View From Above by Melina Meza
I love it when capitalist magazines find something good to say about yoga, even if it is how it is making someone lots of money. But in this case, Forbes says yoga might save the US trillions of dollars in lost productivity for our economy. How so, you ask? Why for a start by reducing the dropout rate from high schools in this country, rates that shockingly range from 30% in most places to over 50% in our urban “war zones.” (I call them war zones because of the continual violent backdrop that these children are subjected to day in and day out. Where just walking to and from school, let alone being in school, is a constant cause for anxiety and worry about getting hurt or killed.)What was a delight to see is one of the featured yoga experts quoted frequently in the article, BK Bose, whose Niroga Institute in Berkeley, CA I have had the great pleasure of teaching for over the past several years. Bose, who started his work career as a software engineer in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley, has in the last years focused his work on bringing yoga to under-served communities, and training the teachers to work with these special populations. These include classes at the Alameda County Juvenile Hall, low-income public schools and low-income senior centers, to name just a few. His work, as most small operations like this around the country, is done as a non-profit venture. Even on its smaller scale, the results of the yoga classes are significant.
And after all, if we can influence the health of our youngest at an early age, that should lead to a longer, healthier life as they age (and, of course, many of our readers have school-aged children). The key underlying factor that Bose identifies as the culprit in so many of the challenges our young is face is chronic stress. We have written on many occasions about the ways in which yoga can help us deal with stress. But what about in our kids, and in the growing number of kids that have to deal with gangs, substance abuse and crime in their neighborhoods? This adds a whole new twist on doing straight up mindfulness techniques, which can work quite well for some children who don’t have the kinds of violent communities that Bose’s programs work with, as you will see below.
For me, as I read the article, I found one concept that comes from mind-body research defined in a new way that I could relate to from my own yoga teaching. I often refer to the mind’s background chatter as “monkey mind” or “restless mind,” and the tendency is for this kind of thinking to have a background feeling of anxiety or stress associated with it. The following paragraph from the Forbes article talks about what mindfulness practices do to the brain, including the new phraseology “default node network (DMN)” that I find confirming of my own observations:
“In 2011, a Harvard study showed that mindfulness is linked to increased gray matter density in certain cortical areas, including the prefrontal cortex and regions involved in self-referential thoughts and emotion regulation. There seems to be a strong connection between mindfulness and the brain machinery involved in self-regulation. Other work has shown mindfulness to be linked to relative de-activation of the default mode network (DMN), the brain system that’s active during mind-wandering and self-referential “worry” thoughts, which are generally stressful in nature.”
Mindfulness practices, then, help us change the way we are thinking, or at least the way we are focusing our minds, which changes our stress response. For a young person, this might equate to changed behavior, in which he or she has more control over emotional reactions that might lead to trouble. Bose, however, notes that in his students who live in violent communities and are more often directly or indirectly victims of trauma, mindfulness is not going to work. As the article points out:
“This is all well and good, Bose adds, but there’s an obvious caveat. When they’re in the midst of stress and trauma, few kids have the ability to sit still enough to take part in a sitting practice. “If you’re not ready to sit in classroom,” says Bose, “you’re not ready to do sitting meditation. If you have drugs and gangs and violence all around you, you simply can’t sit still. Teachers tell us that they often yell at kids 100 times a day to sit and pay attention. It doesn’t work. And to ask them to do this in the context of meditation can have a worse-than-neutral effect – it could be disastrous.”
He says that you have to go beyond mind-body research to trauma research, which tells us that physical activity can help the brain deal with stress and trauma.
“Trauma research tell us that we hold trauma in our bodies… Neuroscience says mindfulness; trauma research says movement. All of the sudden you’ve got moving meditation or mindfulness in motion. Mindfulness alone isn’t going to cut it for these kids.”
Even for adults who carry a lot of anxious energy stored up in their bodies, we here at Yoga for Healthy Aging have advocated for the necessity of movement practices, sometimes more vigorous yoga styles, as an initial stage in leading to deeper relaxation and stress reduction in your daily practice. Turns out to be true for kids with trauma, too.
The take-away from this Forbes exposure of yoga to a larger audience in the US and for us yogis here as well is that it may prove to invaluable to teach young and old alike to do yoga, combining active asana and quieter mindfulness practices for maximum benefit. And that it would be a good idea to change policy on a national level to fund such ventures, so everyone at least has access to trying yoga, to see if it works for them. What an interesting, and possibly wonderful, world that could be!
