The Science Behind Yoga

Western science is beginning to find evidence and catch up with a lot of what this Eastern philosophy has known for a really long time there's actually something very powerful in what's going on in here and that's worth investigating the more control we have in our mind the more power we have in our life yoga has really the capacity to change your brain I think there's four components that that really make yoga what it is one of these of course is the most obvious one which is the physical postures the stretching the exercises the movements the

breathing techniques the relaxation techniques these are an important component that's working the body to affect um our Global functioning another critical area is the idea of self-regulation the ability to control our internal stress response to control our emotion response this is basically reflected as resilience to stress and equinity in the face of emotions and that leads to a psychological self-efficacy another really key area is the cultivation of Mind Body awareness um the sense of being able to feel and experience what's going on in the body and also to experience what's going on mentally to be

able to observe um the flow of thought um and this kind of cultivation of Mind Body awareness leads to an increase mindfulness that can change behaviors in a very positive way and then the final component which is really reflecting the traditional origins of yoga is the idea of experiencing these deeper States um these spiritual States if you will Transcendent States uh even if they're short term these kinds of experiences that you get in deep meditation uh can really be transformative for people and bring them to a positive lifestyle to have them gravitate towards positive goals

in life to improve improve and enhance uh their life meaning and purpose for those who have experienced the benefits of yoga for themselves they don't they don't need any evidence they don't need any research to convince them that that yoga can help however there are others who do like a little bit more of a you know a robust scientific systematic way of looking at what's actually going on rather than you know the anecdotal evidence that that so many people give so what I've been doing recently is research in the field of yoga for depression and

anxiety disorders the most significant result that we found was the reduction in measures of depression so we compared the group of people who were doing uh the yoga practice it was done over 6 weeks and the control group was uh continuing with that regular treatment and we saw a significant difference between the two groups we saw a 33% reduction in the group of people who were doing the yoga practice we saw a significant reduction in scores in anxiety in overall psychological distress uh we saw an increase in resilience that's a really important measure in uh

in mental health we saw increases in the frequency of positive experiences that people reporting and conversely a reduction in the frequency of negative experiences the average amount of yoga that people were doing was 12 minutes on a regular basis most days of the week over 6 weeks probably the most important measures were the reduction of the depression and the anxiety scores but each of the other measures gives us a much more overall picture of improvements in mental health the evidence support reports the whole idea that if people do something that includes movement breath mindful attention

and relaxation using the framework of yoga a little bit each day really does bring about some pretty significant results the most important scientific principle on which the whole philosophy of yoga rests is Prana with space I'm sure you've heard this term very often give me some space yeah but actually we need to create that space in the body we need to create that space in the mind so when your mind is clogged with thoughts you need to flush them out remove them and that's what meditation is all about to empty your mind similarly in a

body when we are doing Arenas what are we doing we are stretching out the body we're creating that much needed space so we need to give this intercellular space and when space is there Prana flows and when there is Prana there is Wellness the most important thing that I see in terms of yoga on a physical level is to establish Connections in the body and the connections come through the channels in in our body body which in yoga they call nardis and what moves through these channels is energy and information which in yoga they call

Prana and chit but physically these channels are blood vessels nerves lymphatic vessels acupuncture meridians just to name the main ones and Prana is things like heat electrical electromagnetic electrochemical energy flooding through the different channels of the body and also energy carrying molecules like glucose ATP then of course information or Ito is the information that might flow through um nerves and also electromagnetic energy that flows through the body carrying information and also information carrying molecules such as hormones neurotransmitters immunot transmitters and so physically and energetically we have energy and information flowing through the body and to

enhance the flow of energy and information through these channels in the body that's the most important thing to make yoga happen in the body now one thing I like to say to people is that yoga has obviously proved itself over tens of thousands of years right yoga has had a chance to prove itself over time but it is important for a lot of people to really have that belief in yoga that they have an understanding of it from the Western Scientific point of view and model uh in terms of the evidence that's there for um

the psychophysiological effects of Yoga practices I think historically even going back to the 50s there's a lot of research that shows the ability uh of these practices to enable people to manage their stress response the stress system and this is one of the major reasons why yoga people practice yoga it's to enable them to cope with stress and emotion in a big way it's one of the biggest reasons why people come to yoga classes is to cope with stress breath is the most powerful tool that everyone has within their reach to bring their stress response

right under their control the most direct way of doing that is by taking fewer breaths within a period of time and trying to fill your l lungs and expand your lung volume with every single breath and trying to increase that as far as you can from one breath to the next when we look at studies of people who perform pron breathing or yogic breathing where they prolong every breath so they breathe less frequently and deeper we find that it's possible to reduce blood pressure by controlling breathing now blood pressure is governed by the sympathetic nervous

system and the sympathetic nervous system is a messenger of the stress response so you can see what we're doing to the stress response simply by modifying breathing now within the yoga postures as we go from one posture to another and we're creating a challenge that our mind has to constantly deal with so if we're standing on one leg or our muscle is Contracting and we're having to bring our thum thought right back one of the things we can do to help ourselves is conturing breathing because as the prefrontal cortex or parts of it are working

to redirect attention we are also trying to get to grips with the stress response and calm ourselves down and using breathing as a tool adds to this so breathing plus the effort of regulating your thought both enhance the parasympathetic signal and bring the sympathetic nervous system signal down and hence moving out of the yoga studio this reflects on life in general so when we are faced with a stressful situation we remember to do exactly the same thing we did in that yoga room which is control the breathing and redirect attention using our mind using the

parts of the prefrontal cortex so breathing is an extremely powerful tool which can be applied both within and outside of the yoga room but we can practice using it within every yoga posture so yoga it strengthens the power of the mind and the more control we have in our mind in a sense of the conscious mind covering or actually controlling subconscious programs that take us off track the more power we have in that mind the more power we have in our life to control not just our physiology but where we are in the world and

how we connect with the rest of the world because it's all through the nervous system the biology that I teach epigenetics the new science is all revealing that the mind is the ultimate control of our health and our biology and we've been looking at genes as the issue it turns out only 1% of illness is related to genes 90% of illness is related to stress and what's stress it's the Mind overworking in a sense of fear and and just being lost in the world of so many things going on and yoga brings it into a

focus I think the most interesting thing is what it shows about Neuroscience neurology and how yoga has really the capacity to change your brain and if it changes your brain it changes your neurology it changes your nervous system it changes your physiology it could potentially change anything inside of you that might need changing or transforming the two areas of research that are really cutting edge currently one of them is neuroimaging the ability of these large machines that can peer right into the brain activity and look at very discrete areas of the brain and look at

changes in brain activity and also changes in brain structure and what we're finding is that these meditative practices can indeed change brain activity when you focus your attention um you change brain activity in a very discret way not only that but over time you actually change brain structure through what's called brain plasticity um and that means you end up with a brain that is conducive to the benefits and the practices that come along with contemplative practices like yoga and meditation and you can see changes in the stress system as reflected in the nervous system and

then finally the the other Cutting Edge area of research in yoga is a ular biological approach this is looking at the action of neurotransmitters uh looking at the action of actual molecules um in the brain uh so for example there are studies that show that a major neurotransmitter is affected after a single yoga class and there's other studies that show that um the expression of our DNA the activity of our genes is actually reflected as changing with these practices and you actually change gene activity you enhance gene activity that's good for you uh things like

immune response is improved and you downregulate gene activity that is sometimes bad for you if you're under chronic stress things like inflammation so um these are the two Cutting Edge areas and they're they're bringing yoga into the biomedical Modern World um we're starting to see that that yoga is not just a hobby not just something that you practice on the side this is real biological stuff you're really changing the activity of neurons in the brain you're changing um function within the body at the cellular and even the molecular level so it's very exciting and this

research is really exploding at this point in time so it's it's very exciting to see this validation of what we've experienced on the behavioral level now manifested in the scientific research what would be great to see is um is a recognition in medicine and in science that there's something worth looking at more carefully so I wouldn't say it's a simple instant outcome that it would be great if medicine saw yoga in this way but I think what's really important is that medicine and and other research recognizes that there's something in here that's worth investigating there's

an enormous amount that we can learn through conventional biomedical research on yoga in fact biomedical research itself is evolving to be able to allow us to peer into the body and the Brain in ways that were inconceivable just decades ago and so as this modern science evolves with things like I've described in neuroimaging um molecular biological approaches will allow us to use these tools to evaluate exactly how yoga is working uh and that's fantastic and and that is going to proceed um in an exponential way every week There's a new publication coming out evaluating some

aspect of the physiological effects of yoga or on um yoga as a clinical inter prevention I think one area that probably may not manifest in my lifetime is to look at some of the subtle things that um historically yoga has been associated with these are sort of the so-called subtle subtle energies uh in the field of uh complimentary integrative medicine this have been referred to as Energy Medicine um there's a number of aspects of yoga that are hypothesized the flow of sort of internal energy throughout the body there's these energy centers or called chakras that

are said to be there in in the body that are affected by yoga practice and we currently don't have the instruments that can really measure um this energy flow or these energy centers if they exist and that is going to be difficult um to measure um but I'm not too concerned about that because what we're really getting with the biomedical research is what we really need right now practically speaking and that is the evidence to show that these practices have real and Powerful changes um and and and they can make people's behavior go in the

proper direction for health well-being and actually behavior in society yoga began as a reaction against the urban environment and the enslavement and exploitation of animals and damning of rivers around 10,000 years ago when we human beings shifted from living aligned with nature and in harmony with nature to wanting to control nature there was a group of us who said I don't know if that's the way it's going to ultimately bring happiness and they held back and as more and more cities developed those people we call yogis now retreated into the forests and the jungles and

the mountains um to see if there was a better way to achieve happiness and Bliss and the knowledge of who we really are yoga has a great capacity to help people heal and help people overcome challenges but I think it's also important that we don't let's say get stuck there because ultimately yoga is about self-realization so let's use it to get better or let's use it to heal but then let's keep going with yoga to really get to the juice of yoga which is to really know the truth of who you are and I don't

know if you can really quantify that through Western science still it's great that Western science is bringing more people to the practice because it's giving them a language that they need in order to enter yeah for me the yoga practice went from the physical mental realm to the energetic emotional realm to the psychic symbolic it was a very practical practice that evolved emotionally and then opened me up spiritually and at one point there was just well now what and it was service it was always service it was take everything that you've learned and take it

off the mat get it out of your house and bring it down into the world where it actually matters a lot of the teaching of yoga is about invisible realities that have been seen by deeper faculties this is where modern science doesn't quite see what yoga is seeing what they're seeing is interesting but they don't see that there are other faculties of seeing the word Veda from which yoga comes means to see and gives us video and what a guru gives or a teacher gives is Daran a vision that might not have been obvious at

first the tremendous transformative power of yoga it offers these techniques to move through emotional mental block blages and challenges and really allows you to find your true seat of power your sense of yourself it integrates the mind the body and the spirit so people reconnect with their soul and sole purpose and a clarifies things for in people's lives it helps people fulfill personal Destiny it's a very deep spiritual devotional practice at the same time it's this beautiful physical practice it creates well-being what I feel is everything you know exists for a reason sometimes is in

the west especially it's a very