Healing from Within: Empowering Mental Health | Episode 110 with Heather Mason

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Transcript:
(00:02) [Music] all right welcome everyone today I'm joined by Heather Mason who is the founder of the minded Institute leading yoga therapy training organization known for its focus on mental health and empowering yoga and health professionals to integrate yoga therapy into Healthcare so Heather thank you and I want to start by asking you why do you do the work that you do you there's so many different angles I could answer that question from but generally perspective that I take is that I had my own mental health
(00:44) issues I'm very public about that I don't know how young they started but young enough that I can't remember and almost everybody around me was medicated for mental health issues that's not uncommon and New York and there's no judgment coming from me around it but I did not want it to be my path and so after graduating from University I decided to actually go and practice intensive yoga and mindfulness meditation for 3 years and that gives rise to transformation and I considered becoming a Buddhist none but because I didn't
(01:27) instead I wanted to take this to other people and and you need you know even though we talk about yoga being accessible and there are movements to bring yoga to underserved communities it is more of the purview of people who are affluent and my feeling is that through its integration into Health Care Systems especially like in the UK where I live where we have socialized medicine that's really going to reach the largest number of people so that they have the opportunity to experience something like I did you remember why you made that original
(02:04) decision to go study yoga meditation like what compelled you to do that well that's quite a story um I'll try and give you the bullet points because that could be half an hour but first of all I had always been interested in eastern philosophies and if you ask me why I couldn't answer there was nobody who introduced me to it I did not come from a world where that was offered or interesting to the people around me um in 2000 sorry wrong time frame in 1996 I went to Costa Rica and I had been prescribed medication that was used at
(02:54) that time for malaria it's not any it's really not prescribed anymore because it is known to have really negative psychological effects including psychosis and it led me to have a rep perception of reality I did not become psychotic but I became paranoid and had these incredible insights which I did not enjoy like that the nature of reality was not substantial um but when you have it on a medication unplanned don't even know the medication's the cause and you think you've gone insane was really frightening I came back to
(03:34) Manhattan the nature the nature of reality was not substantial what do you mean by that I mean that I understood that there were just sort of these components making up reality constructs you know my one of my undergraduate degrees was in philosophy so I was already sensing into these ideas that what we perceive to be real is based upon the presentation of our mind and a reflection of it as opposed to inherent truth and that's a nice concept when you read about it in a book it's very different when you in an embodied way
(04:16) without any training actually realize that the reality you take to be true and real is just a reflection of your mind and you do not know where the substantial solid reality is or if it exists at all so that was really terrifying you know I think it would be akin to somebody that probably had a bad um psychedelic trip but I hadn't signed up for that I was just taking the doctor's medication and um so I went to see a psychiatrist in Manhattan because I actually thought maybe I was schizophrenic again I hadn't linked the
(04:53) medication to this experience and he actually said to me you know I know that you would like to be medicated for this I know you think that you have psychosis but you don't and the insights that you're describing to me are extremely unique for a human being especially a person your age to have and I'd call it a special experience what we need to do is manage your anxiety and as is so common in those days I will give you Zanex for a few days but I will prescribe nothing else but therapy I was Furious um but
(05:30) you know he probably saved me so fast forward I used to come home from my university in New York most weekends to be with my family and I was on a bus and this guy sat next to me and he said I have just been to Guru Ma's asham and I had a sense that I would need to give somebody tickets to go so I bought extra ones and we started talking he said I have a very strong feeling you need to visit her so the next time I left University or college right for Americans um for the weekend I went there I had never been to an ash before
(06:15) and there were about 30 people introduced to this big asham to stay there in all the rules and they had this sinking Sensation that the person there was just talking to me and I was like stop being insane you know this is only feeding that whole belief system that you're psychologically unw and when I when everybody was led to another room the woman stopped me when she said I was only speaking to you and again I thought maybe I'm tripping or having some kind of like Divergence from reality he said I've decided to give you a private
(06:48) audience with Guru Ma I didn't even know who she was I would only learn the following day when like a thousand people came to prostate prostrate before her that she was somebody influential and I sat in front of her explained my experience and she just said to me go to India and she gave me a Mala bracelet and told me to practice so I studied abroad for a semester in India that's where I learned yoga and I had lived in this maybe totally misconceived reality that you go to a guru they take this peacock
(07:28) feather and they make you feel better and when I realized in going to India was two things one nobody was going to help me to become mentally well except for myself they might guide me and two that mental Wellness was all about perception because I remember being in varasi in 1996 and seeing the most impoverished people possible smiling and actually being jealous jealous and I thought that that's a real learning that I want to be those people whose house is made up of trash finin liners and so after um completing
(08:17) University I went back to New York for a year and I was became more depressed um actually I transferred to the University of Hawaii and that was a very good experience for me studied hist philosophy but came back and then I just took off back to Asia and without even trying everywhere I would go people from Buddhist monasteries would draw me in to come and practice at them and I would did my first 10-day Retreat and I understood unequivocally that this was the path for me I had no questions because everything
(08:52) I was learning already aligned with my viewpoint of reality and here was a pathway to manage so it's kind of a long story but that is the real story I hear you saying a little bit is that you had a realization that I think as you put it you know no one was going to save you except for yourself this kind of taking responsibility which I think is so powerful right and also very difficult if we grow up in a world of uh not taking responsibility of you know it's it's up to someone else you know or I am
(09:32) a product of my environment do you remember that initial transition towards like wow like if this is going to happen for me it's not going to be because of anyone else it's because it's going to be because of me I think my transition was slightly different than that OB although yes this was an important realization I was living under under the notion that I Could reconstruct myself in an image where I would be happy and that was based on understanding how to say the right things modeling being calm
(10:11) like people around me when I wasn't wearing the right clothes doing all the right things so I still felt that it belong that it was within my power and that I wasn't Outsourcing that but I really didn't understand that it was about cultivating my mind rather than a bunch of external constructs ideas you know who I should be as a human being to be good enough and worthy that would therefore make me feel happy and that it was all about my mental development and that that required actual work in a way that I my Society did not
(10:50) provide any advice around did you know what that work was going to be immediately or was that a path of discovering what that work looked like I think that as soon as I went to my first Buddhist Monastery understood as soon as the first monk in Korea told me to just sit and that's another long story and I sat and watched my breath I understood I understood that the mind could go away into a thousand different thoughts and that there was this faculty that could direct the Mind back to other things that intentional control was
(11:31) possible and that bearing one's own pain was possible not in a sort of like um martyr way but is not running away from it and becoming interested in one's experience could be more beneficial than constantly trying to alter it so that really happened to me quite early on in my journey sensing into it was the mind that I had to Grapple with becoming interested in the experience almost like a curiosity yeah like rather than I don't want to be this person I don't want to feel this way what is the nature of this
(12:14) feeling what does it feel like to be me um you know and when we come to yoga because that that was more in like the Buddhist context like what does it feel like to be in this posture what makes me want to escape Warrior to after being there for 3 minutes which is not really different than what makes me want to escape something other that I'm experiencing that has a viseral component associated with it do you think that you know some of the the suffering or maybe a great deal of the suffering has to do with maybe
(12:51) like taking ourselves too seriously getting really caught in this identity of who I I am and do I like who I am do I want to be someone else all of that absolutely you know but I think that a lot of people when we talk about taking oneself too seriously they just mean we should be more jovial and light-hearted but I think the way you've described it is really important which is to understand that you know it and it does come back to both yogic and Buddhist views which is essentially that like there is either no self depending upon which
(13:31) tradition you're talking about or there is this luminous self and everything we just layer upon it trying to be something create something and once we start sort of peeling back that layer those layers which is an act of letting go it's work we realize it's just like this I don't have to be something else than what I am and anyway I can't which is it's like what Oscar wild said do you remember that quote um be yourself because everyone else is taken yeah I like that I like to say um I can't not be myself so I might as well
(14:14) be myself yes exactly yeah yeah like I think for me it was it was like realizing the pattern was so powerful that I was just doing like I was just judging myself again and again are you good enough are you not good enough you know external rewards if someone else you know gives you a compliment or someone is criticizing me and just going back and forth back and forth and I saw wow this can this can go on forever I I've got to play a different game is there a different game to play because this is just exhausting me you
(14:57) know I think probably everybody listening knows yeah yeah uh I also wanted to ask you know you shared in your journey like kind of this pivotal moment of this person sitting next to you on the bus who opened this door by saying you know here are some tickets to to go to this place that you never heard of I'm always very interested in these moments of life that seemed to be you know totally outside of our control anything we intended you know but have the most profound impact on our life what do you make of
(15:38) that well I've had a lot Ai and a bunch before that so what this seemed could be the only thing that I made could make of it was that there was some kind of plan that I was being guided I continue it to experience that you know we're talking about when I was 18 years old I'm 47 and it hasn't stopped so what I make of it is that in at least in my trajectory because I don't like to claim that my reality is reflected in everybody else's experience but in my reality there is a definitive vision for
(16:21) what I should be doing and when I align with that people show up out of the woodwork and draw me into places and when I do not door is shut in my face and life becomes very stressful so my spiritual path calls me actively and I sort of feel like I don't have a choice but I know that's probably not a lot of people's experience can you say a little bit more about you know aligning with your vision and getting out of alignment like how how do you fall out of alignment and how do you recognize that you're out of
(16:58) alignment and take yourself back okay so let's fast forward to now right so I'm a spiritual person but I'm a business owner I own the largest yoga therapy school in Europe and business causes stress and you get wrapped up in you know making sure that ends meet in how the program is going to look in the frustration around students doing certain things your staff Etc and it's starts to move through your mind you ruminate even though you have all of that past experience you're wondering how to make
(17:37) things better over and over again and doing all these things to fix it which I do do and then I go on Retreat which I do quite often and I bring my mind back to Center and I come back and those things sort of shift so bringing myself out of of alignment is allowing those things to pull on me and to me me to get caught in the external reality and fixing it and then the external reality tends to get more and more complicated lots of things start to kind of fall apart and then when I go back and my mind is at ease it's like as I'm
(18:21) back in alignment the external World also aligns itself now from a psychological perspective somebody would just say to me well that's just because you're perceiving your reality differently but that is not my experience it's actually that my internal world is a reflection of my external and so if I fall out of alignment with being aware of my mind and body and the cultivation of my mind as being my primary life Focus then life gets difficult for me over and over again I should have learned that lesson but it seems that maybe something
(19:04) is keeps pulling you back to I don't even I mean maybe you're calling it out of alignment but I'm not sure if it is but to this other this other area of focus maybe around business and stressors and Logistics and and these things so something inside of you must still be saying that this is important too right something about this is important the business aspect or the other one yeah I guess the business aspect or when you're talking about you know kind of just the daily the daily practices that you're
(19:38) doing the areas of focus yeah yeah I mean it definitely is important um I didn't know that what I grew would become as big as it is and so there is a do you think the fact that it's big does that change things for you yeah the love of responsibility is quite significant which reduces the amount of time that I can spend engaging in the spiritual practices that I hold so dear you know I have a pretty big staff hundreds of students in any given time frame and there are the realities of how much time exists in a given
(20:20) day and I'm you say more about this about like the responsibility like the fact that it gets larger and there's more people involved and so how does this change things yeah how does it change things so you know the first year that I run ran the training in 2009 and I was the only lecturer and I created the manual and I did the lectures and I was in touch with the all of the students and I had my private yoga therapy clients it was like okay those are the things that I do but now every day I have to talk to
(20:57) operations and they need me to to do these tasks and I need to give them tasks which they send back to me every day I need to talk to marketing they give me things to review and I have to send it back every day I have to talk to policy every day I have student queries every day I have meetings with people that want me to engage in actions to bring yoga into health care and one could say that in all of that your mind could remain completely focused and balanced but I think there has to be also an honesty here which is what you
(21:33) feed is going to be what's present and if you're always having to move very very quickly amongst these things it is difficult to bring yourself to center it is it's much harder um so it amps up the practice it increases the capacity for intentional control but there is a tension there and I you know there are probably a lot of people on here I imagine that might say something different like I'm Zen all the time and but I want to be real and it's not like that maybe also I my spiritual practice grew up in
(22:14) monasteries where I was meditating 16 hours a day so maybe it's slightly that I had that polarized experience like such heightened self-awareness and concentration and when J supposed that to being in the regular World it has to be different you're talking you know you're moving around you have so much sensory input comparatively I really appreciate your emphasis on honesty because I think it's it's essential for making any kind of progress if there there's progress to be made we have to be honest you know um
(22:57) and you I think I think you're totally right right like being in a monastery meditating for 17 hours a day and engaging in you know the business World those are completely different things you know and and has these challenges that don't exist in more of a you know isolated environment so to speak um it's more challenging it seems like it would be more challenging however at the same time like there is only still this internal practice going on as far as I can tell so it's it's a different area of the
(23:36) game but the game is still being played right I'm wondering even within yourself there you notice maybe a story or Tendencies of of of the mind to move between I have to do this this needs to be done and also maybe reframing it in a different way of like I get to do this I'm wondering if that goes on within within you if you notice that shift throughout throughout the day like for me for some of these things that I have to do like I know that I can't survive anymore with just the I have to do this
(24:15) I need to do this like that kind of pressure on myself like I'll eventually break so I have to reframe it yeah what's it like for you yeah I think the cognitive reframing piece is really really important but we all have proclivities and so you know if the have to is your proclivity reframing it towards I get to is more of an uphill battle it's you know more rigorous than if your proclivity we the opposite of you know you're always sitting there thinking I get to do this and I think that the get to do this piece in terms
(24:53) of proclivities is more likely to be uh what one experiences when there are not as many things pulling on one's attention I think that that naturally makes it harder um and also this was this is tangential to what you asked but I I think it's really important to note that living in silence and isolation is no picnic it's not like because you're doing that that life is easy it you go into the depths of the nature of how the mind plays games with itself and you have no distractions in order to pull you out so
(25:32) you are in the absolute throws of your mental constructs habits and fears it's just that you don't also have to go do the laundry my my wash machine is making a little song right now you know so that you can put all your attention towards that but it is by no means an out or an easier path it's really tough I'm glad you you emphasiz that because I think it's so complicated right like trying to analyze these different ways right like to say one is easy or one is hard like they're so different right to even to even compare
(26:09) them yeah yeah absolutely okay so I wanted um to just ask about your your mission and gosh I mean it feels like it's such important work to me I mean so many so many teachers feel this way right experience the power of yoga experience the transformation that happens for students and this mission to bring it yoga into healthc care [Music] right I imagine that your finger is somewhat on the pulse of the healthc Care world and I'm just curious um you know what could you say about that where where do you think we're at um where do
(26:54) you think we're at in terms of healthc care embracing yoga uh uh as something that is extremely powerful yeah well I think in the US and the veterans association I think we're really far because there are eight complimentary practices available to Veterans and yoga is one of them you know you have the Whole Health Care system of the rest of the United States and then the VA and the VA is one of probably the most forward-thinking Integrative Health System system in the entire world so you know you have these
(27:31) pockets in Sweden ynb was able to take his meta yoga program throughout the nation I don't know what the stats are but it's something between like a quarter to 30% of all the health care units in the country have his met yoga program and he managed to do that by training health professionals in a model rather than taking he yoga professionals and trying to get them to knock on the doors because that is a more difficult route uh so lots of countries have different things in the UK where I live it's very interesting you know we have
(28:13) something called social prescribing which has been exported to other countries probably though most of the people listening will not know what it is social prescribing as the recognition that socialization or the lack thereof has a signif ific impact on one's health and health behaviors so by actually referring somebody into an activity group of something they like you will meet like-minded people that socialization has actual physiological impacts that are measurable and you're more likely to take good care of yourself so people can
(28:51) be referred into yoga programs as part of social prescribing and my other organization that I founded the yoga and Healthcare Alliance was commissioned to create a yoga social prescribing program it's 10 weeks long and following evaluation a number of years ago we've trained hundreds of teachers to teach it so that's part of it and actually I'm about on this Saturday I'm going to be lecturing at the interative student medical conference to talk about yoga in medical school and that's really a big
(29:27) piece because that's where you change the Paradigm if you want to talk about yoga and Healthcare yoga has to be embedded into the curriculum of the major health care professions and I had to it's interesting you asked this question do a review between the yes the US and the UK of all the the different ways yoga is embedded into medical school education specifically and primary institutions that are involved in doing so so where are we at we're probably 300% closer than we were 10 years ago but we still have a mountain to
(30:10) climb what do you see as the main obstacles funding funding is a huge obstacle people talk about yoga being cost effective and it can be especially from a prevention perspective and from a self-management perspective but you still need to find the money especially in a socialized system that would otherwise go for like cancer patient acute care and provide yoga Services when the budgets are so incredibly stressed and stretched so I think that that's a big piece of it I do not find that there are many health
(30:53) professionals these days who are disregarding the value of mind body medicine and yoga fits in that camp so I think funding I think bureaucracy and and I know the yoga Community does not like to hear this but when you want something in a health system you generally need to protocolized or like the field of psychotherapy and psychology you need to have a large time frame over which you demonstrate the efficacy of a general IED field that provides treatment in an individualized way but really for yoga at this point we
(31:34) would need protocols and those exist but a lot of the yoga Community feels that that detracts from the beauty of yoga that it's appropriation you know I deal with these kinds of issues and conflicts and discussions as part of my work so those are the things that I feel are obstacles but there are a lot of things also that are in our fav a lot I'm wondering like there are so many studies that have already been done I've heard you speak about you know like just like the main proven uh evidence-based
(32:15) to improve mood and reduce stress like across across all these studies right I'm wondering as studies continue to to be done and it seems even more more and more clear that these are the results these are the effects this is evidence-based how does that information then get to a doctor like how does it present itself before a doctor and have a doctor say oh okay like I'm going to change the way that I practice or the I'm going to offer this to my patient like how does that happen it's like it seems that
(32:56) maybe sometimes the focus end at like the study okay if the studies are done over this long a period of time then things are going to change but practically speaking you know how is just your average medical doctor going to take that information and implement it okay so I can only answer this question in a very tangible way from the UK perspective because I'm on I'm on the pulse of that I mean I can give you theories for other countries but I can answer that very directly in this country so you either needed a medical school or
(33:35) if you have um a doctor out there already and you want them to understand the value you usually will need to go through because the UK has Royal colleges for the different kinds of medicine like the Royal College of Cardiology the Royal College of Psychiatry for example but most importantly the Royal College of General practitioners that's the largest of the royal colleges and actually the yoga and healthc Care Alliance because this is something that we have been thinking of and working towards for a long time what
(34:10) we did was we created a six week course off the back of that social prescribing course specifically for NHS staff but with a focus on doctors where they could take this course for themselves it's six weeks over Zoom one hour a week and they could experience the benefits for themselves while little studies and the physiological mechanisms are gently peppered throughout the teaching in a non like heavily Academic Way and because this course is accredited by the Royal College of GPS it's sent out so old GPS in the
(34:52) country can know that it happens and in this country we have like NHS trusts these are like areas and the trusts will also send out to all the Health Care staff that these kinds of courses exist if they're for free so if the government is willing to fund them or funding comes from a private donor and so they are all super super stressed they're looking for something to do and so this has been probably our most effective pathway the other is to get any of the Royal colleges to publish in their newsletters to their um
(35:34) practitioners the value rather than going to individualize practices and to get things like the General Medical councel in the UK to actually say we um believe that there is a credible evidence-based for yoga's efficacy and then the challenge of course for the doctors is that yoga is so d verse which is why I come back to the protocolized piece so how do I refer because a referral pathway then has to exist and that's difficult but you didn't ask that question you just asked how you get to the doctors the next piece is how do you
(36:10) refer and who pays and we're working on that too by the way you see a future where maybe the doctors themselves can uh lead some of these practices be trained in instead of referring out word yeah in fact if they do the sixe course they get a certificate that says their breath ambassadors doctors and other NHS staffs they don't just have to be doctors and they're allowed to teach two things one is just slow breathing and one ISU but for E ecumenical reasons on request of the NHS we're asked to call it ocean
(36:52) breath and then they have a level two and if they do the level two we teach them other prama practices and gentle movement all of which can easily be integrated into on an appointment in the UK unless you ask for a double one with your general practitioner is 10 minutes which they can teach within a three minute period now so far I believe we've had 600 NHS staff go through the program over the course of just the year and so and then they share it with others and share it with others and share it with others so yes definitely and what yuran
(37:27) bold did was amazing you know where he created this whole protocol that they can train in then you have to have person in the practice that teaches the whole protocol whereas if you teach doctors to offer something in three minute little stance it really trickles down it's so interesting you know as I'm listening to you I'm realizing like yoga is so special in in a way because it's and also this makes it it challenging because it's the intersection of uh healthc care and uh religion or spirituality right and because of that
(38:07) it these tools these practices you know get muddled in different Impressions I think that's the biggest challenge of also implementing them in schools right because people are worried that there's a religious component to it and yeah you know religions kind of have monop monopolized spirituality um and yeah I mean that's why I love yoga because it's honest in the way of of like there is so much overlap you know these things are not isolated like we we try to put C things in in a box like okay I am this
(38:40) way when I'm at work I am this way when I go to church what whatever it is but that's not the reality of of how it is yeah yeah it's very complex yeah yeah all these things that you're talking about you think hopefully the result of them could be that once it becomes clear or more and more clear that there's great power an effect in these practices that eventually it becomes implemented into the actual curriculum in medical schools yeah I mean that's what happen here with social prescribing you know
(39:27) and to come back because i' I've been researching that this morning so it very much feels like a question that is at the tip of my tongue so social prescribing was an idea the medical community itself wanted to spread it but there were limitations because again you need a paradigm shift so student Champions got together the most notable one being Dr Bogden who now lectures at um I think the Harvard um what is the Kennedy School School of Public Health and also here at Imperial University which is very reputable um
(40:02) but when he was a student he championed with other students the idea social prescribing it already existed just like yoga already exists and they got champions for every medical school in the country and those Champions started speaking to other people and other people the other medical students got interested and then they had these little like discussion groups around it and then they they decided that it would be useful to create something called like there's something here that's called student selective components the equivalent
(40:36) would be a medical school elective so you need to create that and that has to be standardized but it's not yet part of the curriculum but everybody has the opportunity to do it and then you start showing the uh directors of different departments its value and the evidence base is also there and then it becomes part of the curriculum and that is actually what happened so what I'm going to be talking about on Saturday is how the same can be done for yoga I think one of the challenges though that yoga faces of social
(41:13) prescribing does not is it's a particular modality whereas it social prescribing is a recognition of the social aspect of healthare but there is evidence there is just a study that was published by the National Institutes of Health um they publish one every few years about what's going on in complimentary medicine in the United States and it's 100% clear that the most popular complimentary practice in terms of growth from 2002 to now has been yoga so if the Public's taking it up then it needs to be
(41:55) something that also the doctors are looking at you know but yeah I I do think it's very possible to get it into the curriculum you just need to know the inroads in this country which you don't have in the US maybe you do but I don't think in the same way has been called the College of Medicine and it's sort of like a hub for all of the most influential Integrative Medicine practitioners Physicians primarily to get together to talk about how to influence policy in this country and they work with students to help
(42:32) Empower them for curriculum change while also working on the top town the social prescribing is fascinating I'm glad that you you brought this up and I'm wondering also the correlation between you know the awareness of uh mental health that seems to have really exploded in the last few years with this so it's like acknowledgement that there's a problem that's that's the first thing and then possible solutions and one of them is you know this need that humans have to feel connection you know and people hear
(43:12) about that as a solution and I think most of us go you know yes I don't know if you've seen the um documentary that Netflix put out about the blue zones you've heard about the the blue zones kind of the places the study done you know around places in the world where people are living the longest you know and that's an element of all of these places even though the blue zones are in you know across all the continents essentially uh that a strong feeling of connection socially is essential to longevity in in life so I'm wondering
(43:50) like what's your sense of of of how necessary it is to actually have the science behind that like was was there greater science in regard to this social prescribing than there is for yoga or is something about this solution just uh stronger or resonates more profoundly inside an individual when they hear about it which makes them say yes let's start doing this that's a great question and the truth is I don't know the answer but I think the Corpus of literature out there that highlights the social determinance
(44:34) of health is pretty robust and more likely to be robust than the evidence for yoga and the thing is that social connection has so many different possibilities it just means help people engage in community where you have a specificity with yoga which makes it more complicated dig just say will this make sense right and social prescribing is an actual referral system into a group activity so you are talking about um that consideration but once you say I'm referring you into yoga it's again what kind of yoga how is it going to help you
(45:21) in specific ways um and across the board I can't say as a yoga therapist and I'm sure not as a doctor if your issue is cardiovascular disease you're going to benefit from exactly the same practice as somebody with osteoporosis and so the specificity also makes it harder I know you you know I'm I'm elaborating on things you didn't ask but I do think you're talking about a much broader conversation when you talk about the value of socialization versus the specific value of yoga with all of these different
(45:59) components and how they're mixed up together with within different lineages it seems to me that this is maybe the most powerful motivator Of Human Action I'm curious if you feel feel the same way it's like the even if we look at gender you know men and women and their relationship with yoga you know for such a long time I think it's at least in the US you know much more socially acceptable for uh a woman to have a yoga practice right yes and therefore they do because that's I'm still included in my social group this
(46:41) is an aspect of my identity that there's no problem with going going to yoga but for men it's been much slower because your average peer group you know guys oh you know whatever label they want to give to yoga um causes people to uh reject it you know yeah and that is a problem and you know that's about the entire piece around accessibility highlighting to the public at large that a yogi doesn't look like this whether you're talking male female or all you know the ways that people identify in between size age race
(47:26) religion you know that there isn't a yogi but unfortunately the media over the last few decades has definitely identified the yogi and so that has a very popular resonance within culture I often ask men how do we get more men you know or any kind of group of people where I don't see them uh highly present in yoga classes or in trainings how do we get more of people like you yeah I think it it always takes courage to be one of the first you know one of the more powerful conversations I had was this guy John Ferguson who's uh
(48:11) you know ex-marine veteran and this is the work that he does you know and listening to him speak it's like I don't even think it's possible for anyone else to do what he's doing because he is from that peer group of veterans so they'll open up and listen to him because he can say I've been where you are and now I'm doing these practices and they've changed my life like give it a try you know yeah um slightly differently but I can relate to that you know my area of specialism within yoga therapy is trauma
(48:50) PTSD I have had complex PTSD and so I was able to to connect with the head of PTSD UK and really highlight the value of yoga and so we have a collaboration together and that is because I can also say I know what it's like I know it works and not just because of the clinical trials I know what it feels like to be afraid I know what it's like in this situation versus that situation and why also somebody might reject doing it but when I say that I just want to shout out to Rachel bilsky who also made that possible in case she's listening
(49:28) because she really made that collaboration possible and she works with them now always give credit where credit is due try to right yeah one of my actually my favorite things about the yoga Community when I first entered it was um at least the one that I was in it was very free and open in terms of you like something that you're experiencing through my facility as a teacher go ahead take it like you you like the language that I use like go ahead take it use it like it's it's yours there kind of this free
(50:05) open um sourcing of of information which was so nice to me it was almost like an acknowledgement that in a way nothing is original right because where did it come from before um ah I that was just such a breath a breath of fresh air for me yeah I agree with that and also in the lineage that I came up from in Buddhism we were always taught to acknowledge our teachers and to pay homage to those who came before us that empowered us with the knowledge that we pass on and it's a sort of honoring it's not about
(50:42) copyright or anything but it's it's maybe a humility like the idea that nothing is new but you can keep going back and back and back and back yeah yeah yeah what's the role of humility for you in your practice is that important yeah it is it is and it's it's an interesting one you know leading this organization working with Parliament and all of that other stuff and [Music] um not feeling like you know because of what I'm done that I'm particularly special interestingly I definitely don't
(51:24) feel like I am you know I'm just me with the same demons that a lot of people have working on them but because of what I do I get a lot of emails and um people you know kind of bestow many compliments upon me and that's that's interesting to actually just be grateful and Express gratitude but also just kind of let it flow and not take it to hand you before mentioned you know you can really really judge yourself or really really e yourself up so just constantly trying I think more than humility to remain neutral and
(52:06) remember that you know we're all just who we are and not trying to become something great but it's useful to do something great what did Martin Luther King say if you can't do something great do small things in great ways maybe I'm paraphrasing I always really like that I like what you said that it's it's useful to do something great what what does that mean can you say more about that you know look at what you think in your world you can improve that you have the power to do and take that on with
(52:43) passion you know so rather than trying to be great actively try through your actions to bring greatness to the world and greatness can be in tiny Pockets right diamonds are very very small in comparison to other things but we place high value on them and so can be acts that we're passionate about that may not Ricochet in huge ways and ripple in huge ways but still have impact ah Heather thank you so much and I know uh maybe you don't want to take credit and it's not necessary but I I feel grateful for the work that you and
(53:29) so many others are doing in this field I I can just feel how important it is um so I hope that you continue and that it continues to serve you um and that you get as much as you're giving back out of it and I I sense that that you are because it is so meaningful um if people are interested in learning more about your work more about your program what's the best way for them to find out more information so if they're interested in the stuff that the yoga therapy school does then also and we didn't get into
(54:01) that there are also Avenues through which we're bringing yoga therapy to healthcare but that is different because it's more bespoke so they can go to the minded institute.com and if they want to know about the large movements in the UK to bring yoga into Healthcare both from a patient and Health Care perspective they can go to uh the yoga and health car alliance.
(54:27) com and read some of the information but also get in touch so those are the primary ways that I think people could reach out I have a YouTube channel I was doing a lot of free videos during the pandemic I haven't had time recently so if anybody's interested in just listening to me speak or learning some of the practices they're available um and oh there's a conference taking place Jonathan Rosenthal put it together which is free I think um from the 15th to the 17th of March at this event so it's the
(55:09) neuro yoga NYC conference I think and it's Jonathan Rosen fall and he's a doctor and that yeah you can look up that conference online and find out a lot of information not specifically about me but just about this in general wonderful thanks for being on the podcast Heather thank you so much AI um I wish everybody well take good care of yourselves and um be gentle with yourself life is hard thanks for listening if you've enjoyed this content and think others might as well please feel free to share and
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