be doing something in your body, like locking up your neck and shoulders. This leads to chronic physical ailments in time. Think of people who have experienced sexual, physical or emotional abuse before the age of two. Most people would agree that this has to be massively impactful and yet a child hasn't laid down the cognitive ability in those years to give intellectual understanding or memory to those events. And yet we remember them - the pain and fear are locked into our body and mind through our physical and emotional responses. An intellectual approach to healing that trauma will not help much unless we can give meaning to the clues from our body and emotion.
A few months ago I went to a really interesting conference in California called the Evolution of Psychotherapy. It was a bit daunting to have eight and a half thousand therapists in one place!!! However it was great to hear the elders and international leaders of various therapies present. One outstanding presenter Bessel Van de Kirk who is a leader in trauma research and something of a rebel in the traditional psychiatric field spoke of a research study he undertook on the treatment of anxiety and depression comparing the effectiveness of twelve weeks of cognitive behavioural therapy versus twelve weeks of intensive yoga. Guess which one had the better results? Yes that’s right, Yoga. How could I not study it? More next week.......
