I love attending talks and conferences because I always leave with renewed excitement about the topic. So it’s no surprise that I left the most recent Yoga Research Network half-day conference “The role of Yoga in Psychological Therapy”, organised by Westminster University, feeling driven to help more people discover mind–body practices as a way to support their mental health.
I was excited to actually bump into some familiar faces, including my lovely teacher colleague from Sol centre.
I would distill the day down to this simple message: psychological conditions don’t just involve the mind, but also the body. Anxiety (which was the focus of this conference) is strongly tied with the stress response (a biological response). Stress and overwhelm are obviously tied with the stress response. Depression has links to inflammation. Ignoring the body in psychological therapy misses out half the picture.
I’ll share an example. I actually have tons from my own experience, but I wanted to share this one because it was just so impactful for me to watch what a difference embodiment made for someone else right in front of my eyes (I hope they won’t mind me sharing).
I practice focusing, an embodied practice like yoga that invites dialoguing with sensations in the body, and getting insights (and hopefully release) on what’s going on. My focusing partner (focusing is practiced in pairs) was struggling that day, and the simple invitation of placing a gentle hand on their chest and staying with their breath was apparently more effective than the talk therapy they’d had that day.
Beyond the experiential, the clinical evidence for yoga and other mind–body practices in this space is growing, and so I’ll echo the sentiment that guidelines and recommendations really need to be updated to include things beyond CBT.
The Minded Institute is trying to organise an evidence collection to support bringing yoga for the treatment of GAD, or generalised anxiety disorder, into the NICE guidelines). You can get in touch with them directly if you are involved in research or other evidence collection in this space.
Conference highlights
Talked about clinical research in anxiety (and specifically GAD, which is the most prevalent mental health condition in the UK). This includes his group’s work exploring the effectiveness of (Kundalini) yoga and CBT for GAD, which I’ve written about before here, here and most recently here (this used to be a paid post but I’ve made it free for all).
As a quick summary:
Both yoga and CBT are effective for GAD
CBT tends to be more effective than yoga (but that doesn’t mean that yoga is not good, because, as he noted, CBT is only effective for some anyway)
Adding yoga to CBT makes it even more effective than CBT alone
Discussed work that her group has done on integrating yoga to CBT for various psychological conditions, including anxiety, which has shown promising results. Of particular interest was work indicating, again, that adding yoga to CBT makes it more effective than CBT alone, likely due to the added mindfulness element.
Presented her interesting model that parallels specific elements of yoga practice (the yamas and the niyamas) with the general mental health processes needed to drive psychological improvement. In essence, it directly compares how yoga creates these mental changes to how traditional talk therapy works.
Built on what was discussed at the start of the day by exploring how therapeutic yoga elements can be incorporated into CBT practice, and her informal evidence from training CBT students that this helps transform their practice. One thing that really stayed with me from this talk is how important it is to ground at the start of a therapy session, and probably any session – I’ve found this helpful personally and also when I’ve led writing for wellbeing sessions.
Let’s try something together
Just a short grounding and reflection practice for you to try:
Take three rolls of your shoulders back, and three rolls of your shoulders forwards
Bring your shoulders to your ears, and then drop them down with a strong exhale; try this twice
Close your eyes or soften then and just feel your breath coming in and our without trying to change it, counting down from 10 every time you exhale. Repeat 3 times (so 3 rounds of 10 exhales, 30 breaths) or more if you like.
When you finish, grab a pen and something to write on and make a list of things you noticed. For example:
Softening in my shoulders
A cloudy sensation around my head
A lightness in my hands
The light behind my eyelids
Coming up…
Yin 200hour teacher training
I’m teaching two sessions on this exciting teacher training next month. If you are a student on this course, I’ll see you there for more on stress and the immune system, and on yoga nidra.
Workshops
I have two workshops coming up at Sol centre, details coming soon but briefly:
Yoga, yoga nidra and reflective writing (October)
Yoga and self-massage/myofascial release (November)