Yoga: the space in-between

As a doctor, you must know how easy it is to get yourself busy and how difficult it is to slow down or pause. Especially living in India. Don’t get me wrong. I love India. It’s beautiful and messy. Spectacular and smelly. Peaceful and dirty. I think it’s no surprise that yogic philosophy has its roots there.

The last time I was in India it was in 2018, way before the pandemic. I worked for the International Federation for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus and we organized a conference in New Delhi, together with our Indian member Spina Bifida Foundation, led by Dr. Santosh Karmarkar. It gathered specialists, doctors, families, and people with these neural tube defects. I presented the benefits of yoga for mental health.

I started practicing yoga when I was still a student, in Poland. Back then yoga helped me to manage anxiety although I only concentrated on a very physical aspect of asana practice, doing Iyengar postures from the book. Years passed and with the boom of yoga in the West, I could explore a variety of other styles: hatha, kundalini, yin, vinyasa, ashtanga, Bikram, and even beer-yoga when I lived in Belgium.

Little had I known about the very therapeutic aspects of yoga. I felt them obviously but was not aware of the way it worked. And since I started working as a psychotherapist, I felt the urge to grasp it intellectually. Talking therapy works. But in some cases, the body knows better. And if I was really about to help people feel better and be better, I knew that I needed to incorporate the body, its movement, and somatic processes.

After the conference in New Delhi, I took a flight to Rishikesh to begin my journey to understand yoga better. After completing the yoga teacher training I felt it was only the beginning. I practiced yoga daily and it impacted my life a lot. From the perception of self, service to others, including the meditation and philosophical aspects of yoga, it became my way of living. I became a yogi. I make sure to separate it from any religious connotations. It is more of a lifestyle, a philosophy of life. When I came back to Europe I decided to start studying yoga therapy with The Minded Institute in London where I graduated as a yoga therapist in February this year.

Yoga offers tools to regulate the nervous system, for example bringing it to the parasympathetic state when the cortisol is too high, only by breathing practices (10 minutes of Ujjayi). It increases proprioception, improves HRV, increases the release of GABA, lowering stress, and improves wellbeing. It offers a sense of belonging to a community, and provides philosophical guidance (yamas and niyamas). And for me personally, yoga has always been this kind of pause described a long time ago by the father of psychology Victor Frankl:

“Between the stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom and power to choose our responses. In our response lies our growth and our freedom”.

Yoga is definitely a tool that helps to prepare this response, making it truly yours, checking with your body, mind, and intuition first, before acting. It helps us grow and feel free, just as we are.