Enhance Your Yoga Practice For Mental Health and Trauma Recovery | Ep 11

Join Liz Albanis as she chats about  Yoga for Trauma Recovery and Mental Well-being.  Exploring some of the ways to enhance  your practice for better mental health. 

Key Topics

• Learn why consistent practice. Even just five minutes daily, can be more effective than two studio classes each week. 
• Discover how to improve your nervous system with Yoga. can support your journey towards balance without overstimulation or depletion.
• Understand your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems' roles in healing from trauma and recognize signs of being stuck in a fight-or-flight state. 
• Why your yoga practice needs to meet you where you are. Helping to alleviate anxiety and depression.
• The Importance of a personalised yoga practice.
• Why yoga poses are only a small part of an effective practice and some other practices to consider incorporating.
• Somatic Yoga for trauma release.

Whether you’re a seasoned practitioner or new to yoga. Liz provides practical insights tailored for trauma survivors seeking holistic well-being. 

More About The Host

Liz offers one-on-one online sessions to help yogis cultivate a personalised yoga practice. Liz is a registered senior yoga teacher with Yoga Australia. She has been teaching since 2012. Liz is currently studying to become a yoga therapist. A qualified personal trainer through her Diploma of Fitness. Liz is also a qualified Pilates and Barre Instructor.

The content shared in these conversations is intended for informational and educational purposes only, and it is not suitable for listeners under the age of 18. Please use discretion and consult a qualified professional before making changes to your health or wellness routines.

If you’re interested in being a guest or know someone who might be head to my website: https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/podcast/yoga-for-trauma

For bonus content Join the 3R Program: Regulate, Rebuild, Restore. Start your journey with a 14-day free trial and learn how to create a sustainable, personalised yoga practice that supports your mental health and nervous system. https://www.lizalbaniswellness.com.au/plan

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction: Why Your Yoga Practice Might Not Be Working
• 1:55 Consistency Matters for Yoga for Mental Health
• 2:35 Beyond The Studio: Practising Yoga Independently
• 3:39 Understanding Your Nervous System and Trauma Recovery
• 6:26 Timing Your Yoga Practice for Optimum Nervous System Support
• 7:15 Personalising Your Yoga Practice for Mental Health
• 8:48 Yoga is More Than Poses
• 9:25 Yoga Off The Mat For Better Mental Health
• 11:12 Somatic Yoga For Trauma Release

Transcript

[00:00:00] No one in the world is exactly like you, and our practice, ideally is personalised to what we need. Yoga Nidra is a beautiful practice. Is it suitable for everyone? No. People who suffer from psychosis or have schizophrenia, it is not a suitable practice for. It's great to learn practices that are portable, that don't involve rolling out a yoga mat.

Are you holding issues in your tissues you haven't gotten rid of?

Welcome to the Inner Fire of Yoga, a podcast about transformation, resilience, and the power of yoga beyond the mat. I'm Liz Albanis, senior yoga teacher and yoga therapist in [00:01:00] training. This podcast was born in 2024 after I survived my second fire. Fire has been a recurring theme in my life, not just in the literal sense, but as a metaphor.

It has asked me to burn away what no longer serves me to transform and to rise stronger each time. This podcast is about that fire, the one that challenges us, but also fuels us to grow. If you've been showing up to your mat regularly, but still feeling anxious, heavy, or stuck in the same emotional loops, this episode is for you.

Here are some key things to think of with your yoga practice. One is meeting and balancing your mood without aggravating your anxious or depressed mood. Practicing consistently, regularly, and I mean daily because of [00:02:00] the neuroplasticity of the brain. even five minutes a day can be more effective than two classes a week. . So when a yoga therapist gives someone a program, it's often a twice daily thing.

When I study with Dr. Timothy McCall, who himself is a medical doctor, a yoga teacher, and a world renowned. Yoga therapist and author, he emphasized neuroplasticity of the brain practicing daily, often, Consistency matters. . Often we rely on yoga classes to get our yoga practice in because that's what yoga is in the modern day.

That's what people think of going to a yoga class to practice yoga. The beauty of it is you don't have to do a 200 hour yoga teacher training to be able to practice some yoga at home. Going to classes is great, but you can't always get there. We [00:03:00] had a prime minister that had time every morning to go for a walk with his security team.

I'm sure we have time to fit in five to 10 minutes day of some sort of yoga practice. So if you can only feel calm after a guided class, you are gonna find yourself in a pickle. I know of people that have said, oh, haven't been able to get to a class and been going nuts and crazy, and it'd be great if they could learn some tools they could practice independently as well as going to their classes,

 working on having a balanced, automatic nervous system.

A lot of us. In the modern day world, a sympathetic nervous system dominant, a sympathetic nervous system, is not the bad guy. We need it. The sympathetic nervous system is often known as the bad guy, the [00:04:00] get up and go, the one we need if a tiger is chasing us, for instance. So, we do need that. SNS. There are some people in the world who are parasympathetic nervous system dominant.

The parasympathetic nervous system is known as the good guy. It's the rest and digest system, but there are some people who have parasympathetic nervous system dominance. Severe melancholic depression is one example. A well-balanced one is also one that when the danger has passed, that switches back on smoothly, so it doesn't take ages for the parasympathetic nervous system to kick in after that [00:05:00]danger has gone.

The same thing goes though if the danger occurs that SNS kicks in quickly and appropriately. It doesn't overreact to something that is not a danger. Trauma will cause a person to have that startle response, and the SNS will kick in too quickly when it's not needed. If your nervous system isn't adapting properly, like a car with faulty brakes.

Even yoga can feel draining. You might be doing all the right things, but still feel stuck in fight or flight. Part of this is creating efficient breathing patterns in our practice, but also in everyday life. . . But it's not just the mechanics, the blood gases being important too, developing C02 [00:06:00] tolerance, because a lot of us are over breathers. We breathe too much, we have too much air hunger. So it's not just important to focus on the breath mechanics.

It's also important to look at the blood gases on and off the mat. Timing, taking into account the season, the time of year, but also the time of day. That is important too because obviously in the evening. We want a practice that is not going to make us so energized that we can't go to sleep. We've gotta keep in mind the time of day with our central nervous system.

So in the mornings, we want an energizing practice, not a practice that's going to put us to sleep. So the time of [00:07:00] day matters, and that's one of the many myths of yoga I've had so many people say to me. Oh yeah, I'm gonna go to a yoga class, so I'll sleep better. Well, not necessarily. It depends. Yoga can keep you awake as well.

Personalizing your practice to you because you are you. No one in the world is exactly like you. And our practice, ideally, is personalized to what we need. Hence why yoga was initially taught one-on-one handed down, not taught in a group setting. Learning what you need for your practice, and that will change over the years.

As you get older, your practice will change as your needs change as well. It can be really useful to work one-on-one with someone qualified to learn about what practices suit you. When a [00:08:00] yoga practice isn't personalized, it's not tailored to your specific needs. Yoga practices are like penicillin, not just the poses.

One may be medicine to you, but poison to someone else. There are many contraindications with yoga practices. For instance, yoga nidra is a beautiful practice. Is it suitable for everyone? No. People who suffer from psychosis or have schizophrenia, it is not a suitable practice for mania can be an issue too there as well.

The modern day yoga world. As Rebel said, my first guest is too postural focused. There's too much emphasis on yoga poses and flexibility. A really [00:09:00] key important part of yoga is self-inquiry is f Ya Ya. Self Study Study of the yogic philosophy and study of yourself practicing consciously. With presence when we practice, including postures, not treating them like an exercise class without it, we are just moving our bodies without asking, why am I reacting this way?

What patterns am I stuck in? Why does this yoga pose irritate me? Why does this instructor irritate me? Why do I always have to place my mat in that part of the yoga studio? So yoga's meant to help you uncover these sneaky habits that keep us stuck, and if we are completely oblivious to them, how can we start to drop them?

We can learn a [00:10:00] lot about ourselves with our yoga practice. And Samskara can be good, but we wanna uncover and change, get rid of the samskara that keep us stuck in ways we suffer and we suffer many ways. We don't wanna just focus on postures in our practice as well because. There's gonna come a time when you injure yourself or you are ill, and postures aren't an option.

Postures aren't necessary anyway, but they're not an option. So for instance, I had two lots of surgery last year. I was in hospital. My surgeon said to me, no yoga, and I said, I can practice yoga at the hospital. You can practice my meditation and that. So there's going to be times when you can't practice any postures and it's going to involve just breath work, self-inquiry.

You know, it's great to learn practices that are portable, that [00:11:00] don't involve rolling out a yoga mat, such as pranayama, breath work, meditation. Relaxation. Self-study, somatic release, which I touched on in another episode, issues in our tissues, yoga is a somatic practice.

Are you holding issues in your tissues you haven't gotten rid of? And she can sometimes feel that in a pose, you'll feel a release. As Justine beautifully described, Justine Janssen, that she could see this in students when she was teaching. We want that somatic release if we're holding onto stuff because we hold issues in our tissues.

You might find yourself crying suddenly in a class. In a certain post [00:12:00] like I have, or you might find yourself tremoring, you're releasing something. We do wanna release stuff if we need to in a careful way.

This is what I support people with practicing independently improving their mental health. There are so many wonderful yoga practices that aren't taught in group classes just because they can't be. And I hope you've gotten something out of that and it's inspired you to mix it up a bit, add something else into your regular yoga practice.

Thank you for joining me podcast. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired and informed and empowered to take meaningful steps towards your wellbeing. If there's a topic you'd like me to cover, or if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to hear from [00:13:00] you. Just fill in the form on the podcast page of my website.

Your voice is an important part of this journey. I want this podcast to reflect the conversations that matter most to my listeners. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from these conversations. Don't forget to subscribe. It helps grow this incredible community of resilience and support.

Until next time. Take care of yourself and never forget the power, the possibilities of a regular yoga practice. See you soon