The Therapeutic Wisdom of Yoga with Doug Keller

Join us on the latest episode of This is Yoga Therapy for a conversation with the insightful Doug Keller. We explore the therapeutic wisdom of yoga and what it offers for those navigating chronic pain and health issues. Tune in to learn how this evolving field is set to become a vital part of the future of yoga!

Transcript

Michele  0:00  
welcome to this is yoga therapy. I'm your host. Michele Lawrence, join me as we venture beyond the mat into the fascinating intersections of yoga and health. Each episode brings you candid conversations with the visionary leaders and practitioners who are truly shaping this field, sharing their stories, insights and the profound impact of yoga therapy in action.

 0:37  
In this episode, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with Doug Keller. Doug's been teaching workshops and trainings in the therapeutic applications of yoga since 1998. his teaching is rooted in a vast and inclusive perspective of study and practice that honors the insights of the many streams of wisdom that flow into the river of yoga. He is known not only for his effectiveness in communicating an ever evolving approach in these trainings, but also for his extensive writing on the topic in magazines journals, and his two volume work on yoga as therapy. Today, we'll be speaking with him about the therapeutic wisdom of yoga and what it offers for those navigating chronic pain as well as other health issues and Doug, it's an honor to have you here today. I'm delighted to finally have this meeting with you. Thanks. Michele, hi. Can we start by just having you share a bit more about yourself. You've been teaching yoga for a long time now. What initially drew you to the path of yoga and then to the therapeutic side of the practice. 

Doug: Well, because of what I do, people often think have a background in physical therapy or, yeah, anatomy like that. I actually started with an interest in philosophy, particularly spiritual philosophy. I got a college and graduate degree in that, and taught in colleges for a while, a few years, and then I wanted to pursue the experience of the spirituality more deeply, especially because I was drawn more to the eastern spirituality with a good grounding in Western Christian spirituality. And so I ended up going on staff in an ashram, and spent a good seven years in India, as well as another seven years in the US and the ashram, getting a chance to be on staff at the ashram, and with that, learn more about the philosophy and do the practices. And along the way, I got introduced to the hatha yoga practice and started to appreciate how that was a necessary part of the experience of yoga overall. And in the course of that, I got into teaching it. So when it was time to go out back out on the world and start working again, I was lucky enough to get into teaching yoga. And in the process of that, got more and more interested in the ways in which the yoga practice benefited people. They recognized the benefits. So I wanted to understand that more deeply. And with that, just began to explore more deeply into the anatomy, ideas about fascia and all of the aspects of yoga practice, including the breath as well as meditation. So I ended up teaching yoga along that path, kind of coming from the spiritual to the physical, recognizing a lot of teachers come at it from the opposite direction, starting from the physical and moving into the spiritual. Either way is good. Either way is good. That's really great. I love knowing that about you and and that might speak to really how your information comes across in different ways. Maybe you can talk more about how your work, it's a blend of the ancient wisdom of yoga as well as the practical needs of modern health issues. I think I was one of those people that probably thought that you were a PT or doctor, right first, but maybe tell us more about what you mean by the and I'm putting air quotes out here the therapeutic wisdom of yoga, and how is this different from a purely physical practice kind of that's part A, and then Part B is, how is it different from what we call yoga therapy today? I think this will be a really cool conversation to begin with. There's very practical concern in calling it the therapeutic wisdom of yoga, largely because there is such reticence around the term yoga therapy, especially with yoga Alliance, and that does have legitimate concerns about scope of practice, especially when the term yoga therapy is overly broad, and it seems to include a lot of different forms or fields of therapy within itself, making assumptions about competence to perform that kind of therapy. And like I said, there are legitimate concerns about claims that people make in being yoga therapist, because you need specific training to work in specific fields, by the same token the therapeutic wisdom of yoga as part and parcel of  Practice. It's inherent, right? It's inherent with it, particularly starting with the Hatha yogis. I mean, often we don't make distinctions about yoga. Certainly Yoga itself has a history going back a good 3000 to 5000 years, certainly going back to the Vedas. And there were concepts about prana included within the Vedas, but there wasn't really specific content about maintaining physical health, in particular through yoga practices, the current concerns were almost exclusively spiritual and especially concerns about liberation from the body, rather than taking care of the body. What happened with the advent of Hatha Yoga, which honestly, is what most people do when they do what they call yoga, Satya yoga, that started in the Middle Ages, AD, around 1100 1300 1400 and for the first time, there are specific concerns about physical wellness, including emotional wellness, that got included in the practice and the practices that were given a lot more detail in how to do them with the Hatha yogis, both from Asana as well as pranayama and even approaches to meditation, those details were also oriented towards how that maintained the wellness of the body for the sake of continuing in your spiritual practice. So the therapeutic wisdom of the practice was baked into the practice as it was described by the Hatha yogis. So it's it's really rather hard to separate out something that you would call yoga therapy as apart from the wisdom that's inherent within the practice itself. And also, I think it's important to recognize that when we're talking about the therapeutic benefit of yoga, it's unlike other forms of therapy, because the effectiveness of yoga in particular relies more upon the person doing the practice than it does upon the therapist. The therapist offers insights and guidance, not really diagnosis in the technical term, but certainly assessment of what they see going on with the person. But the yoga only works if the person does the practice and persists in the practice, and that's unlike other therapists that you go to for sessions where in one way or another, they act upon you to make you better, or to cure you or to improve your health. And so I'm shifting the focus towards the wisdom of the practice and shifting it away from dependence upon the therapist, though the teacher, assuming that role has an important role to play in working with the student. 

Michele: That's really clear. Thank you. Let's talk about yoga's benefits for chronic pain. We hear a lot about that. There's a fair amount of research around yogas efficacy there. What are some of the key principles you apply when working with individuals who are navigating persistent pain and even other health issues as well. But let's start with pain. Are there some guiding principles that you hold? 

Doug: It's an important question, because medical science has made great advances in dealing with injuries, trauma and disease, but chronic pain syndrome is the most resistant area, along with that forms of chronic inflammation. They're the root of many of the endemic diseases that we have, from diabetes to dementia to cancer and other things like that. And of course, what people very, very often suffer from are simple chronic pain syndromes, whether it's back pain or knee pain so on and so forth. And this is where a practice of yoga has a definite role to play in overcoming those syndromes, as far as basic principles, what I've been coming to see more and more from the kinds of things that I've researched is that the syndrome start with the joints and with the mobility of the joints, especially a principle that a doctor named mennell Back in the 60s put forth, calling it joint play. And he's basically saying, when joints are misaligned in a way that they don't have proper space for movement within the joint, the muscle may try to move the joint, but because the joint cannot move. The muscle can't move the joint, and therefore the muscle gets tired or sore or weakened or atrophied. And different reflexes, protective reflexes, kick in, imposed by the nervous system to basically limit our attempts to move that joint. Some muscles tighten up to stabilize the joint. Other muscles trying to move the joint get weakened as a kind of protective mechanism. And so the pain signals that we get start in the joints from this lack of movement, and you cannot make advances with dealing with the muscles or muscle pain until you free the movement of the joints. And so the simplest start place to start.

Doug 10:00  
For anybody in yoga practice is with mobilizing the joints before they attempt to stretch the muscles or strengthen the muscles, focus on the joints first. That in itself, is effective in releasing or reducing pain syndromes. Just last weekend, I was in Boston, I had a woman in the workshop, and she came in and she had, she didn't even tell me before it started. She got there a little bit late, and we were doing simple, passive movements to free up the ankle and the toes and then get into the knee. It's just moving the ankle around the toes around. And she came up after the workshop and said she came to the workshop with a lot of ankle pain and foot pain and problems with her arch. And after doing those exercises, the pain was starting to go away, and she was feeling a lot better. And then from the joint exercises, we went into the asanas, working with the muscles, the feet, the arches and so on. And she started to experience more freedom in the knees, the hips and the feet along with it. So it's kind of natural to start with the joints. Of course, from there, you get into the muscles in ways that we're familiar as far as stretching and strengthening, and in that whole process, the nervous system does get involved, because, of course, one major aspect of pain syndromes is the kind of fear and uncertainty that accompanies the pain. When people don't know why they're in pain, it causes anxiety, and the anxiety about the pain increases the pain and also tends to make the person move less out of fear of the pain as the very action of moving less that can perpetuate the pain syndrome, or turn it into a vicious cycle. And so there are emotional permutations to the whole pain problem, problems of anxiety and unwillingness to move, and all of that has an impact upon the nervous system and emotional states. So you can start from someplace simple, and it does into expand into broader and broader circles that encompass more and more aspects of a person's wellness. And in addition to that, I would mention what's especially become clear, or at least I started to understand, after our experience with covid A few years ago, which is continuing now, is the role of the autonomic nervous system, and not only wellness, but pain syndromes. And the autonomic nervous system is the aspect of our nervous system that basically maintains the automatic functions of the body stuff you don't have to think about, like digesting your food, regulating your hormones, regulating your sleep cycles and so on, all of that's done below the conscious level, and we're not conscious of it until things start to go wrong. You have problems with your digestive system, problems of inflammation, autoimmune diseases, all of that falls back on the autonomic nervous system going awry. And there is such a thing as long covid, which persists now, which is not really caused by the virus itself, but it's a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system in reaction to the virus. And dysautonomia, or dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system, existed before covid. We only came to appreciate its role because of covid and after so the many problems, like pots other inflammatory diseases, all of those rest upon dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. And when I look at the fundamental yoga practices, from Asana to breath to meditation and the different approaches to meditation, all of those practices are specifically geared towards better self regulation of the autonomic nervous system, and so they approach or address the central problems of many of our chronic pain as well as health problems, in a way that, honestly, modern science is trying to catch up to. But again, all of this comes down to a person's self care and self regulation, which is something that people have to do for themselves to be ineffective. There is no pill for your autonomic nervous system. They're trying, but that's not working as of yet. So I think yoga really encompasses manageable approaches to all of those realms of disease, as well as chronic pain syndromes.

Michele 14:26  
So that was a lot. Yeah, I'm going to maybe distill a few things that stood out for me from that, and that is, in chronic pain, for example, a good place to start is with the joints and bringing awareness gentle movement, mobility to the joint can offer some pain relief and bring you to a place where you can move on right from there. So I heard that. I also really heard that it's so important to. Into the nervous system, not only in chronic pain, but in other health issues. And in pain, the nervous system gets so charged due to fear of being in pain, right? And how we can brace ourselves for that. So it's such an important component of dealing with the pain and that overall, many health issues have this component of malfunction, dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system, and therefore using us in a breath work, meditation, all the tools of yoga in a self affirming, self efficacy type of practice that yoga is is, you know, so helpful for regulation, regulation of the nervous system, which can be really key to feeling healthy and liberated. So is that a good summary? Yeah, yeah. I certainly emphasize, especially if you're working with older students in yoga classes, their brain problems tend to be more centralized in the joints with inflammation, and it's especially important to work with the joints first before attempting you know the average approach to stretching, which can be frustrating for teachers, because they make less progress with stretching and achieving flexibility and strength, though they do make progress, and what would help those students better is to adjust the joints first. And I would add that doesn't just apply to older students. So many people, even in their 30s, 40s, any earlier than that, that experience frustration with achieving flexibility in their practice, it's because they're going at the muscles directly and not realizing that mobilizing the joints is the key to making more progress with greater flexibility with the muscles, so it really stretches across the spectrum and becomes more important as students become older and older in their practice. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I live in a 54 year old body and doing joint freeing series, for example, when I was in my 20s and 30s, was completely uninteresting, right? And now it feels What's that? It seems boring, yeah, it seems really boring. It only takes a couple of minutes and makes a difference, yeah. And now it seems like a non negotiable. And you know, I teach it regularly, almost in all of my therapeutic classes, for sure, and in general, yoga classes as well. Not necessarily the whole sequence from start to finish, but but parts of it and then riffs on it as well, and all of that. And people love it. I think for me too, I have to be a believer in it in order to have some conviction about it, right? And it probably took that and some real steady practice in it myself in order for me to pass it on in a way where I'm not undertoning that this is kind of boring and let's just get through it, but it's really helpful and important. 

Doug: Yeah. And certainly, Mukunda Styles was the pioneer in putting that out, yeah, doing the book that emphasized that, yeah. And there's an even greater variety to what can be done with the muscles, with the joints, both prior to doing the asanas and in the process of doing the asanas to create greater freedom. So there's really an almost limitless field in which you can move with the joints or work with the joints in the practice. And, yeah, it's like, if you do some stuff with the beauty class, students look at you as like, Is this really what we're doing here? But it moves on quickly into getting something more interesting for give some good resources for other I believe that the possibilities are endless, too. But do you have a particular reference that you've published about joint movements? I'm working on that currently with my trainings, I don't really have anything published about that my therapy books, I need to incorporate more of that information into them as I develop but it's got some basic stuff about working with the joint. So it is really work in process. Mennell himself. His name is John mental it's M, E N, N, E, L, L. His book was written in 1964 you can find used copies of it with some difficulty. And of course, he was coming from the perspective a doctor and a physiotherapist. So he gets very specific about manipulating a client's joints in very specific ways. And of course, most yoga teachers are not in a position to do that, are not trained to do that. But it doesn't really matter, because you can take the very the basic ideas from that and incorporate that into simple, simple joint moving. Mucuna styles tended to focus more on the feet and the wrists, and, to some degree, the knees and the shoulders, but there's a lot more that's kind of inherent in the asanas themselves that involve different movement of the joints, as long as we don't treat asanas in a very static way and.In the sense of just going into a pose, like a warrior pose, and just holding the pose for a certain period of time. There are variations and movements that you can do to free up the movement of the joints even while practicing the posture. And that's why the approach to a kind of flow approach to yoga practice is helpful, because it also balances holding poses with moving joints, and that's why a flow practice, if it's not too fast, can also be of additional benefit. Yeah, you're speaking my language, yeah. 

Michele: So tell me what are some common misconceptions you encounter when people first come to you for therapeutic guidance, you can even like go back in your history, right to think about some of those situations that might have come across through the years. But I'm curious what some of those might be.

Doug 20:51  
The most basic and obvious ones that I keep encountering yet again and again is people come to you with an idea that you can just give them a short set of poses or stretches to fix their problem, like I had knee pain or hip pain, or my daughter has this going on. Give me a pose to do for it, or a couple of poses. And on the one hand, they need some sort of initial short program so they'll follow through on it and do it. So they do need that. And at the same time, what has to be inculcated in the person is the self awareness that accompanies doing the program so that they can carry what they do and a few yoga poses into their ordinary life and recognize the patterns that they tend to repeat that increase the pain problems, whether it's a Knee or a hip or a shoulder or so on the postural patterns that they tend to repeat the RE emphasize those patterns. I have to emphasize that what we're doing with the pose is meant to reinforce better and healthier patterns of movement that persist throughout the day, and not just in yoga practice. And so again, it's that compartmentalized kind of thinking where it's like, well, give me something I can do over here, so the rest of the day I'll feel good. And yes, you have to start with that, but then you have to carry the yoga practice in a very practical way into the rest of the day and catch yourself in the times when you're doing things that bring you back into the pain syndrome the first brought you to look for help. And isn't that part, the dissemination of that message in lots of different languages and ways that might land for the individual, and also the openness and readiness of the individual at any moment in time. Like it feels like there are some things we can control there, and some things that are just, you know, either the time is now or not, it could be later. It could be never, yeah. I mean, one of the nice things about being in yoga is, in general, people come to you because they want to do it, or in general, as in general, whereas when they go to the doctor, it's only because they're hurting and they want to get fixed by the doctor and get out of there as quickly as possible. People in general, come to you with an interest in maybe this will help me, and if they get some experience of some improvement from doing it, then they're encouraged to keep coming back and doing more. Hopefully, in that way, there does need to be a shift in the understanding of yoga practice, where, previously, as it was popularized in the west through teachers like Iyengar and others, there is this conception that if you can make your body fit the pose, then the pose will fix you. That only goes so far, and that that led to the sort of mentality of, give me a couple poses to fix my problem, and it in the back, the back of my anger yoga, or the back of light on yoga, gave that impression, because he has, you know, a section where, if you have this problem, do this series of poses and it'll fix the problem. And of course, he paid attention to alignment as being a part of that. But I think yoga is, is, or should be, moving more towards a body centric understanding, instead of an Asana centric understanding, in the sense that the Asana is meant to serve the body that you're working with, rather than the body trying to serve the asana, which means understanding there are differences in people's structures and movement patterns and the poses can be refined in order to help the person with their own self, understanding and experience of their body, First of all, understanding why they're having a pain problem. Second of all, understanding what kind of movement patterns improve the pain problem, and also basically improve their overall function, their general function. And Asana is a path of exploration towards understanding that about. Yourself, and then that makes the asana more interesting, where it's not a thing, where people think, well, if I just hold triangle pose for 30 seconds on each side, then I'll feel better. No, in the process of doing Triangle Pose, what are you feeling? I know you know, in teaching beginning students, students, often in the process of class, their question is, what am I supposed to feel in the pose, when I do this pose, what am I supposed to feel? And after remind them, the question is not, what are you supposed to feel? The question is, what do you feel? And that's the key to making the asana work for you. What do you feel, both in the sense of when it feels good, as well as in the sense of when it doesn't feel right, or it causes pain. Obviously, we're not meant to cause pain in the pose. You may experience some discomfort that's different from pain, but pain is a warning that we need to adjust the pose until it doesn't feel painful to you, and then you're making headway and understanding your own body. So an Asana is an opportunity for self exploration, and that's what's going to make it interesting to students as they engage in the yoga if you can get them engaged in that process. And so I'm going to further this just a little bit more into the how do you do that, like as a yoga teacher, so you have a unique way of teaching students to listen to their own bodies and become their own best teachers. And you just said that there too. And so do you have any guidance for other yoga teachers, listening or even the individual? How do you cultivate this sense of inner wisdom and empowerment in your students? And how can other yoga teachers look to do that the first step is always just in your own practice, paying attention to even the little modifications that you may make, uncon even unconsciously at first, that help you with your practice of the poses or things that you do that make the pose seem a little bit easier or more fluid or flowing. And then in the course of teaching a class, just sprinkle in a few adjustments or modifications, in the sense of try this or try this this election, see how that makes a difference. And students do come up afterwards and say, you know, those little things that you say, it doesn't make a difference in the pose that's different from saying to the student, well, you're misaligned. Your knee is supposed to be pointing that way, or that's misaligned. Your shoulders supposed to be like this. It's not about supposed to bes and rules of being right in the pose. It's more little suggestions like try this and see if this gives you a new experience or helps to take you a little bit deeper into the experience of the pose, and I do, to some extent, when teaching in the class, do the poses myself in the course of teaching, and not all the time. It's not like I'm up there doing my own practice and they're just following along, but I kind of keep myself in the flow of what's being felt in the class, rather than just standing up at the front and calling out instructions. And I find when I feel certain things in my own body, when I'm doing the pose with them, I incorporate that into the teaching, and often that's what the student needs to hear, too. In the moment, there is a kind of group energy to being in the class with the students, and we're meant to be with them as much as possible while still taking care of them, as opposed to just lecturing to them. And I think that's a very organic process that every teacher finds in their own way. And it's really about paying attention to what keeps the practice interesting to you. When you focus on what makes the practice interesting to you, it's going to be interesting to the students, and that does hinge upon whether your interest is in doing more and more advanced poses, or whether your interest is in doing the practice and with it allows you to take care of yourself honestly. Teachers are so stressed out from teaching, they need to focus their practice on self care, rather than advancement into more and more elegant poses. After a while, it becomes a question of fundamental survival and wellness and kind of like, what's the point? I mean, right, yeah, yeah, that was really beautifully shared. Thank you. So we're seeing when I say we, I mean maybe me and other people in the field of yoga therapy, maybe you, too, growing interest in yoga therapy within some more mainstream medical communities, right? There's more recognition that yoga is beneficial for a lot of different health challenges, for example. So from your perspective, how do you see this evolving and becoming a vital part of the future of yoga? And what are the key challenges and opportunities you foresee there as well? The first challenge is really just communicating in a way that the medical. Community understands what yoga is about as a practice, and they're coming to an appreciation of that because there are many doctors that are that are presented with patients who have pain syndromes, and the doctor honestly cannot diagnose or figure out what's wrong with the person you know. They do the proper test, they do the appropriate test, attempt to make the appropriate diagnosis, and it's not clear exactly why the person is experiencing what they're experiencing. And in the past, doctors tended to write it off as some kind of mental problem, or it's like it's in your mind, it's not in your body, when the truth is, it actually is in the body, I think, an important inroad, and this is what I've been pursuing for a long time, since I encountered Tom Myers book on Anatomy Trains back in 2000 an important inroad is the whole understanding of the connective tissue of the body, the fascia, which the medical community is also coming to understand at the same time through more and more research being done by it or about it, and that's certainly very closely relevant to what's going on in yoga practice, because yoga poses are not about the fascia. It was all always about the prana and the flow of prana, which I think are Sanskrit words for the experience, or what we experience through the connective tissue in the body in the process of moving and breathing and doing a yoga practice, and the relationship of disorders in the fascia, or adhesive tissue in the fascia, things that doctors do understand to some degree, as we focus on how the yoga practice helps to resolve those disorders, imbalances, points of stress, adhesive tissue in addressing pain problems as well as joint movement problems, I think the doctors and the medical community can understand the specificity with which yoga can approach those disorders. The other problem is the lack of understanding about styles of yoga, because doctors often say, Well, you need to maybe go take some yoga classes with no guidance as to what kind of yoga class you should look up because they don't clearly understand it. And I think we need to communicate the foundation and the essence of the practice better, rather than also getting caught up in yoga styles or approaches. I think that's happening organically. I find these days, people worry less about what style of yoga they're doing, and rather, instead, they're more interested in whether they're actually enjoying the yoga class that they're going to or not, and often they're willing to try variations or different approaches to yoga. But I think in general, as yoga teachers, we have a duty to properly understand the foundation of the practice, what it does for people, apart from concepts about yoga styles, and also to communicate the essence of the practice and how it benefits people in all of its dimensions, and the better the medical community understands that, the better the medical community can kind of be on board with what we're doing. Yeah, a really good point about how folks today do seem to be a little less attached to style, as they were maybe 1015, 20 years ago, and lineage, for example, and more willing to try is, you know, oftentimes it probably comes down to a teacher they like or a place they can easily go to like those factors are probably more relevant today than the other ones. I will say too that I read some some research. Maybe you saw it too. I think it was put out by the NIH just a couple of years ago, a year or two ago, that people nowadays are going to yoga for pain. So you know, instead of fitness, or some of the things that they may have gone to yoga for in the past, is that more people are showing up for health reasons, including pain. Yeah, I think that's a really accurate insight and generalization about it, because people have many avenues of fitness, and they pursue those different avenues. And my own belief is variety is good. People should pursue a variety of paths to strength and wellness and fitness. And yoga is one factor in it. And people are often initially attracted first to the things that offer them maximum progress, like cardio and so on and so forth, which, once again, is great. And in the course of that, inevitably, given wear and tear on the body, it's going to lead to pain syndromes and people. So people can only do these things for so long, and then they have to deal with the reality of the body that they're in. And honestly, every human body is going to experience pain syndrome.  It's kind of built into the fact that having a body and its systems for maintaining its own vitality. And so Yoga is not exclusively about dealing with pain problems, but at the same time, it's what draws people to and instills a kind of faithfulness to the yoga practice, because it is specifically for addressing those concerns. So many of other forms of fitness are more outer, directed in terms of directed towards certain achievements, whether it's running faster, achieving better times, so on and so forth, external objective measures to progress in their fitness. Yoga actually should not be wedded to those external measures of progress. It has been in the past with the concept of progressing through more and more advanced poses, or more and more advanced programs or a series or so on and so forth. It shouldn't be externally driven towards performance that wasn't the original purpose, but it should be directed towards more self awareness that helps the body to maintain its its vitality and to keep itself as much as possible free from chronic pain syndromes. And so it demands that kind of self awareness. And so the yoga we do should be the yoga that we do can continue to do at age 60 or 70, as much as it was when you were 20 or 30. It will not be the same yoga. Won't be the same poses, and it won't be the same yoga in the sense of the same poses, but it will be the same yoga in the sense of the process of self exploration, which is appropriate to the present moment in life, whatever that moment that is, again, whether you're 20 or you're 60 or 70. And yeah, there are plenty of 20 year olds dealing with chronic pain problems that need to be addressed and won't be fixed by other approaches to fitness. And so yeah, Yoga has that role to play with that particular attitude or understanding of why we're doing this in the first place. What is this doing for me? Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I'd love to know if there's anything you else you want to share about something that you're up to right now, what you're inspired by right now, some work that you're putting out there in the world, upcoming projects. The theme that I've been exploring the past year, and I'm going to continue, to some degree, partly at the encouragement of studios that I've been teaching at, particularly in Taiwan, I've been doing more work in Taiwan as well, is the whole theme of healthy aging.

Certainly, in Taiwan, they have an aging population, perhaps aging faster than ours, though it's funny, because most of the yoga teachers tend to be younger. I was teaching a course a couple of weeks ago in Taiwan on healthy aging, and realized I was the oldest person in the room. So it's like so if you want an example of an old person, I guess look to me, you know, but teachers are looking to be relevant in what they offer to students, because they see their students were also getting older and older. And I think it's an important approach. Because first of all, I point out the aging process starts at birth, or Properly speaking, once you hit about age 20 or so, then you start to enter the long process of aging, which, of course, increases over time. So it doesn't matter when you start. You're always doing yoga for healthy aging. And I point out that even in the original yoga text, Hatha Yoga text, there was that emphasis upon how, as they put it, they were kind of overselling it, saying Hatha Yoga, the practice of Hatha Yoga, conquers old age and death. And say, yeah, they were overselling it, but they weren't off point either. And I think all of the practices of yoga, again, not simply Asana, but breath practices, as well as meditation or interception or inner awareness and emotional self regulation goes with that. All of those directly address aspects of the aging process in a way that few other disciplines do. And so kind of my project is, first of all, to offer things that are helpful to people there are entering 50 or 60 or 70 or beyond, but at the same time, given an appreciation that at any point of life, we need to deal with the process of healthy aging or maintain, as I put it, maintaining our vitality in the face of our natural process of aging. It's never too soon to start as never too late to start. So I'm focusing on helping people understand the key features of yoga that specifically address that one way or another. I'm going to continue that theme, though. The challenge to me is it always makes it sound like the workshop is like yoga for old people, yeah, but it's not exactly that. I'm noticing that is a popular subject.

Michele
Amongst the folks I interact with over the last couple years too. And you know, in some ways, as someone who is an, you know, aging yoga teacher myself, I noticed that the people that come to see me, you know, keep getting older and older. So there's, there's plenty of people there that want that, even if it ends up being old lady Yoga, you know, which sometimes I feel like that's, that's what I offer. But there's a fair amount of really healthy, strong, vibrant seniors who want this, yeah? And for any teacher looking for longevity in their career, these are going to be your most faithful students? Yeah, yeah. I've had STEM students for 20 years now too, and our progress is not about what poses we're adding, but what poses we're subtracting. No good for you, which ones we're focusing on as being the right ones. Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. So as we wrap up, I always love to ask this question at the end to each person I interview on the podcast. Just to give us a little glimpse inside of what your yoga practice looks like, we do place a really strong emphasis on that. I don't know how you couldn't actually as a yoga teacher training school and a yoga therapy training school for the students that come through our program, you got to do your own practice first, that is foremost, before teaching or working with others in a therapist capacity as well. With that in mind, I'd love to know a little bit about what your yoga practice, your daily practice, looks like, and kind of in line with what we've been talking about already. I'm sure it's changed through the years. Yeah, it's really about focusing on the yoga that you need, not the yoga that you think you're supposed to be doing. And first of all, it's it's mixed in with other forms of exercise, because, again, variety is good, and particularly as yoga teachers, when you're teaching all the time, it's really healthy to do something different for yourself while you're offering the yoga to everybody else, and at the same time, that informs and supports the practice that I do do, and it's challenging me yoga teacher with the kind of schedule you have to follow. In my case, that includes a lot of travel, which, of course, is, you know, uniquely stressful upon the body and your own schedule and ability to maintain regularity in your practice. And so it makes me focus in on whatever I practice I do focus in on what I feel I need in the moment that's going to support me. And I find that illuminating about my practice, because we often approach practice in terms of a routine, like I'm going to stick to the routine of these are the poses that I'm going to do to maintain myself, where sometimes you're doing a practice and you're like, you know this is not what I need right now, and you switch to what you do need, and that often gives you an insight.

Doug
And so there's variety to my practice. It has to include things like breath and pranayama, as well as pauses for meditation and self awareness, and really, to see how the different those different dimensions of practice actually support each other. My asana practice makes me want to meditate, and my meditation practice makes me want to do asana and do pranayama, and so seeing the interrelationship between those for the sake of my own self care, is really kind of the guiding light for my own practice. Well, that was really nice, and I so enjoyed our whole conversation here today. Doug, I am thrilled to have had it, and I look forward to whenever our paths may cross again. Thanks. I hope so.

Michele  43:46  
Thanks again for listening. If you're interested to learn more about who we are and what we do, check us out at inner peace, yoga therapy.com, you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai