Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk, a body-centered, mental health podcast. We’re your hosts, Jessica Warpula Schultz and Jeanne Kolker. Whether you’ve tried everything to feel better and something is still missing, or you’ve already tuned into the wisdom of the body, this podcast will encourage and support you in healing, strengthening relationships, and developing your inner potential, by accessing your mind-body connection. Please know this podcast is not a substitute for mental health treatment and is not considered psychotherapy. Let’s begin a conversation about what happens when we take a body-centered approach to improving our mental health. 

Today’s episode of Insight Mind Body Talk explores yoga therapy with our guest Nikki Cook. Nikki is a yoga therapist. She holds a master’s degree in education counseling and she’s certified as a trauma informed yoga teacher. She specializes in yoga treatment for eating disorders, addiction, and trauma.  

Welcome!  We’re so excited to have you as a guest.     

Thank you. I’m really happy to be here and looking forward to our conversation today.  

I’ve been looking forward to it too.  I’m grateful you’re here sharing your expertise with our listeners. Today Nikki and I will demystify the practice of yoga, explain what we mean by trauma informed yoga, give you the listener a taste of what you might experience in a yoga therapy session and end our episode with body centered tools for mental wellbeing.   

Nikki, you believe yoga is a powerful practice for every person; that it can be any effective component of the healing and recovery process. Let’s start by discussing what is yoga and who can do yoga? 

That’s a great question. Lots of people are unsure if they are a good fit for yoga and when we talk a little bit about what yoga is and how we approach it, that oftentimes allow people to see themselves in the practice. Well, yoga can be approached from many different standpoints. It often is a practice where we’re moving our bodies in certain postures and linking movement with breath. That is the physical part of yoga. We also have other components of yoga. There are eight limbs to yoga and the movement portion is really just one of them. We also have yoga philosophy where we talk about different ways of being, which often has to do with treating ourselves with kindness and compassion and treating others with kindness and compassion. There’s another limb that has to do with breath and meditation. It’s much more encompassing than what a lot of people see, maybe when they think about a yoga class at a gym or a studio or see something in a magazine or on TV. There’s a lot that people can access, even if they feel that the physical part may not quite be for them. However, I’d like to challenge that the physical part isn’t for them also, because yoga movement can be as simple as taking a breath in, reaching your arms up and then as you exhale, releasing the arms down. You can do that from anywhere. If you can find the right offering for what you need, you will find that there’s so many different variations that it really is for everybody.  

Yeah, a traditional view of yoga, or at least a mainstream view of yoga, is a certain type of person going to a boutique studio or the gym. It’s very body centered in the way that we build strength and increase our flexibility.  Maybe that’s as far as it goes, which for some people that’s wonderful and useful. I like how you bring in the other tenants of yoga philosophy into a more holistic lens.  

That being said, who’s a primary candidate for yoga therapy? 

I would say everybody is. Yeah, absolutely. I think part of it, again, is landing in the right place and finding somebody that either, whether it’s a yoga therapist or yoga teacher, that you feel comfortable with. Once you establish that relationship, then you can really start to explore in a safe way.  You know, a lot of people will come to yoga, as you said before, with more of that body focused, physical wellness. This is great. Then along the way, people will start to notice the mental health benefits that they feel. They start to notice that they’re in their bodies in a different way that just feels really good. Then from there, they find that it is this really, you know, holistic approach to wellness. So really. it works for everybody.  

Can you explain how that’s different than a regular yoga practice? Yep. Absolutely. There’s definitely crossovers and similarities that you will find in both. For a regular yoga practice, right, that doesn’t have yoga therapy, you’re not working with a yoga therapist. That’s what you typically will find in a studio, in a gym. Everybody is given pretty much the same instruction. Hopefully, some variations and different options. You’re there participating as an individual, but within the group setting, so not a lot of individual attention. You may have a teacher who will be really great and talk to you if you’re new and just check in to see what physical needs you have. So really you are being instructed as part of a group. Yoga therapy, on the other hand, whether it’s individual or it’s group, because we keep our groups pretty small, we start to get to know the person as an individual.   

When I start working with somebody, our first appointment, our first session, is mainly discussion with just maybe a little bit of movement. We’ll use different assessment tools to talk about, how is your body right now? Do you have injuries? Do you have concerns? Getting to know the physical needs and also our emotional needs. A lot of times people are looking for different venues, different ways to increase their emotional wellness and emotional stability. So we really talk about how can we also bring that into the work that we do together. Then from there, we create specific goals for you. Like, what do you want to work on?  What’s your overall hope? You know, two months from now, where do we hope to be? It’s very collaborative.  

I, as a yoga therapist, will be checking in to say, how does that feel on your body? What are you noticing? Is it working? Is it getting us towards that goal that we have today? If so, great. If not, let’s pivot and let’s do something else. So, it not only allows you to be in a situation where you’re getting your individual needs met, but you also are beginning to build those tools and that awareness of what works for me. That makes it so much easier to transition into practicing those skills when you’re not actually in the session, which is our ultimate hope. That we get these tools, and we begin to use them on a daily basis, even when we’re not doing our dedicated yoga practice per se.  

That sounds wonderful. And I appreciate the individualized plan because we’re all different. We all have different needs, different nervous systems, different bodies. We’ve all had different life experiences. I appreciate how yoga therapy is also trauma informed. Can you share with our listeners what trauma informed means? How it pertains to yoga therapy.  

When we’re talking about trauma informed yoga, we’re talking about working with a yoga therapist or a yoga teacher who has had specific training, not only in how to deliver a trauma informed class or individual session, but also training and knowledge of how trauma affects the nervous system. How trauma affects the body. That is very helpful in determining not only what we teach, but how we teach, and how we work with someone.  And when we’re talking about using yoga from a trauma informed perspective, we think about using all of our tools, whether it’s breath work, the postures, the meditation, we’re working on using these tools to help regulate the nervous system and help heal the effects of trauma from a physiological standpoint.  

A lot of the effects of trauma show up in the body, show up in the nervous system, so it’s very challenging to talk your way out of a trauma response. If you’re experiencing some anxiety, depression, panic, it’s the nervous system reacting. For example, if we’re noticing that we’re feeling a lot of anxiety, and actually, I had this happen to me yesterday, and I just, I just used it myself. I was on an airplane and there were issues with the airplane, so we had to wait for two hours on the plane for them to determine what was wrong with the plane. Could they fix it? They determined that they could and we eventually were given the go to take off. In the meantime, you’re just sitting there in that small space, waiting and wondering and waiting. Yes. So, you know, I could notice that I was very grateful for my yoga practice and specifically my trauma informed yoga practice at that point in time, because I was able to sit there for the two hours and not have it had too much of an impact on me. Yeah. I noticed the others around me becoming very anxious irregulated. Sure, they’re having threat responses right some want to flee and get out of there, some people may become more irritable, have that fight response and even freeze or shut down, I’m sure there were all sorts of different nervous systems reacting around you. Right, there were, and then I noticed as soon as we were given the go ahead and we started taxiing that my heart started beating a little bit faster. My mind starts going, I hope they really did fix it and, you know, as we’re taking off, all the bumps and everything were affecting me in a different way than they had on my flight down there, simply because of what had just happened. I knew it’d be very difficult to rationalize with myself at that point. Like to think my way through it? To think my way through it. So I said, Nikki, let’s start doing some breathing.  The breathing technique that I used was focusing on the length of my exhale and I chose to do that because one of the things that we know about the body and trauma is that if we can have a longer exhale than inhale, it engages our vagus nerve, which is very important in regulating our nervous system. We started feeling calmer, safer. Yeah. Absolutely. And so, I did probably a good five minutes and it worked. I was able to just really settle myself.  I was so grateful for that. Just the knowledge of changing our breath, what that can do for us. 

I agree. Later we’ll go over the long breath as a skill for listeners if you’re interested in applying that into your life.  Nikki’s going to lead us through that in a little bit.  

I was reading on goodtherapy.org that yoga can even boost the neurotransmitter GABA, which is important because GABA levels are statistically low in people who experience substance abuse, anxiety, depression. When we think about yoga therapy, who would you say would benefit from this practice?  

Well, before the pandemic, I would say the grouping of people that would benefit from yoga therapy or trauma informed therapy was a little bit smaller or focused a bit differently. One thing that I have noticed just talking with a variety of people is since we’ve all navigated a year of this pandemic and we’ve been dealing with really a threat to our safety, it may not always feel like it, but it is the underlying current that we all have. Many of us are really working with dysregulated nervous systems right now and from that standpoint, I think we all could benefit from a yoga practice. Whether it’s individual or group yoga therapy that is taught from that trauma informed perspective where we’re attuned to how to create a sense of safety in either the individual or the group session.  So that’s a very broad kind of over sweeping thing to say everybody.  

But I think that’s important. We’re all going through a major trauma right now and we won’t even see the effects on our bodies, our minds, until it’s over and it’s not over yet. I appreciate how you’re bringing the yogic philosophy into how we’re coping with the pandemic, as well as how we will treat the effects of the pandemic once things return to normal. Whatever the new normal is. 

I think that’s going to take a while as well. I think as people start to go out and do things, it’s going to feel, for example, I was just on a plane that felt odd. Right. Being in an airport with a lot of people that felt strange. So, it’s going to be these small, everyday things that you’re going to want to have additional tools to help cope with the effects of that. We might do more irritable. Right? I mean, it may not show up as we feel anxious at that time, but maybe afterwards. After we come back from the grocery store or whatever outing. We might snap at our kids or partner or whoever and wonder where that came from, right? Having that awareness that it’s normal that we’re going to feel a little bit different and that we’re not alone in that because it’s happening to all of us to varying degrees. I really encourage people to start to explore whether it’s yoga or some other body-based nervous system regulating tools.   

I hear what you’re saying, where there are different physiological and psychological aspects that yoga therapy can treat. What about the common concerns of, if people are saying, you know, I’m not flexible. I don’t think this is something I feel comfortable trying. I’ve never done yoga before. How do you calm those first-time jitters? 

I let people know that that is probably one of the most common things I hear about concerns of doing yoga. I can’t do yoga because I’m not flexible and my response often is, that’s one of the reasons we do yoga, because it increases our flexibility. Right. Also that, again, everybody’s different, that is something I talk about a lot as well. Right. Whether we’re in an individual session or if we’re in a group setting, it’s just human nature, we’re going to look around the room, right. Even if I’m doing it virtually, and wonder why does my body look different than that? There’s so many different reasons and it doesn’t even necessarily have to do with the fact that you’re not flexible enough. Maybe your body just doesn’t do it that way and that’s okay. What we want to do is use the poses to start to find a sense of comfort and ease within the body. Right.  

You know another difference for what you might find in yoga therapy and/or teachers that are trauma informed is that we want to give choices because when we’ve experienced trauma, we at some point had some choices taken away from us and that can really be an effect that stays with us.  When we can give choices, that can be very empowering to people to safely practice making decisions because it’s for a very brief point in time.  Then again, we get that sense of agency, we start to take that back because we notice, ok Nikki gave me three different ways to try this, the second way feels the best to me.  The next time we do this, I’m going to do it this way even if somebody next to me is doing it differently, because I know this is what works for me.  

And that’s important as a body-centered psychotherapist and fitness trainer, it’s really important to me and all body-centered practitioners that people feel safe in their bodies and that isn’t necessarily where we all start.  Sometimes our body is a place that we feel uncomfortable or that we haven’t spent much time in. As we build that relationship with ourselves and we befriend our body and we start considering being friends with our body, these practices that are trauma informed focus much more on tuning in, on feeling empowered, and feeling safe.  Absolutely.  Absolutely.  

When a person is in yoga therapy, how else might a yoga therapist encourage safety through breath, or through listening to the body, or through nervous system regulation?  

So again, choices, so, if it’s breathing for example, we’ll try something for a little bit and then I’ll pause and I’ll check in and say, how does that feel? What are you noticing? If that sense of safety doesn’t feel there, we’ll switch and we’ll try something different. It’s important, and it’s the same thing with a posture. What are you noticing right now? Do you feel safe in this? Does it feel comfortable? Do you feel like you want to run out of the room? And just always honoring whatever the response is and knowing that that’s ok, that’s actually one of, like, the gems that we’re going for in the yoga therapy practices is really being able to notice and be in tune with what we’re feeling and then ask ourselves how can I best nurture and attend to this?  If we’re doing a balance pose and you’re not feeling safe in that, then we don’t need to be in it right now. We can come back to it.  We can do something, a breathing technique or a different posture.  You know, something that a lot of people find comforting is child’s pose.  We can go into that for a little bit and then when you feel more regulated, more safe, then let’s try that pose again and see what the difference is.   

Yeah, it sounds like yoga therapy helps people learn how to respond to what’s happening rather than react to what’s happening in their system.  

Yes, I think that’s a great way to put it. Absolutely. And just really honor.  There’s a lot of shame and judgment that surrounds our responses to things.  Especially if they are responses that we would rather not experience. The anxiety often, depression often.  If we’re irritable often, we can react to that in a way where we get upset with ourselves and we wonder, what’s wrong with me, why does this always happen? And then we get very much in our head and we’re very judgmental of ourselves.  In that instance what I would offer up is, is it maybe ok to just notice that you’re feeling this and then honor that it’s your body sending you a signal that you need something different than what’s happening right now. And noticing after you honor that, where you are.  

I agree. I agree. One of the gems of doing body-centered work is that we can mindfully separate and observe what is happening instead of taking it personally or over identifying with it. Let’s say we move into a different yoga move and our heart starts racing and maybe the initial thought is, I’m anxious.  Why am I always anxious? Why can’t I do something fun and new?  This always happens to me.  I knew I shouldn’t have come.  And then, thoughts can continue in that direction. Or, when we step back and observe through the body we can notice, here’s racing heart, here’s feeling clammy.  I wonder why my body is responding in this way right now.  How can I help it feel safe? How can I be kind? And that’s such a shift, that offering ourselves compassion, one, lights up different areas of our brain than judgement does, and it can help regulate and build that sense of wellbeing.  Two, it encourages us, like I said, to stop taking it personally.  This isn’t about us. This is the human, or even mammalian experience. It’s our body, or brain, trying to protect us and keep us safe.  So then, we have an opportunity of witnessing and then maybe deciding if there’s other things we could do differently to engage that sense of safety and engage that sense of connection and wellbeing.  

I myself as a psychotherapist have noticed that it can be very helpful for clients who are in traditional talk therapy to incorporate some form of somatic, which means the body, therapy, such as yoga therapy, trauma informed weightlifting, mindfulness or meditation. In your opinion, how does yoga therapy support somebody who’s maybe feeling stuck or feeling like something’s missing in their care? 

That’s a great point, because I would say, the majority of people that find their way to yoga therapy have expressed that they have tried a variety of different talk therapies and it’s been helpful to a certain extent, but they feel stuck. They feel like something’s missing.  So, it’s not that that hasn’t been helpful, they just feel like they need something else to complement it, to go with it.  Sure.  

The leading trauma therapist Bessel van der Kolk, he wrote The Body Keeps the Score. Great book. Excellent book.  He also has done a lot of research with a yoga therapist, David Emerson, and they’d done research based, trauma informed yoga to show that yoga from, scientifically proven, that yoga does reduce the effects of trauma.  That has led Bessel van der Kolk and other psychotherapists to arrive at is for us to heal trauma we need to have the body involved somehow. Sure. It’s important. It’s part of the healing process, so Bessel van der Kolk will even say that we first need to get into the body and heal from that point before we can start to access more clearly that prefrontal cortex. That thinking part of the brain where that talk therapy usually comes in. I like to let people know that you’re not alone in feeling like something was missing because something has been missing.   

Yeah.  I’m so appreciating our conversations and for you for sharing your time with us Nikki.  Before we end today, let’s revisit what we mentioned earlier about the long breath and maybe even offer a couple more body-centered skills. What do you think?  

I think that sounds great.  Absolutely.  When we can use just a couple of different tools and we can practice them.  Hopefully, whoever’s listening can practice along with us. You can start to see that it doesn’t take a whole hour of yoga.  Typically, yoga is presented in these hour-long sessions, which that’s lovely, and sometimes it takes three minutes, five minutes, 15 minutes, and we see the shift in how we’re feeling.   

So, I think we’ll come back to the breath again to mention that this breathing technique, one of many, focuses on lengthening the exhale. Ok. I say it’s one of many because I want anyone out there who might practice this and feel like it doesn’t shift their nervous system to feeling more calm, more easeful, or maybe even does the opposite, to know that you’re not doing it wrong.  This might just not be the breathing technique for you.  Ok. And that’s ok.  Ok, that’s good to know.  We’ll figure out something else.  Right, so the way that we want to practice this is we want to breath in through the nose.  Just for a comfortable amount, we don’t have to feel like we need to take a huge breath in. And then we exhale out through the mouth and it’s a slow, gentle exhale.  We don’t need to feel like we need to really push anything.  I sometimes suggest a sigh to go with it or a haaa sound because in addition to the lengthening of the exhale, engaging our vague nerve, engaging our parasympathetic nervous system. That sound also does that as well, ok? When we get to the end of that exhale, we’re going to let the body tell us when we want to take that next breath in.  

Thank you for that Nikki.  Let’s move into skill #2, movement in breath.   

And so, this shows up a lot in many different postures.  I’m going to come back to one that I referenced earlier which involves simple arm movements. I do also want to share that there are times, especially when we may be newer to yoga practice and linking movement with breath, that sometimes we might start to feel not necessarily overwhelmed, but feel like we’re focusing too much on that, on getting it right, and it takes us out of the body and into the mind.  I always tell people, try to remind them that, if you notice that starting to happen for you, just kind of drop the breathing for a little bit and just do the movement and see how that feels, ok?  Ok. One of the reasons we do like to link our movement with our breath is it just increases that mind-body connection.  And also, if we have the tendency to have a very busy mind, which many of us do, including myself, when we can link that movement with the breath, it helps us to stay a little bit more present.  Again, if we notice that the opposite is happening, we just adjust and do it slightly differently for our needs in that moment.  Thank you.  

The one with the arms is taking the arms out to the side and when you take a breath in you extend your arms up above your head. Then when you exhale, you begin to release the arms down.  It’s just a gentle movement with the breath where you’re extending up on your inhale and your releasing on the exhale.  You can determine what a comfortable range of motion is for your body.  If extending your arms up above your head doesn’t work because your shoulders hurt or you have an injury, you go to your comfortable range of motion and then you release back down.  That is one simple way you can do that.  

I appreciate that. Often when I’m working with people and movement as a personal trainer, we all have different ranges, our bodies move differently.  What I encourage for those whose bodies are maybe not moving in a pattern that they expected, is that we just meet the body where it’s at. If we push too hard, we’ll just create a threat response.  Our bodies will say something isn’t right.  There’s pain or there’s an issue here.  Then we’re creating a response where our body will want to protect itself instead of feeling safe.  I really like that accommodation to that pose.  

That moves us into thinking about trauma informed poses.  So, when you’re working with a person who is experiencing restriction or perhaps not feeling comfortable in their body, how do you encourage them to change a possible traditional pose into a trauma informed pose? 

That’s a great question. One of the examples that I like to use because this seems to be a pose that a lot of people know even if they’re newer to yoga, is the tree pose. It’s a balancing pose.  So that’s a pose where we are shifting our weight to one leg, we’re working on lifting the other leg up, arms might be extended as well.  It’s a pose that takes a lot of concentration for one thing, which can be a challenge.  The other thing is that we’re purposefully introducing instability, right? One of the things that we do hope that happens is that we work on improving our balance because from a physical standpoint, especially as we age, those are very helpful things.  I also invite people to consider different intentions of being in that pose. because the tree pose also can produce a sense of grounding and stability as well.  When we think about trees rooted into the Earth, right, they’re very grounded, they’re very stable, they’re very connected.  If we’re in this posture, I might ask, what are you noticing right now?  There’s something that you can shift that might increase the sense of grounding and stability.  Maybe what that means is that you have a hand on a chair to help steady you.  Maybe you have a hand on the wall.  Maybe your back is up against the wall so you have that stability.  Maybe both feet are actually on the floor because that’s where you’re feeling most stable today.  The invitation is to not only explore different variations that will work for that day, but also explore your intention behind the posture. Trying to use these poses in a different way than maybe what has been traditionally presented in a yoga practice.  

That’s great. Thinking about the intention and asking yourself what can I do to bring a sense of safety, connection, empowerment into the pose.  That’s wonderful.   

Next week, join me and Jeanne Kolker as we take a deeper look at trauma.  What is it? What does trauma feel like in the mind, in the body? What type of resources can you, the listener, use to address it? 

Thank you again for being here today, Nikki. I’ve so appreciated your time and the gifts that you’ve shared with us.   

 
Thank you for having me. It was lovely to have this opportunity to share some information that hopefully resonates with some of our listeners out there.   

Yeah. Yeah. Me too.  I hope it does too.   

Speaking of, if someone’s interested in yoga therapy, either individually or in a group setting, what’s happening at Insight? What can they look forward to? How can they get connected to you? 

Good question.  We always have a lot of different options, different variations, depending on what works for you, works for your schedule.  To get more information, you can always visit our website https://insightmadison.com/.  It has a list of our weekly drop-in classes.  If you’re interested in our individual yoga therapy, you can send me an email, [email protected]. You also can call the office and they’ll get you in touch with me where we can have a conversation, just to start to explore to see if it’s something that’s of interest to you. We also offer specialty yoga therapy groups in addition to what we consider weekly drop-in classes.  Yoga for stress and trauma healing.  That is a 5–6-week series where we dive a little bit more deeply.  We explore some meditation, some breathwork, some postures like you often would but we have opportunities for discussion if people want to engage in that.  We do journaling.  It’s just a little bit deeper dive.  I’ll be offering that starting in May.  If that’s something that’s of interest to you, again you can contact me directly. We can chat a little bit more about that and go from there.  

Great.  That sounds wonderful.   

Well, thanks again Nikki, it’s always so good to see your face even if it’s virtual.  I agree, it’s so good to see you too, thanks. Alright, take care. You too.  

Thank you again for joining us on Insight Mind Body Talk, a body centered mental health podcast.  We hope today’s episode encouraged and supported you in learning new skills and strengthening your mind-body connection. Please join us next week as we continue to explore integrative approaches to wellbeing. Until then, take care.