Major Points:

• Integrating the eight limbs into teaching asana to bring the fullness of yoga to everyone. (12:58 )
• Media images of yoga will affect people’s decisions on whether to attend yoga classes. (4:22 )
• How do we become more inclusive in yoga (32:23 )
• Practicing yoga helps you become more discerning by making us pause and reflect between the stimulus and response of day to day life (7:56 )

00:47                                      This is Changing the Face of Yoga and this is episode 113. I have an incredible guest today. Her name is Doctor Christiane Brems who is a certified psychologist from the American board of Professional Psychology. She is an RYT 500 yoga teacher, a certified yoga therapist and she received her Phd in clinical psychology from Oklahoma State University in 1987. She currently directs YogaX an innovative Yoga School Initiative in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. It provides yoga training, continuing education and services. Dr. Brem has been extremely interested in yoga all of her life and she's integrated it into her research for clinical work and also, has developed this program called YogaX. YogaX sounds like a really different kind of yoga teacher training. We're definitely going to go into that. It is the integration of science and spirituality in service of individual and communal health. It's work is grounded in modern neuroscience and psychology research as well as the ancient philosophy and psychology of Yoga. It is based on the fact that yoga is a lifestyle practice and has many health and mental health benefits. So thank you Christiane for coming on the podcast. It's amazing what you are doing there and I think it fits so well with what Changing the Face of Yoga is all about. So welcome.

02:42                                      Thank you. It's absolutely a pleasure to be here. I'm very excited. Thank you.

02:50                                      Is there anything you'd like to add to that introduction? I kind of zoomed through it because it's just incredible what you've done. I wanted to hit the highlights, but is there something that you would like to emphasize?

03:03                                      Well, maybe I'll just emphasize that YogaX really is a team effort. I happen to be the director of it at the moment, but our team includes 10 people and YogaX is really our collective brain child. And so I just want to acknowledge that I'm speaking for the group, not just for myself. We have been together for quite a while now. I think coming on seven years. So even though the Stanford initiative is very young, our team is pretty seasoned.

03:32                                      There are a couple of things I've picked up that I thought was really interesting. You said that you had done a study or seen a study, I'm not sure exactly. There really is a media bias against inclusiveness, shall we say in Yoga where you have to be young and white, probably economically safe. It isn't, in the west, very welcoming to other people. Did you do that media study or did you see it or what's the background of that?

04:22                                      Yeah, that's actually our own work. We did a review, a fairly thorough review of about 10 years worth of yoga journals, looking at all their images and articles, the graphics that go with advertisements in Yoga Journal. Obviously we were pretty successful in showing that there's a strong bias towards white, skinny, wealthy women in the images, not just in the advertisements, which was originally our hope. Also in the graphics that accompany the articles in Yoga Journal. So there's clear sexism, there's racism in the sense that there are not a lot of people of color. There are lots of images of white people. They're more images of women than men. And the interesting thing is when men are depicted, they are typically in teaching roles, whereas the women generally are more likely to be in the student role.

                                                 There just a lot of really interesting things. We've published a couple of papers about this, but we also did a really interesting study where we took Yoga Journal images and we took some information about yoga. We created a control group and a treatment group and we invited people in to learn more about yoga and then at the end of this study asked them whether they might be inclined to try yoga. The treatment group was exposed to the yoga images whereas the control group was just exposed to information about yoga. Then both groups just got a little power point presentation about yoga and we ask them our questions. Being exposed to the images of Yoga Journal as opposed to just learning about yoga made men feel much less likely that they'd want to try yoga then if they just read something about yoga. And we thought that was really fascinating because it's sort of undergirds this premise, right? That if we show the wrong images then we disinvite or uninvite certain parts of our population from the practice.

06:36                                      Yes. I used to teach seniors and a lot of ads for senior yoga and stuff would have this very young girl, the typical yoga person. And I kept saying that's not a good idea; people need to see themselves to think I can try that.

06:57                                      Yeah. We need models.

07:40                                      Yeah. So I just thought that was interesting because it is a bit of a thing with me that I was really glad to hear that there was actual research to support what I've seen. So, I loved this. This came from your blog and it just totally got me, because I didn't ever think of it this way, but you said, that yoga is when we find the gap between stimulus and response. Yeah. I thought good grief. That is what we do. But it just seems like stimulus and response is so close. For Yoga to define that gap is kind of amazing. Can you kind of expand on that idea a bit?

07:56                                      Yeah. That to us is sort of the central practice, right? And even going all the way back to the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali's yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. That's the second line in the yoga sutras - right now is the time for Yoga, which is sort of a call to mindfulness. And so even Patanjali argues if we can still the mind, then we can transform ourselves. And it's the same idea when you start looking at that gap between stimulus and response, you need to have a moment of quiet in the mind, right? You need to be able to take the stimulus and then have some discernment and some deliberate choice about how you will respond to that stimulus. And in our day to day life, that doesn't tend to be our habit, right? Our habit is more stimulus  and reaction,; there's no gap at all. And so in Yoga, we tried to cultivate is this pause, whether it's through breathing practices where we have a pause at the top and the bottom of the breath or whether it's through a physical practice where we pause to take a moment to tune in to the sensation in the body before we just sort of blow out our physical boundaries and limitations. It's all preparation for having that capacity when a stimulus reaches our nervous system to take a moment and make a deliberate choice about how we respond. So to me that has always been the very central part of the practice is this instilling of the capacity to pause.

09:41                                      I like that. Now I'd like to talk about, your teacher training because it sounds to me having been through two different sets of teacher training, that it's very, very different because it seems to have a real emphasis on community. . As well as, , learning all this stuff you got to learn. Sure. All that's in there too, but it's really, I wrote it down. It's fostering of community, encouragement of service and engagement, creation of accessibility and inclusion and I liked promotion of inspiration. The teacher training contributes to the student's persona