East Meets West – How Yoga Is Changing My Life!

I’m just going to come out and say it … I never used to get Yoga.

While professionally, I would never discourage clients from doing Yoga, Ayurveda, or other Eastern spiritual practices, I would never encourage them either. In my Western trained scientific mind, the evidence just wasn’t there for them. So I preferred to stick with what I ‘knew’ would help people (and also what I was allowed to ethically practice as a psychologist!).

And personally, I was even more dismissive. Embarrassingly, the most I knew about Yoga was from a character in a video game named Dhalsim. Now this guy was cool – he had extra bendy arms and legs and his special power was breathing fire. When an ex-girlfriend encouraged me to try Yoga to help with my kickboxing, I joked ‘I’ll only go if they actually teach me to breathe fire!’. The ‘stretching’ (which is what I had reduced Yoga to in my young mind) could be accomplished by simply stretching more, which in my infinite wisdom as a twenty-something, I already knew how to do.

Over time, my professional attitude towards ‘holistic’ approaches to health and wellbeing – including Yoga – softened. This growth happened as a result of several factors, including:

(1) Listening to the benefits my clients expressed about these approaches (and observing how they were supporting our clinical aims – it’s amazing how much we therapists learn from our clients!)

(2) A growing evidence base for Eastern approaches (who would have thought that practices that have been tried and tested with millions of people over thousands of years would also be supported in scientific studies?)

(3) A general ‘opening up’ of psychology to more holistic approaches, such as mindfulness based therapies (and, in my case, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), which is based on the meridians and acupuncture points of Chinese medicine)

But personally, I wasn’t to experience the benefits of Yoga until they were shown to me by one of my own psychologists …

The members of our Transformation Support Community Online Program (TSC) had identified a gap in our offerings. While we had covered a wide range of topics throughout various courses since our inception as a community – and even delved into ‘alternative’ therapies such as EFT and hypnotherapy – most of the program’s courses were still based on traditional psychological therapies. This ‘gap’ the members were feeling was for some work that delved deeper into the psyche, and even potentially into the spiritual aspects of our existence … but how would we fill it?

After a period of reflection, I decided to speak with Emma Furner, who is one of our Senior Psychologists at the clinic as well as an experienced Yoga teacher. And – after a lot of thought, discussion, and planning – Emma agreed to be our first ever ‘Special Guest Expert’ in the TSC who came from within our ranks at the clinic! Emma developed and delivered a beautiful course that combined psychology and Yoga called The Deeper Work: Knowing Yourself. The course was transformative for many of the members, but I didn’t expect it to be so life changing for me.

I actually started experiencing the benefits well before the course started. Each course we do comes with a workbook, and as the creator of the community, it’s my role to edit it! Now, Emma’s was massive (a whopping 166 pages!), but I didn’t mind at all … because in just reading the material, I was beginning to understand myself on deeper levels. I looked forward to this professional activity, because it was helping me personally. As I formatted the text, checked for spelling and grammar, and suggested edits, my mind itself was reformatting, refining, and re-understanding itself. This Yoga stuff was powerful! 

While I always make an appearance in a few of my guest experts’ live webinars when they are delivering a course, I resolved to take part in each of Emma’s weekly live webinars throughout the course, so I could experience the benefits as a participant. And the benefits were profound.  

The funny thing is that the benefits I experienced (and whenever I rave about them, Emma reminds me to also share that all people will experience different benefits!), were the same as those we are trying to achieve in Western psychology.

For me personally, I have experienced:

• A deeper sense of relaxation and inner peace than I have ever experienced before. (One example of this was so life-changing that I wrote a whole blog about it, which you can read here).
• Being more able to notice, accept, and process my emotions. This has left me more able to let go of difficult emotions (and also opened me up to more joy!).
• A greater ability to be vulnerable. While I don’t understand exactly how it happened, I have become more able to express how I feel with loved ones (especially when it may not be easy for them to hear), say sorry quickly, and reach out to connect with friends and others.
• Being less ‘driven’. While I still have many important goals (and am maybe even better at achieving them now), I no longer feel as though I have to be better – instead I feel as though my self-development is an expression of the love for myself and the world that I already have. (Full disclosure, this one comes and goes, it is a work in progress!).
• Being more aware of my own ‘energy’. I am more in control of my own mood, thoughts, and energy … and as a result a better influence on others.
• Feeling more ‘alive’. While I am still very much a creature of habit, a dash of flexibility has infused into my routines, and I feel a little less robotic, and – dare I say it – a little more human.

The wonderful experience in Emma’s course led me to finding my own Indian Guru, and continuing my journey into Eastern wisdom. One day, when I was talking to Emma about the benefits of this continued journey, she asked me what I was doing with the Guru. With a little embarrassment, I said ‘I don’t really know … we do some simple postures, which is like Yoga, I guess’. She nodded. ‘But we also do lots of meditations … so I don’t know what that part is’. To which Emma replied, ‘That’s also Yoga!’. ‘Oh okay, I guess in Yoga classes you do that little meditation bit at the end, so that makes sense … but we also do lectures on how the mind and body work – it’s kind of like psychology but with more spirituality’. To which Emma replied ‘That’s Yoga too!’.

What I came to realise was that Yoga was not just a routine of stretches with calming music being played in the background, but an entire system for living, encompassing not only the physical practices of the postures, but recommendations for nutrition, sleep, and other practices of self-care, as well as a deep understanding of the human mind and psyche that predates even the grandfathers of psychology by at least a couple of thousand years. And – if I’m being completely vulnerable – I have to admit it is a psychological system that has helped me in areas where my own Western psychology has not been able to. Yoga was more powerful than learning how to breathe fire!

I called this blog, How Yoga Is Changing My Life, as I am very much at the beginning of this journey … I am aware that it is by no means complete (and probably never will be). But because it is a journey that I am finding so personally rewarding – and one that my clients and online community members are also finding incredibly rewarding – I wanted to share it with you in case opening up to the benefits of Yoga, in one of its many forms, can help you on own your journey of mental, physical, and spiritual transformation.

I am a baby student of Yoga, and, apart from sharing my personal and professional story with you, I am by no means anyone to learn from.

So, over the next few weeks, I am going to hand you over to our resident Yoga Guru, Emma, who is going to be sharing some of her personal story with Yoga and psychology (which has spanned decades), as well as some valuable Yogic psychology ideas that will help you to connect with yourself a little more. I am sure that if you embark on this journey you will find yourself pleasantly surprised – and maybe even, like me, amazed – at the life changing benefits it has in store for you.