Major Points:

• Integrating the eight limbs into teaching asana to bring the fullness of yoga to everyone. (12:58)
• Media images of yoga will affect people’s decisions on whether to attend yoga classes. (4:22)
• How do we become more inclusive in yoga (32:23)
• Practicing yoga helps you become more discerning by making us pause and reflect between the stimulus and response of day to day life (7:56)

00:47                                     This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is episode 113. I have an incredible guest today. Her name is Doctor Christiane Brems who is a certified psychologist from the American board of Professional Psychology. She is an RYT 500 yoga teacher, a certified yoga therapist and she received her Phd in clinical psychology from Oklahoma State University in 1987. She currently directs YogaX an innovative Yoga School Initiative in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. It provides yoga training, continuing education and services. Dr. Brem has been extremely interested in yoga all of her life and she's integrated it into her research for clinical work and also, has developed this program called YogaX. YogaX sounds like a really different kind of yoga teacher training. We're definitely going to go into that. It is the integration of science and spirituality in service of individual and communal health. It's work is grounded in modern neuroscience and psychology research as well as the ancient philosophy and psychology of Yoga. It is based on the fact that yoga is a lifestyle practice and has many health and mental health benefits. So thank you Christiane for coming on the podcast. It's amazing what you are doing there and I think it fits so well with what Changing the Face of Yoga is all about. So welcome.

02:42                                     Thank you. It's absolutely a pleasure to be here. I'm very excited. Thank you.

02:50                                     Is there anything you'd like to add to that introduction? I kind of zoomed through it because it's just incredible what you've done. I wanted to hit the highlights, but is there something that you would like to emphasize?

03:03                                     Well, maybe I'll just emphasize that YogaX really is a team effort. I happen to be the director of it at the moment, but our team includes 10 people and YogaX is really our collective brain child. And so I just want to acknowledge that I'm speaking for the group, not just for myself. We have been together for quite a while now. I think coming on seven years. So even though the Stanford initiative is very young, our team is pretty seasoned.

03:32                                     There are a couple of things I've picked up that I thought was really interesting. You said that you had done a study or seen a study, I'm not sure exactly. There really is a media bias against inclusiveness, shall we say in Yoga where you have to be young and white, probably economically safe. It isn't, in the west, very welcoming to other people. Did you do that media study or did you see it or what's the background of that?

04:22                                     Yeah, that's actually our own work. We did a review, a fairly thorough review of about 10 years worth of yoga journals, looking at all their images and articles, the graphics that go with advertisements in Yoga Journal. Obviously we were pretty successful in showing that there's a strong bias towards white, skinny, wealthy women in the images, not just in the advertisements, which was originally our hope. Also in the graphics that accompany the articles in Yoga Journal. So there's clear sexism, there's racism in the sense that there are not a lot of people of color. There are lots of images of white people. They're more images of women than men. And the interesting thing is when men are depicted, they are typically in teaching roles, whereas the women generally are more likely to be in the student role.

                                                 There just a lot of really interesting things. We've published a couple of papers about this, but we also did a really interesting study where we took Yoga Journal images and we took some information about yoga. We created a control group and a treatment group and we invited people in to learn more about yoga and then at the end of this study asked them whether they might be inclined to try yoga. The treatment group was exposed to the yoga images whereas the control group was just exposed to information about yoga. Then both groups just got a little power point presentation about yoga and we ask them our questions. Being exposed to the images of Yoga Journal as opposed to just learning about yoga made men feel much less likely that they'd want to try yoga then if they just read something about yoga. And we thought that was really fascinating because it's sort of undergirds this premise, right? That if we show the wrong images then we disinvite or uninvite certain parts of our population from the practice.

06:36                                     Yes. I used to teach seniors and a lot of ads for senior yoga and stuff would have this very young girl, the typical yoga person. And I kept saying that's not a good idea; people need to see themselves to think I can try that.

06:57                                     Yeah. We need models.

07:40                                     Yeah. So I just thought that was interesting because it is a bit of a thing with me that I was really glad to hear that there was actual research to support what I've seen. So, I loved this. This came from your blog and it just totally got me, because I didn't ever think of it this way, but you said, that yoga is when we find the gap between stimulus and response. Yeah. I thought good grief. That is what we do. But it just seems like stimulus and response is so close. For Yoga to define that gap is kind of amazing. Can you kind of expand on that idea a bit?

07:56                                     Yeah. That to us is sort of the central practice, right? And even going all the way back to the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali's yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. That's the second line in the yoga sutras - right now is the time for Yoga, which is sort of a call to mindfulness. And so even Patanjali argues if we can still the mind, then we can transform ourselves. And it's the same idea when you start looking at that gap between stimulus and response, you need to have a moment of quiet in the mind, right? You need to be able to take the stimulus and then have some discernment and some deliberate choice about how you will respond to that stimulus. And in our day to day life, that doesn't tend to be our habit, right? Our habit is more stimulus  and reaction,; there's no gap at all. And so in Yoga, we tried to cultivate is this pause, whether it's through breathing practices where we have a pause at the top and the bottom of the breath or whether it's through a physical practice where we pause to take a moment to tune in to the sensation in the body before we just sort of blow out our physical boundaries and limitations. It's all preparation for having that capacity when a stimulus reaches our nervous system to take a moment and make a deliberate choice about how we respond. So to me that has always been the very central part of the practice is this instilling of the capacity to pause.

09:41                                     I like that. Now I'd like to talk about, your teacher training because it sounds to me having been through two different sets of teacher training, that it's very, very different because it seems to have a real emphasis on community. . As well as, , learning all this stuff you got to learn. Sure. All that's in there too, but it's really, I wrote it down. It's fostering of community, encouragement of service and engagement, creation of accessibility and inclusion and I liked promotion of inspiration. The teacher training contributes to the student's personal and relational health. Relational health I don't , recall anything like that in any of my trainings or anyone else talking about that. And so could you kind of expand on that? What, what do you mean by relational health and how does the Yoga teacher training contribute to that?

11:10                                     It brings us right back to that gap between stimulus and response, right? So our relationships are often a reflection of our own capacity to self-monitor, to be compassionate, to be empathic and to understand what's happening in the other person before we react to whatever is happening in our relationship. In YogaX, in our group we have used yoga a lot in mental health care settings. And we have learned there that what happens with our clients as they do yoga because they increase the gap between stimulus and response. They become better partners in relationships. They bring us back anecdotes where their partners or spouses say, oh my gosh, you're so much more patient. Oh, you're less likely to fly off the handle. You haven't been as angry. You're easier to talk to. Bosses make comments to their employees about what changed for you? You're more patient, you're more thorough, your attention is better. There are really these reverberations into day to day life that enhance relationships. And we find that when we teach teachers, the same thing happens, right? We expect basically when we teach teachers that they too master this capacity to create a gap between stimulus and response. And that in that moment they become better people because they can make a choice about how they want to relate to the community in which they're learning and which they're grounded and in which they are responding.

12:58                                     You said that, and I thought this was excellent, really, that you do not emphasize the physical, but that all eight limbs of yoga get equal attention. I think that the physical, I hadn't actually put it in these words, but I think it's a beautiful way to say it does seem to get most of the attention both in the media and in the training that I took anyway. So how do you give equal time, in the training to all these eight limbs?

13:38                                     Yeah, that's a wonderful question because we are a yoga alliance registered school now and so we did have to comply with their criteria that they set for curriculum development. And of course, the alliance has an overly heavy emphasis on teaching asana. And so the way we make sure that we bring all eight limbs into our teaching is that bringing all of the limbs also into how we teach asana. And we do this also when we teach classes, not just when we teach teachers. When we do clinical work or research.

                                                Everything is infused for sure with Limbs one and two. That just is a background for everything. We really believe that you can’t do or teach asana without also being very clear about the first limb, the ethical practices. Otherwise you practice asana in a way that might be violent to yourself. We see this all the time when people get injured in yoga classes because they're pushing past their limitations or their boundaries and they get hurt, right? Because they're not practicing acceptance and a compassion or nonviolence toward their own body.

                                                We also really believe that in all physical practice you need to be truthful. You need to recognize when you need to use a prop or when you need to ask for help or when you need to say, this is a posture that's not accessible to me in this form. I need a modification. But we see people all the time when we offer them supports in asana, they reject it because the person next to them isn't using it. And so they're not being truthful to themselves. And so in the same way, when you infuse moderation, you infuse non-jealousy, you infuse joyfulness and non-stealing.

                                                Cover all of the first limb in everything you do in your physical practice, including your form, your movement, but also your breathing practices. And so this is a way to do that. The second limb can very naturally be infused in everything we do. We can practice with contentment, we can practice with discipline, but we can also practice with introspection and with a dedication to a greater purpose.

                                                So all of our classes always start with the setting of an intention and the presentation of a theme or the class. This will happen in our teacher training as well. That's a really beautiful way of bringing the second limb into everything you do and to always have in front of you. That realization that I'm not really on the map to enhance my body but to become a better human. Yeah. So I could go on for a whole hour talking about how we integrate that into everything we do. But that's sort of the basic premise that if you integrate them all the time, then it doesn't matter how much time we've used to any one because you're never just talking about one.

16:57                                     That makes sense to me. Towards the end of my teaching, I used to, have them set an intention, didn't tell them what it should be. But I thought it helped, again, to make it more personal for them so they would do what they needed to do, not what they thought they needed to do.

17:24                                     That's the beginning. And then we constantly come back to the theme of the class and we give lots of reminders for people to come back to their own intention. And to breathe it into their heart and then to breathe it into their community throughout the practice. Right? So that's the intention and the theme of the practice, whatever the theme of the day is, is never a lost during the time on the map. And then we asked people to take it with them when they leave the room.

17:54                                     Very, comprehensive. Yeah, that's a good idea. I didn't do that, but I think that's a really good idea. You say that what you're doing is, you are adding or supplementing the ancient yoga traditions with the current research in psychology, neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, cultural sensitivity, inclusivity and humility. Why is that important to take the modern with the ancient?

18:48                                     That's a wonderful question. It's addressed a little bit in my most recent blog about why do we practice yoga? And the point I'm making there is that the modern enhances the ancient and the ancient enhances the modern, right? The ancient comes to us. Well, it's a lot of wisdom and a lot of sort of subjective, qualitative, anecdotal evidence, that this practice really works. It transforms us as human beings. That helps us be agents for change and helps us transform our community, our society into something better.

                                                If you work in modern healthcare settings, however, if you say, I want to teach yoga to mental health clients or to people with cancer or to individuals who are coping with MS or Parkinson's, administrators will not be compelled when you say it's because it's in the yoga sutras. But if you can say, there's research that shows that when you practice yoga, you enhance people's resilience. You enhance their day to day functioning, their wellness, you optimize their autonomic control. You help people regulate their endocrine system and their immune function. You shape more adaptive, emotional, and behavioral responses. You down-regulate their reactivity, right? You make them more patient. All those things that we talked about earlier that happens in relationship.

                                                People start to listen to you and they say, wow, this would be really great for my clients because they do have immune issues or they do overreact or they need to be more resilient when they face stress, their executive function isn't quite what it be. Their memory could be better, their pain tolerance, could use some help and we now have research that shows that yoga can do all of this. I think that's the power of modern science and integrating it, For us, they stand side by side because it's amazing. You can look at the sutras and then say, and here is how we see that in modern neurobiology or in neuroscience or in psychology research. I find that just so inspiring and people love it. Our students love it when we talk about this in classes because it gives a language that bridges the philosophical and the medical, the soul and the science.

21:35                                     Yes. I've often thought that the sutures are a little difficult to understand, or was I understanding it correctly? I think you're right that it does give a bridge between the modern and the ancient with hopefully keeping the ancient wisdom intact.

22:00                                     Exactly right. We don't want to lose that wisdom because it is incredibly compelling. And to me, because the science is actually confirming that wisdom. To me, it just strengthens it, right? It allows it into the room now in a way. yeah, that's both subjective and objective, right? It's research based, but it's also experientially based and it just creates a beautiful whole.

22:29                                     Would you say and okay that you would give more weight to the experiential now that we have found that the research is supporting it. I felt that experiential was not very compelling until I heard all this other research and I thought just because it didn't have (we can go through all of the research protocols if we want) that (protocol) doesn't mean it wasn't, true. Or at least as true as we can think anything is true. So does it really give support to that kind of multiple decades and centuries of experiential learning?

23:29                                     Yes, I think it does. Most definitely. And modern research is starting to become more open-minded as well. So we don't just do clinical trials anymore. We don't just do sort of the really control, every variable kind of science anymore. We also use qualitative methods where we're talking to people, we do focus groups, we do interviews and we talk to people about their actually experience in the room. And to me that's a very powerful paradigm when you study yoga because you don't just say to people, okay, fill out this depression measure or this mindfulness measure, so we can track over time whether your depressive symptoms get better and whether your mindfulness is enhanced. I mean all of that is great, right? Because it gives us hard objective data.

                                                But we also at the end say and what else happened for you on a deep or subjective experiential level? And people will come up with things that you would have never thought about. Right. They got these amazing insights about themselves that you didn't find in your objective data, but their experience just sort of threw it to the foreground and that was the meaningful thing for them and then giving them a chance to talk about that just sort of blends with your hard, more scientific data. But it's entirely experiential and so to me, the two are utterly connected. We call this, in science we call this mixed methods. We use quantitative and qualitative data and I'm a big fan. I like to blend that sort of very objective data collection with the more subjective experiential piece and then bring both of those aspects together to really demonstrate that it's true in either paradigm.

25:26                                     That's excellent because I've always been concerned because yoga is so inclusive of all the things, the breathing and all eight limbs. How do you research that? You can research a part of it: you can research meditation, you can research breathing. But how do you bring that all together, Maybe that experiential, the subjective, the qualitative research may be the answer to that or at least partially an answer.

26:01                                     Yes, indeed. Indeed.

26:04                                     I was interested in the students that you've taught through YogaX, You have people with mental health and physical challenges, individuals and correctional settings, inpatient mental health settings, first responders and care providers. So you're looking at a really wide variety of people who are dealing with a wide variety of things. And is it kind of that yoga is so large, shall we say it can help people all in all of those areas? Or is, are each of those classes kind of tailored a bit to look at resilience or whatever is needed by possibly this class in front of you?

27:05                                     Yeah. Let me just say that our clinical work is what is pre-existing, right? So that is what happened in our group before we became YogaX where we were embedded in a comprehensive health care clinic. We did a lot of community outreach. Our first responder work was in the community, not in the clinic. and there are some basic premises that undergird our work, that are always present in everything we do. And with any population with who we do this work, right? We are always an Eight limbs based practice. And we are always very focused on the layers of self.

27:57                                     So looking at the five Koshas, body, breath, mind, intuitive wisdom and then ultimately joy, bliss or union, however you sort of want to translate the names of the Koshas. So in this work, they are always present, no matter which group we work with, we do however, adapt how we deliver the message to the group in front of us, right? And so, when we work with our mental health clients, we really work a lot through the body, the breath and the mind, really always in combination. And the more trauma we have in the room, the more careful we are to really work with body and breath, or body and energy and less so with kind of the more analytical, cognitive sort of strategies in the mind. Because the research is really clear that the contribution that yoga makes to help ameliorate traumatic experiences, is through the body and the breath.

                                                And then integrating that with work that happens in the mind that whole top down, bottom up integration. When some of our team members have worked with the police force for example, then breathing and, and thinking breathing and decision making is more in the foreground, right? And asana of course, because that group is drawn into yoga because of the physical demands. But bringing them into balance, right? Giving them the asana, talking about how that actually can help them down regulate their nervous system, how it can help them inspire that gap between response, right? If you are a police officer in the field and you have to make quick decisions all the time, if you can help get that gap long enough that the decision is more discerning, that's a wonderful, wonderful skill for them to have.

                                                But you're not going to use Sanskrit with every group like that and your tone will be much more matter of fact, you're going to use some humor. You'll adapt sort of to the cultural environment of that particular group. When you go into the prisons, which one of our team members did, she taught in a teacher training program in the prison and they taught an eight limbs practice, but they had to be much more discerning about how they practiced asana in prison, right? There were prison rules that they had to abide by - so no skin tight clothing, practice in sweats and you sort of, hide your female body if you're working with men. And so there are always adaptations that you need to make. But I think that's true no matter what, Any yoga class, a public class, anything you're always going to have people with different demand characteristics. And as a teacher, I think the more nimble you are in recognizing that and in responding to that need with appropriate modification and adaptation and suggestions, the more inclusive and inviting your practice.

31:42                                     I agree. I'd like to ask one last question. Your research showed that the media is not as inclusive as perhaps we'd like it to be. That yoga alliance has a great emphasis, has an emphasis, let's just say that on the physical as opposed to the other eight limbs. What is your suggestion to helping, us become more inclusive in yoga in the west.

32:23                                     Yeah. Well, one thing we really need to do is we need to become more inviting to underrepresented groups. Right. It's interesting that you ask this question because this is an ongoing conversation in our group, right? We are very dedicated to diversity and inclusiveness, but sometimes we hear from people, but you guys are all, yes white women. We're not. There are eight of us who are out of the 10 are white women. Some of us are young and some of us are older. We're not all white, but, and, and we grapple with this, right? How can we say that we are dedicated to inclusiveness and diversity when our own faces are often not perceived that way by other people.

                                                And so we have been making very deliberate attempts to figure out ways to become more inclusive. So for example, we're working now on a scholarship, a fund to draw people from underrepresented groups into our teacher training program so that they can participate without having to think about where the money will come from, right? But we also try to be inclusive and the images that we put on our website, we're not always successful with that because we, we don't want to use stock images. We want to use our own images. And so we have limitations there, but we also offer physical practices that honor all levels of skill, all levels of body capacity, all levels of emotional and psychological needs.

                                                We're really dedicated to making sure that when we demonstrate postures, we don't demonstrate the advanced. Oh, we demonstrate the beginner's pose, right? So that people have this sense of, yeah, I can do this. I work with a lot of seniors and they're always so excited when they can get into a warrior. It's a modified warrior, but I'm not going to say it's a modified warrior. It's a warrior pose. It's a beautiful expression. We can adapt and modify and so variety should make the practice accessible. We become gentler in how we teach asana. We bring the Eight limbs in. I like to say, , if somebody has the capacity to breathe, they have the capacity to do yoga. If they have the capacity to focus their mind, they can do the yoga.

35:23                                     It's a difficult problem. It really is.

35:28                                     It has to be a collective effort. And I really see this happening. I mean, if you just look at the accessible yoga website of Jivana Heyman. You interviewed him. They're fantastic. And the images that they can show and that's what we need to do. That's where we need to end up. But we also need to do better. We need to offer sliding fee scales. We need to draw people into the practice.

36:01                                     So I'll give you an opportunity here if there's something that you would like to say in a little more depth than we covered or if there's something that you would really like to share with the listeners that we haven't covered. please do so.

36:15                                     The one thing that maybe we haven't touched on as much as would it be necessary to truly reflect where we come from in YogaX is the culture of the Koshas. We really have a very strong commitment to working with the Koshas. We view the Koshas as a developmental model. And this is maybe our background in psychology. Most of us are a psychologist and the Koshas are really this beautiful ancient model of how we transform as human beings. Starting with as we come into the world being primarily focused on our body. And then as we relate to our caretakers, recognizing sort of our aspect of self. And then we began to acquire language and our mind comes on board and then we recognize we're in relationships and our wise, intuitive self has to come on board so that we can be compassionate toward others. And then ultimately we have to recognize that there is sort of this bigger connection. There's this bigger union, this very joyful interdependence. And that then brings us to maybe later in life when our existential imperative needs to become more important than our biological imperative.

                                                And this is something that I think is a lovely paradigm for Yoga students and for Yoga teachers to understand that even 2,500 years ago or whenever yoga first started to be transmitted, whether orally or in writing, there was already this wisdom that as people, as humans, we evolve. We have sort of a central capacity that's innate to develop toward an existential imperative. As long as our biological imperative is taken care of. If our survival is assured, if we have food, shelter, clothing, then then we can live to do amazing things. And so we talk about this quite a bit in yoga classes. It's a model for mental health. It's a model of resilience, it's a model for coping with illness. It's a model for enhancing relationships. so I just wanted to put a plug in for really working with the Koshas and recognizing them as this very beautiful developmental model that finds a lot of support in psychological research in terms of how we evolved through brain development and such to become more empathic and compassionate loving and kind as we get older.

39:09                                     Thank you so much, Christine, for coming on. I think you've given us some different ideas or how to think about some of these things. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us.

39:52                                     Well, thank you, Stephanie, for including me. It was an absolute pleasure. It's, yeah, and I'm humbled by the invitation.

40:01                                     Thank you.

                                                Contact details:

                                                Website: www.yogaxu.com.

                                                Instagram and Facebook: yogaxteam

 

Changing the Face of Yoga – episode 113

[email protected]