HOW YOGA CAN HEAL: A CHAT WITH THE YOGA PSYCHOLOGIST
The first of the three categories in Anomalous Social Club is CARE: an event series that revolves around wellness practices and mental resilience.
Amidst the chaos of modern life, we aim to hold space this year to facilitate re-balancing and re-focusing on self-care. For me, adequate self-care is often overlooked or misinterpreted (i.e. a good ol’ night out doesn’t really count in this context).
Our debut session of ASC: CARE was led by the deeply talented Dr. Stephanie Minchin (yoga psychologist) and illuminating Duygu Kacar (sound healing practitioner).
I managed to sit down with Steph to learn more about her practice and the relationship between yoga and psychology; more importantly, the ways in which yoga can heal us.
Only blue quoted text is the opinion of Stephanie Minchin (marked SM), the rest is my own.
what is yoga therapy?
Running parallel to her life-long passion of clinical psychology, Steph fell in love with the practice of yoga during her travels in South East Asia.
Following her visit to an Ashram in India, it dawned on Steph that she wanted to teach yoga. Thereafter came the new challenge of balancing her studies of clinical psychology and teaching yoga.
SM: I was almost living this double life; one was a shrink in, you know, the therapy chair working in mental health services in the NHS. And the other was this sort of, pretzel performer. As many of us yoga teachers call it.
After attending a conference in 2018 led by Heather Mason (founder of the Minded Institute, the leading Yoga therapy school in the UK) Steph had her Eureka! moment.
Yoga Therapy. The perfect antidote to a double life by marrying up her two greatest passions.
MISCONCEPTIONS about YOGA THERAPY
I have fallen victim to the opinion that yoga is for a certain kind of person, and to the cliches or stereotypes that come with the practice.
After speaking with Steph, it seemed to me that one of the greatest misconceptions of yoga is that it is a personal experience in which the results of the practice will differ based on each body. It seems there is an issue surrounding the practice in terms of accessibility, i.e. “I can’t do it, I’m not a yogi.” (Me, three weeks ago).
SM: “I'm not flexible enough. I'm not something enough. I'm not slim enough or I'm too old for that”. Honestly, I really believe that if you have a body and if you have a breath, yoga is accessible at some level to you.
We are all different shapes, sizes, colours, backgrounds, cultures, and that is to absolutely be celebrated.
And the way our bodies want to move is different depending on our skeleton structure, depending on our muscle mobility, depending on “if I’m tired that day”.
It's not about accessibility in terms of like fitness and gymnastics. The practice of yoga is so much deeper than that. There's not a perfect size that fits all, or that it should look a certain way.
As I so candidly admitted at the beginning of this section, there is a lot of miseducation surrounding yoga. Steph spoke very passionately about this, and I found that our values around the education system aligned quite beautifully. (I edited out my enthusiastic inputs for the sake of this blog post length…)
SM: I wonder if it's less about myths and more about people not knowing what it is. I feel really passionate about raising awareness, educating, bringing yoga into schools, getting yoga on the curriculum, getting kids starting yoga early.
Why are we putting kids in detention rewriting lines? Why we not teaching children how to self-regulate? Mindfulness and breath-work rather than this punitive approach and systems? Can we take a more compassionate approach and really view ourselves as human beings?
Why is it so hard to be present?
Okay, maybe I was using this as my own therapy session a little …
Being present is something that I personally struggle with; it’s simplicity is so paradoxically complex. I was curious from a yoga therapists’ perspective why this state of being can be so tough to achieve. Steph drew my attention to a magnificent quote from Piko Iyer:
It’s ironic that the easiest thing to do with your body physically is somehow one of the most taxing mentally. Just to be.
Often, we find ways to fill our time in order to escape from or avoid difficult emotions.
SM: The challenge in being present is we’re asking ourselves to be not only here and now, but we're also asking ourselves to be with discomfort.
Yoga incorporates the practices of mindfulness and meditation to help strengthen mental resilience and draw one’s attention back to the present moment.
SM: There's so much again, myths, about things like mindfulness. Because people think it's, you know, being an enlightened monk sitting on a mountain having an empty mind.
It's not humanly possible for our mind to be empty because our mind is evolved, designed to think and be this computer that's processing.
what’s next for the yoga psychologist?
You can follow Steph and The House of Yoga Psychology on Instagram for updates on her exciting projects this year.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR ANOMALOUS SOCIAL CLUB?
Comedy lovers, mark your calendars! On Thursday 22nd February we will be hosting the debut session of ASC: CULTURE for a night of laughs.
All we be revealed soon on our Instagram. Word on the street is we’ll be joined by a Britain’s Got Talent semi-finalist …