Becoming an Evidence Informed Yin Yoga Teacher or Student: A Guided Journey Part Four

Are you ready to unlock the power of evidence-informed Yin Yoga in managing chronic pain? This fascinating episode wraps up our four-part series, illuminating how Yin Yoga can help regulate the nervous system and promote mindfulness. We journey through the meditative stages of a typical Yin class, revealing the transformative impact it can have on those grappling with persistent pain. A captivating discussion awaits you, exploring the role of Yin Yoga in overcoming pain and fostering a positive relationship with the body.

Imagine if there was a way to untangle the knot of chronic pain from our self-identity. A groundbreaking study from 2003 used fMRI imaging to gain insights into this, revealing a compelling method known as a 30-second interoceptive exposure task. The process decouples pain from the self, leading to a remarkable reduction in pain intensity, duration, and associated anxiety. We delve into the fascinating findings of this study, shedding light on how it employs strategies that Yinsters are already using. Though perhaps with this information we can support those with persisting pain even better.

We also dissect the influence of kinesiophobia or the fear of movement in managing chronic musculoskeletal pain. Drawing from a systematic review in 2018, we highlight the correlation between kinesiophobia, escalated pain intensity, and disability. The critical role of yoga teachers in shaping a positive environment and nurturing a supportive relationship with the body is emphatically discussed.  

Join our vibrant Facebook community where we continue this enlightening conversation, sharing evidence, asking questions, and growing together. Engage in the exploration of Yin Yoga's benefits, especially for special populations like those dealing with chronic pain. Tune in to this episode – a treasure trove of knowledge for teachers and students alike!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Yin Yoga Podcast. I'm your host, mandy Ryle. Today we are wrapping up our four-part series Becoming an Evidence-Informed Yin Teacher or Student. I have to tell you that I have been excited about this episode and the papers that I'm going to tell you about since I started putting this series together a couple of months ago, and here's why the papers that we're going to talk about have been extremely important, even formative, for me in developing my own personal teaching values and my personal teaching strategy.

Speaker 1: 0:39

As many of you know, I work mostly with people who live with chronic pain, providing holistic pain care coaching. To me, these papers will reveal to you as a Yin student, as a Yin teacher, how things that we are already doing in this practice can be applied to help to manage chronic pain and even prevent chronic pain, if you're suffering from chronic pain. I think that you're going to find this information extremely refreshing. So, as you know, these last few weeks, my intent was to help you to become Evidence-Informed. I wanted to help you learn how to access evidence, how to read and process evidence and, finally, how to employ evidence in your own practice and teaching. So, to that end, I have provided the links to every single study that we talked about in episode three and four. You can find those links in my free, private Facebook group, movement for Healing. I'm going to put a link to the show notes there. I really hope you'll join and at least check out a couple of these articles and just start to work out your research literacy muscle that you've been working these last few weeks. The other thing about that group is that I am very accessible there, so if you have any questions about anything that you've heard or any of the research, you can just ask me there. So thank you so much for your continued support of the Yin Yoga podcast and for Evidence-Informed Yoga. Please enjoy this last installment.

Speaker 1: 2:28

Here we are. It is the final episode in our series Becoming an Evidence-Informed Yin Teacher or Student. I have to say that the process of putting these four episodes together has been pretty challenging. I sort of feel like I've been writing a term paper every week for the last month or so, but it's also been really edifying. I have read so many studies, I've gone down so many rabbit holes and, as a consequence, I've really actually learned quite a bit. So thank you for being on board with me throughout this journey and I hope you're finding as much value and is learning and learning as much from it as I have been. So today we're actually going to be looking at some evidence that is related to Yin Yoga practices, but the evidence is not specifically about Yin Yoga. On a personal note, I will tell you that the information that I will share with you today has been absolutely essential in forming my values as a teacher, in forming my technique and my strategies in working with my classes, my students, but also with my clients in my pain care coaching practice. Last week, we discussed tissue science. We just had a tiny, tiny, little, bite-size nibble of tissue science, but we all know right. If you're listening to this podcast, I feel like you're on board with me.

Speaker 1: 4:03

We all know what makes Yin such a healing practice. It has less to do with the physical and more to do with the less tangible aspects of practice, so that would be things like mindfulness, non-judgmental awareness, equanimity and breathing practices. For me personally, when I find evidence that is related to our practice but comes from outside the yoga world, I find it even more valuable. Since number one, I trust that there is less risk of bias, because often in yoga research, the subjects know that they are getting a yoga intervention, and so that might skew the results. The other part of that is, if a researcher is studying yoga, the chances are they already have sort of bought into yoga, and so their bias might in some ways corrupt the results as well. The other thing is that when I find evidence that is related to the practice but doesn't directly involve yoga practice, it gives me some fresh ideas about how I can apply techniques in my practice or teaching Things that may not necessarily be part of the tradition but are a beautiful addition, and so when I read this evidence, it really opens up my thinking processes, and it's a great mental exercise to consider how evidence might or might not be useful to our practice or to my work specifically. So all yinsters know that yin is a beautiful way to practice mindfulness.

Speaker 1: 5:51

You might recall that the Yoga Sutra state that in yogic meditation one should first cultivate attention to the inner landscape through Prachahara, and then select a focal point for maintaining attention through Dharana, and then finally become absorbed into the object of meditation through Dhyana. It is said that the object of meditation should be close to one's heart, and what is closer to us, to our own heart, than our own embodied experience, which is why I think yin is such a wonderful opportunity to practice mindfulness. It could be a standalone mindfulness practice or it could just be an adjunct to a more formalized seated practice. So a typical yin class naturally and unobtrusively leads the practitioner through each of these stages of meditation. There is a centering practice, which is analogous to Prachahara, a focus on a body part or sensation, which would be the Dharana, the choosing of that focal point. And then there is a whole self attending to the ripening of the pose or, in some cases, the somatic drill. That would be the Dhyana, the absorption into the experience.

Speaker 1: 7:21

So meditation is really baked into the yin practice and I know that all of you I know for myself. We have ample anecdotal evidence that we or our students feel calmer before and after practice right. So we know that there is some nervous system regulation that happens naturally in practice. We know that we feel less reactive to stressors in our lives over time right with a lot of practice, and that we have the ability to attend to our bodies better and to be more present generally. Now, not all teachers, not all classes, not all styles are really emphasizing these things, but these are absolutely essential In my personal practice and in my teaching. And while these benefits can be attributed to the more esoteric or spiritual drivers, there are real physiological changes that underpin these states.

Speaker 1: 8:28

As a curious yogi, this is the stuff, personally, that I want to know. It is, to me, a harmonizing of the traditional and the modern and, in my opinion, it doesn't take away from the spiritual aspect. Rather, to me, in my thinking, it reinforces it. But how can we harness this innate quality of practice, for example, to serve special populations, as I do with chronic pain, or how can we direct our practice toward healing ourselves and our communities? I would argue that evidence is a really good place to start. We know that these things work, so what I'm suggesting is that maybe now it's time to try to understand why it works, so that we can do what we do even better. For my part, I love the science of tissues, but I feel very strongly that the benefits of yin yoga and movement in general come from improving our skill and being embodied, and being embodied and intending to all domains of self, and not segregating them into discrete categories that we address separately, right? So then, maybe we have one discipline for our muscles and we have one discipline for our connective tissues, and we have one for our mental health, and one for our trauma, and one for our social health, one for our financial health. Right, like all of these domains of self are happening in each and every whole self, and so what I am suggesting here is that we can address all of these together rather than segregating them as we have historically done. So let's discuss some really interesting evidence that can help us to understand how to improve our embodied awareness, and the second study, I think, is going to be particularly applicable to those of you who teach yoga.

Speaker 1: 10:45

The first study is valuable to people who practice and teach. I also refer to this study a lot with my clients who are healing chronic pain. So the first paper is titled quote immediate and lasting chronic pain reduction following a brief, self-implemented, mindfulness-based interoceptive exposure task a pilot study. That's end quote. That's just the name of the study, in case you want to try to look it up. The author, the lead author, his name, is Kiyun and it was published in 2017. This is the only paper that I'm talking about which is not open access, but I find it so valuable that I wanted to tell you about it here. I do have the complete paper from my pain science mentor, so I have read a few times the full study. So when I first read this paper in 2021, I was like completely bowled over, and I have to admit that it has informed pretty much every class or client I have taught since. That's how powerful I think this information is. So even though this was only a pilot study that is, a pilot study is really a study to see is this even a viable research topic and then maybe to determine what information might be useful in follow-up studies.

Speaker 1: 12:22

This paper is extremely well done and it piggybacks off of a lot of other research that demonstrates how certain brain regions are associated with the chronicity of pain. What they're going to be talking about in particular is the default mode network, which I will explain to you. So here is a quote from a related paper that was actually cited in the pilot study that we're discussing. Quote chronic pain patients suffer from more than just pain. Depression and anxiety, sleep disturbances and decision making abnormalities also significantly diminish their quality of life. Recent studies have demonstrated that chronic pain harms cortical areas unrelated to pain. Here we propose that long-term pain alters the functional connectivity of cortical regions known to be active at rest, ie the components of the default mode network. End quote. So lots of other studies have shown these brain changes.

Speaker 1: 13:44

Many other studies have also shown how incredibly beneficial mindfulness-based stress reduction is for chronic pain, specifically low back pain. So this paper is kind of taking all of that information. But it's especially interesting because it did not require the subjects to learn a lengthy meditation technique like mindfulness-based stress reduction. I mean, that's like an eight-week course you have to take to learn how to do this technique. This study is interesting because it simply taught the subjects in this study to use a 30-second interoceptive exposure task, which was extracted from mindfulness-integrated cognitive behavioral therapy. So I'm going to again quote this study. This is directly from the abstract Quote.

Speaker 1: 14:36

Recent imaging research shows that approximately 80% of people who transit from acute to chronic pain produce neuroplasticity-linking pain pathways to learning areas of the brain, thus showing physiological evidence that chronic pain is largely learned. Religious meditation programs have been used successfully to teach people a way of decreasing pain-related distress and unlearning their unhelpful relationship to pain. However, not all chronic pain patients are amenable to undergo a full mindfulness program and then maintain daily practice. End quote. So perhaps some of the information that I've just shared with you about this idea of chronic pain being learned is new for you. If this is new information for you, or if it's just something that you would like to learn more about, I would very much recommend that you enroll in my free email course Introduction to Pain Care Yoga. You'll get a little bit of, a little bit more in-depth education about this in that free course, and that is always linked in the show notes. So that was just a little note, because I think that that's kind of like a little bomb to drop on you and then not to offer a continuing resource just didn't feel right to me. So definitely access that course if that's something you're interested in learning more about.

Speaker 1: 16:14

So, in other words, the perception of pain is highly influenced by cognitive and affective factors, which have been increasingly associated with the transition from acute to chronic pain. That's a quote from Thorn 2004. So let's talk about what, then, is happening to the brain in people who are suffering from chronic pain or transitioning from acute to chronic pain. The changes appear to be in a part of the brain known, as I said before, as the default mode network. The default mode network is also referred to as the me network. It is the place in your brain where you create me and mine. It's the place in the brain which is activated when you're daydreaming, when you're remembering autobiographical information and telling stories about yourself and your experiences, and it's also associated with all of the other self preoccupations that didn't tend to take up our attention when we're not otherwise occupied. So, in other words, it usually spins up when you're task-free, when you're just sitting there, okay and when you're performing an attention-demanding task, usually the default mode network activity decreases in favor of activation in the brain areas associated with the task. So if you go for a run, for example, the brain areas that are associated with running and that whole experience, those are going to be activated and typically the default mode network would take a backseat.

Speaker 1: 18:01

However, in other studies using fMRI imaging by the way, this study did not use fMRI imaging, which is fine because they had plenty of evidence from other research here's a quotation from a study that did use fMRI imaging specifically on individuals with low back pain. This study is grecious at all, from 2003. Pain patients, despite performing the task as well as controls, displayed reduced deactivation in several key regions of the default mode network. In other words, self-referential processing remains significantly greater in pain patients, and so for anyone who has had a pain issue, this is a familiar feeling. I bet Pain is such a powerful protective response because it literally crowds everything else out. The pain or the fear of the pain, even when it's not terrible, right, it's always just kind of there that's what my people tell me all the time Like it doesn't really hurt, it's just there. That's kind of the experience of being in pain, and to some extent that is attributed to this autobiographical network never being able to really shut off.

Speaker 1: 19:24

In the grecious study, they had the subjects in the fMRI machine perform a visual task. As they were performing a visual task, the control subjects, their default mode network activity decreased, as you would expect to see. And individuals who suffer from chronic pain in this case it was low back pain those individuals performed the task just as well as the controls, but their default mode network was just going, going, going going, which really explains why people who have chronic pain are often so distractible and, quite honestly, they get irritable. You would get irritable too if something was constantly demanding half of your attention, right? So this is the experience that you're having To some extent, I hope to validate this for you. You're not crazy, and to some extent I also want for us to understand how powerful these networks really are.

Speaker 1: 20:20

So, as I said, in the grecious study, it was a visual task, but let's imagine that they were able to perform this fMRI. They were able to do this brain imaging on people who were moving. Obviously that would be impossible, but I would imagine, based on my experience, that the default mode network would be even more active, since when you're moving and you have fear of hurting yourself, you're just going through a litany of memories, predictions, fears, beliefs, in an attempt to protect yourself from potential harm. And what we see in this research is that that behavior is no longer adaptive. It no longer serves a functional or physiological process to have this constant spinning of autobiographical information.

Speaker 1: 21:12

This incessant activation of the mean network is part of the learned experience of pain and it is unrelated to your tissues. It has nothing to do with what's going on in the body at all. It is a learned response in the brain due to neuroplasticity. So you might be wondering how can we unlearn? So this study, the Kayun et al, designed a 32nd interoceptive exposure task and assigned it to 15 subjects. Their prediction was that the interoceptive awareness would activate a quote functional decoupling of the cognitive, evaluative and sensory discriminative dimensions of pain end quote which can help us to not react to pain, which can then help us to reduce central sensitization. So this paper has lots of great neuroscience. There's more to it than what I'm revealing here, but I don't really want to spend our whole episode on it, so I will stop there. But let's just say that the idea here was can we help people to decouple their experience of pain from themselves through this 32nd interoceptive exposure task? So what was the task?

Speaker 1: 22:43

The subjects were asked to focus their attention on the most intense body sensation, as often as it intruded into their awareness, for 30 seconds only, and they were specifically asked to evaluate four physical characteristics of the pain or discomfort. Those characteristics were mass, so how big was it basically? The motion Was it moving around? Was it still? The temperature Was it hot, cold, warm, freezing, scalding? And the cohesiveness Did it stay together? Was it solid or was it more ephemeral, like a cloud? And they were asked to assess each of these characteristics while remaining objective or not getting caught up in the story of reacting to it. So, in other words, they were training their default mode network to stand down while they attended to their pain.

Speaker 1: 23:40

They used this practice in daily life for 10 weeks. So of the 15 subjects, two of them had to drop out of the study, but the remaining subjects experienced a reduction in pain, anxiety, pain duration and pain intensity. The participants also normalized anxiety, depression and stress severity. And here's what's really really cool the results were even maintained or, in some cases, improved upon at a two-month follow-up. So after the 10 weeks they waited two months and then they checked in on the subjects again and the results that the subjects had experienced were maintained or, in some cases, improved upon, which means that many of the subjects continued practicing the 30-second task even after the study, which tells you just how simple and easy it is.

Speaker 1: 24:43

So my clients often come to me with a lot of distress about their pain, and some people are suffering 24-7. Some people don't suffer every single day, but it's still a chronic pain issue and they still have a lot of fear and the default mode is still extremely active, right. So it's a very, very distracting and disruptive force in their lives. I can tell you for sure that they would take gladly a 10 or 20% reduction in anxiety duration, intensity of pain. Well, guess what? The subjects in this study had really, really amazing results, in many cases, way more than 30%, 50% or even 70%. Some of the subjects even reported that they didn't use the interoceptive task very much because, after using it for a short time, the pain wasn't intruding into their awareness very often.

Speaker 1: 25:44

Okay, so you're thinking, well, I have, like this pain issue. My student has this musculoskeletal issue. They have arthritis in their knee. How will this help them, right? So what I am suggesting is that something that is very much in the wheelhouse of a Yin teacher and certainly within the wheelhouse of a Yin student, is to learn to pay attention to our discomfort and pain with equanimity, to be objective. And the reason I love this task is that it gives you a checklist okay, mass, temperature, cohesiveness, movement done. Okay, it helps you to remain objective.

Speaker 1: 26:25

Yin is absolutely the perfect canvas for interoceptive awareness. You may have noticed in yourself or in your students that at first, when you first start practicing, it can be very, very, very difficult to pay attention to the body without spinning up a story or becoming distracted. But, by the way, both of those things do to the default mode network, right. But over time, the attention muscle can be strengthened. We have seen this in research and, with an educated teacher who is emphasizing this capacity of Yin, a student can learn to disengage from the story and observe something that is more accurate.

Speaker 1: 27:14

Speaking of observing things more accurately, let's move on to our next topic, our next study, which is related to fear, or specifically fear of movement. This is known as kinesiophobia. I'm going to quote the definition of kinesiophobia directly from the study that we're going to look at. Kinesiophobia, also known as fear of movement, is defined as an excessive, irrational and debilitating fear to carry out physical movement due to a feeling of vulnerability to a painful injury or re-injury. This also comes directly from the study I'm quoting. The prevalence of kinesiophobia and persistent pain ranges from 50 to 70%. It can be acquired through two forms. One would be a direct aversive experience, so that would be a pain or a trauma, and the other would be social learning. So kinesiophobia can also be acquired through observation and instruction. If you instruct bodies in motion moving bodies please perk your ears up. I'm still quoting here.

Speaker 1: 28:39

Kinesiophobia may be associated with pain and associated outcomes, disability and quality of life, in several ways. First, kinesiophobia alters how people move, possibly with the initial goal to avoid pain. It causes adjustments of motor behavior, which affects the performance of actions related to the management and control of pain and pain related disability. And here's the final thing from this quote that I really would like for you to pay attention to A greater degree of kinesiophobia predicts greater levels of pain. End quote. So this may fly in the face of everything that you know about pain, especially as a Yin teacher, right? So we are told often, and we believe strongly, that if you hurt yourself, that you should rest, you should not move that body apart, you shouldn't do things that would aggravate the injury and you should do everything in your power to avoid the movement that caused the injury in the first place, because you're very, very fearful that it will happen again. And what I'm telling you is the research shows that that actually will potentially increase your pain, increase disability, decrease quality of life.

Speaker 1: 30:08

The evidence is pretty clear. So all of this information that I just shared with you comes from a study called role of kinesiophobia on pain, disability and quality of life in people suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain a systematic review by Suarez at all in 2018. So let's talk about the paper. This random excuse me systematic review included 63 articles. So that was the. They went through a ton of different papers and they eliminated all. Eliminated all the ones that weren't going to fit perfectly into their study design, and they ended up with 63 papers.

Speaker 1: 30:50

And here were the findings. They say we found strong evidence for an association between a greater degree of kinesiophobia and greater levels of pain intensity and disability, and moderate evidence between a greater degree of kinesiophobia and higher levels of pain severity and low quality of life. A greater degree of kinesiophobia predicts the progression of disability over time. That's with moderate evidence. And a greater degree of kinesiophobia also predicts greater levels of pain severity and low levels of quality of life at six months. That's with limited evidence, however. So maybe it's hard to understand this moderate evidence, this high evidence, this low evidence. Basically, what that means is that the effect size was low, moderate or high. So let's talk about this idea of kinesiophobia and the really horrible outcomes that happen as a result of fear of movement.

Speaker 1: 31:56

It is absolutely normal to want to protect yourself when you're injured. Okay, pain is an extremely compelling experience, which absolutely forces us to protect ourselves, but let's talk about chronic pain as opposed to acute pain, right? So when you injure yourself, you twist your ankle. That's acute pain, right, we should protect ourselves. But chronic pain is defined as pain that persists past normal tissue healing time, which is generally considered to be about three months. The pain issue is no longer because of the tissues and more because of a learned response to pain. So fear, which is a reaction to threat, is now maladaptive. It no longer serves a purpose. Right, this fear isn't helping you anymore. It's not helping you to protect yourself. Your tissues are healed. The problem with fear is that it activates this sympathetic nervous system and defensive behaviors which can increase pain, even in the absence of tissue damage. So why do I think this study is really important for yin teachers? Why did I choose, of the two studies I wanted to talk about, to talk to you about this one?

Speaker 1: 33:21

How often, as yin teachers or yoga teachers in general, do we refer to a pose, position or transition, or even a body part, as safe? How often do we do that? What kind of message do we send about that pose or transition or that body part? When we say that, are we indicating that some are not safe, ie dangerous? How often in our teaching do we caution students in subtle or very explicit ways to protect themselves.

Speaker 1: 34:06

Let me give you an example. Years ago, we auditioned an instructor for a potential spot on the class schedule at my studio, sound Method Yoga in Omaha. The teacher had been teaching for quite some time and she had us on our backs and she had a star knees into our chest in a pose that we often call apanasana. Sometimes we call it wind releasing pose. Essentially, your knees are hugged into your chest right, you're laying on your back, and she cautioned us strongly from holding our knees or pressing on them directly in the pose, as it could cause knee injury. That's what she told us.

Speaker 1: 34:53

What really alarms me about this is that she's really, really giving the wrong idea about the body, indicating that it could potentially be so incredibly delicate that just your hands resting on your knees could harm them. Now I'm saying that I understand that a lot of older people do have knee pain, but there is absolutely no possible possible way that you could injure your knees by touching them in apanasana. So what does this potentially do? It encourages fear of movement, fear of a body part, fear of a pose. How else do we potentially cause some fear of movement in our students? It could be as simple as telling a student that if it hurts, just come out of the pose. If it hurts, don't do it. Right, and this seems like great advice. Right, you don't want people to quote injure themselves, but it can be incredibly harmful because it equates pain with injury.

Speaker 1: 36:02

And you, my evidence-based lovelies, know that pain and injury or tissue damage are very poorly correlated. And since we understand that socialization is a major cause of kinesiophobia, what I am telling you is that you, as a yoga teacher, have the capacity to do a great deal of good. You can be a force for good in this world. You can reinforce that bodies are strong and stable and adaptable, or you can do a lot of harm. You can encourage people to believe that their bodies are delicate, that their bodies are breaking down, that injury is inevitable, that aging is a one-way ticket to decline, and then we just have to bubble wrap ourselves against potential injury. This is the difference between being evidence-informed or not. In my opinion, this is the most compelling reason.

Speaker 1: 37:09

So let's look at the evidence. If you're still on the fence about this, right. If you're like, well, some stuff is just dangerous, okay. So let's go back to what you learned last week about how tissues become stronger and bigger. In some cases, performance improves as a result of the very most extreme stretching protocols that we talked about in that first study.

Speaker 1: 37:34

It is highly unlikely that the mild stretches that we teach our students or that we practice for three to five minutes could cause trauma to tissues, so the concerns of damaging tissues are probably unfounded. The fact is, your body is really freaking strong. If your body could get injured by holding your knees or by holding an uncomfortable pose for three minutes, it would be kind of a shitty body. It doesn't make sense that the body could be harmed with such low forces. So does that mean that I'm encouraging you to ignore pain? No, I'm definitely not encouraging that. However, in our own practice or as teachers, I'm encouraging you to invite an exploration of pain, as in the first study that we discussed, right? So rather than immediately coming out of that thing that hurts, perhaps we could try to in a slightly different way and just examine not just the sensation but also our response to it, not just physiologically, but mentally and emotionally as well.

Speaker 1: 38:50

For my part, if my student experience is pain in a group class setting, one of the reasons I love Yin is because I can go over there and we can just have a conversation. There have been many times on the podcast where I was teaching a live class and you heard me have a conversation with my students. Right, by finding a slightly different way to still do the pose, we are opening the door to curious awareness, to interoception, a more accurate sensing of what's actually happening in the body. The other thing about finding a slightly different way to do the pose is that it will build confidence in the student that this movement is in fact, safe. For me, it encourages autonomy in the student and it reduces fear. But if we just go oh my gosh, don't do that pose, it hurts, come out. Right, that is going to increase fear. Right, and understanding how powerful fear is to the chronicity of pain or the transition from acute to chronic pain, that is something that should absolutely be on our radar as teachers or students of Yin. This is the number one reason that I am so passionate about helping movement professionals become research literate. So I want you to know that, as I was preparing these discussions for these last four episodes, I read and discarded dozens of other studies. I wanted to expose to you how important it is to be evidence, informed, by dispelling myths, but by also encouraging you to think bigger about our practice and its value, way beyond flexibility, way beyond range of motion.

Speaker 1: 40:52

Yoga, and Yin Yoga especially, are so much more than just stretching. Yin Yoga, with its emphasis on present moment, non-judgmental awareness, slow breathing and gentle movement, can potentially reduce systemic inflammation. So last week we talked about a study that showed how stretching might help to modulate inflammation. We also see studies about meditation and how they could reduce systemic inflammation. There is some preliminary evidence as well that Yin can improve health span and immunity through mindfulness practice. So one of those studies that I considered very strongly for this episode demonstrated an increase in telomerase activity after mindfulness meditation.

Speaker 1: 41:42

So what is telomerase activity? So your immune cell telomeres protect and stabilize the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes. Shortened telomeres are a marker of immune cell aging and vulnerability to apoptosis, which is essentially cell death, and are associated with poorer clinical outcomes and premature death in various age-related diseases. So we want to preserve our telomeres. Telomerase protects telomeres. So the evidence is still preliminary, but promising right that potentially, mindfulness practice could help us to age better, to maintain our strong immune system.

Speaker 1: 42:37

It can play a role in calming chronic pain. Yin can reduce anxiety and stress. And, yes, yin can improve range of motion, although, for me, what the major benefit I see of the postures themselves is improved proprioception, which I think then contributes to range of motion. So it is very clear, guys, that lifestyle has a huge impact on human health. Yin yoga and yoga in general are already well-accepted strategies for improving health. I believe that, with enhanced research literacy, yoga teachers and students can make a huge impact. Right, each and every Yin teacher out there is seeing dozens of students a week. What if we could help people to reduce their fear of movement? What if we could help people to use their mindfulness skill toward greater interoception, perhaps even preventing chronic pain, preventing age-related diseases and improving health span? What I'm saying, guys, is that our power in this practice and in this profession is immense if we use it.

Speaker 1: 44:01

So, if you have enjoyed these episodes, I would say that you are a perfect candidate for my Yin teacher training. The first module is primarily the science of Yin. So, even if you have no aspirations to teach Yin yoga, I think that you would really, really enjoy this self-paced online training. I invite you to learn more on my website if you're interested, and I will include a link in the show notes. If you would be interested in accessing links to all of the research which I have discussed in this episode, please join my free, private Facebook group. It's called Movement for Healing and that is where I will be posting all of the links and the research cited in this episode and also in the previous episode. It's also where you could bring up some questions that you might have, or if you have some other evidence that you would like to share with the group, I would love to see it and we can have a discussion about it there. Thank you so so much for your interest in evidence-informed practice.