Tag Archives: Kelly McGonigal

Sf-based yoga instructor, Stanford psychologist, yoga therapist, author

I’ve got a daily yoga practice

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Photo: a hand mudra during meditation

A clas­sic hand mudra dur­ing med­i­ta­tion closes the energy circuits

I went to my first ses­sion at Thrive Yoga since last Fri­day, a vinyasa flow 2/​3 that should have been beyond my reach because of my lack of prac­tice. I could have pan­icked; instead, I let the yoga find me on the mat. If I felt winded, I went into child’s pose. If I wanted to keep my own pace, I did not let the lack of syn­chro­niza­tion with the rest of the class throw me off. I paid atten­tion to how a par­tic­u­lar pose felt, what mus­cles were taxed and twitch­ing, what was dif­fer­ent from pre­vi­ous ses­sions. It was fine. I made it through the class and did not feel worse for the wear.

Dur­ing the past week, my 9-to-5:30 job seemed to  stretch into a 9-to-6:30 because last-​​minute requests required extra time at the end of the day. So I don’t make it home in time for the 6:30 or 7:30 classes.

At least I have my yin/​restorative rou­tine in the evening, but that does not con­di­tion me for a vinyasa flow class. It keeps my mus­cles and fas­cia from short­en­ing into my old habits of being a key­board slave. I am more inter­ested in learn­ing to release my mus­cle ten­sion that build­ing mus­cle strength so I am not going to berate myself. I am more inter­ested in mon­i­tor­ing my daily yoga prac­tice, how­ever mod­est it might be, to see how it changes than focus­ing on the peak per­for­mances that come from an advanced vinyasa class or mas­ter workshop.

That’s an impor­tant shift in per­spec­tive: I used to look to a for­mal yoga class and a trusted instruc­tor to pro­duce the sub­stan­tive change in my con­di­tion as a yogi; now, I see daily prac­tice as being the more pow­er­ful lever­age point in alter­ing the bal­ance of my being.  I need my daily prac­tice to feel at ease and sane. It’s taken six years, but I think the turn­ing point came when I heard Kelly McGo­ni­gal give some advice in a Google Talk when asked what kind of yoga a novice should do at home: she said go for what­ever your body is ask­ing for, lis­ten to your body. So in the evenings, I started to do the poses that my body seemed to be ask­ing for. Kelly may have writ­ten this point in her book or made a point of  it in her online class five years ago and it never sank in.

Yoga for Pain Relief — what I read during the snow storm

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Cover art of McGonigal's bookKelly McGo­ni­gal sent me a copy of her book Yoga for Pain Relief: Sim­ple Prac­tices to Calm Your Mind & Heal Your Chronic Pain (New Har­bin­ger Pub­li­ca­tions, 2009) and I’ve been sit­ting on it for nearly two months.

Kelly does not need another review of her book. Eigh­teen endorse­ments from yoga experts, health advo­cates, pain relief spe­cial­ists, and sci­en­tific researchers are spread over four pages. Tim­o­thy McCall, the med­ical edi­tor of Yoga Jour­nal and author of Yoga as Med­i­cine, wrote her fore­word. She got a review from Yoga Jour­nal in the March issue and also pub­lishes an arti­cle on Surya Namaskar (Sun Salu­la­tion) in the same issue.

She has a blog, The Sci­ence of Will Power, on Psy­chol­ogy Today (looks like it comes out twice a month), as well as her per­sonal blog, Sci­ence and Sutras. Also check out her Face­book page.

She’s giv­ing sem­i­nars at the Omega Insti­tute (New York). She’s quoted in Time mag­a­zine, the New York Times, and the Wash­ing­ton Post. She’s start­ing to make appear­ances on TV.

As a psy­chol­o­gist at Stan­ford Uni­ver­sity, she’s uniquely posi­tioned to see where yoga is inter­fac­ing with West­ern sci­en­tific inves­ti­ga­tion and med­ical prac­tice, both in terms of the­ory and prac­tice, at a time when neu­ro­science is redefin­ing and re-​​dimensioning our under­stand­ing of the human mind. She’s also an accom­plished yoga instruc­tor and teacher of instruc­tors, as well as the edi­tor for the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Yoga Ther­apy.

Do we see a pat­tern devel­op­ing here?

She def­i­nitely does not need another book review or endorse­ment from a blogger.

New Har­bin­ger has pro­duced an under­stated book for­mat, look­ing sim­i­lar to the scores of other “Yoga for …. [name your dis­ease, symp­tom or pre­ferred body part].” Clean design, large font size, gray scale pho­tos. So what sets this book apart from all the stock in the self-​​help section?

Photo: deepening the twistOnce I started read­ing her book, it impressed me as an impor­tant blue­print for yoga in the United States. It’s a book that I would rec­om­mended to any­one who wants to under­stand what you can get from yoga/​meditation. The book hits a kind of “sweat spot:” this is yoga’s entry point with the min­i­mal ini­tial phys­i­cal invest­ment, the low­est oppor­tu­nity cost and the biggest pay-​​off. You don’t have to get in shape, build up your aer­o­bic capac­ity, mus­cu­lar strength and flex­i­bil­ity before see­ing results. You don’t even need to know what’s wrong with you for yoga to do you some good.

The book is extra­or­di­nar­ily acces­si­ble: No jar­gon, either from the San­skrit or from the academic/​scientific lin­gua franca, no intel­lec­tual arro­gance, no mag­i­cal incan­ta­tion, no gate­way to eso­teric wis­dom, no com­pli­cated sequences of poses. Within the first 25 pages (out of 183 pp), she’s giv­ing you easy rou­tines to start using what’s she teach­ing, in this case, observ­ing your breath.

One of the things that Kelly said five years ago has stayed with me and she repeats it in the book: peo­ple seek out yoga because they are suf­fer­ing, either phys­i­cally, psy­cho­log­i­cally or spir­i­tu­ally. Human suf­fer­ing is a great moti­va­tor and a con­stant of human exis­tence. The book’s virtue is sim­pli­fy­ing yoga down to a con­cise, clear mes­sage: Relieve your suf­fer­ing; start with these easy steps. If Patan­jali had writ­ten like Kelly, yoga would have taken over the world (kid­ding — a little).

Kelly also under­stands the value of per­sonal nar­ra­tive along­side the find­ings of ran­dom­ized, blind con­trol exper­i­ments, and she has included com­pelling sto­ries of peo­ple impacted by yoga through­out the book.

I also appre­ci­ate her thought­ful list­ing of resources: med­i­ta­tion and yoga instruc­tion books, audio/​DVD, music for move­ment, med­i­ta­tion and relax­ation, books for peo­ple with pain, non-​​profit orga­ni­za­tions sup­port­ing peo­ple with pain, and orga­ni­za­tions sup­port­ing research, edu­ca­tion, and pro­fes­sional train­ing in yoga and med­i­ta­tion. In addi­tion, she has 50-​​item bib­li­og­ra­phy. If you poke around her blogs, per­sonal web­site or her book site, you’ll find lots of point­ers to cen­tral ref­er­ence texts, sci­en­tific stud­ies, resource cen­ters and spe­cial­ized knowl­edge hubs — stuff that she did not include in the book because they would have got­ten in the way.

You have to be in Down Dog to appreciate the humor

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NYTimes.com Yoga Classes Play Up the Lighter Side opened the year with a chuckle about the use of laugh­ter in the yoga studio:

“I do think there’s a trend toward light­en­ing up in the yoga com­mu­nity,” said Kelly McGo­ni­gal, 31, the edi­tor in chief of the Inter­na­tional Jour­nal of Yoga Ther­apy (found at iayt.org). “Mostly around the rigid­ity and humor­less­ness of doing things ‘the one right way’ &emdash; always hav­ing to get bet­ter, feel­ing like every yoga prac­tice has to be one big self-​​improvement project.”

I was struck by the lame­ness of some of the attempts at humor cited as exam­ples of a trend in this arti­cle. I really had to search for some text to pull out in a quote. I sus­pect that the con­text gives more mean­ing to the words. The point about yoga being taken too seri­ously is right on tar­get; I am guilty of it myself.

Yoga Peeps

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I spent part of my lunch break­ing lis­ten­ing to an audio inter­view with Cyndi Lee while I was fill­ing out checks to pay the monthly bills. I really enjoyed the con­ver­sa­tion. Cyndi brings a Bud­dhist vibe to yoga so she empha­sizes med­i­ta­tion and life style. She’s involved in a lot of inter­est­ing projects in New York and around the world.

Lara Ces­tone, the found­ing spirit behind Yoga Peeps, really does a fan­tas­tic job bring­ing together lengthy (30-​​60 min­utes, I think) inter­views with yoga instruc­tors around the United States and Canada. She has 19 episodes now, avail­able as pod­casts or mp3 files, with peo­ple like Ana For­est, Shiva Rea, and Kelly McGo­ni­gal, as well as lesser known instruc­tors. Lara does this out of the good­ness of her heart because there are no ads on the site and there does not seem to be a busi­ness model behind it.

12 months later

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Through­out 2005, I par­tic­i­pated in an online/​e-​​mail course that was led by Kelly McGo­ni­gal. We were sup­posed on answer the ques­tion “Can yoga change your life?” Here’s my response:

Answer­ing the ques­tion “Can yoga change your life?” is is a lot harder than I would have though 12 months ago — more com­pli­cated, more sub­tle, more covert. To answer it in one sit­ting is almost impos­si­ble since I have con­sciously cho­sen to nur­ture my silence as part of my prac­tice. When I started the course, I was eager to lay out my expe­ri­ence for all to see. As my yoga expe­ri­ence has matured, deep­ened and broad­ened, I have become less con­cerned with writ­ing about it explicitly.

This cure of silence is best summed up in my per­sonal mantra — “let the yoga take care of it,” with “it” being what­ever dis­trac­tion, worry or whim is pulling me out of the present moment. That mantra sums up what has changed in my life in a year that seemed to swing me in oppo­site direc­tions. At the worst moments (when I was lit­er­ally in an employ­ment limbo, not know­ing if I was draw­ing a salary), I turned to my refuge in yoga, pranayama and med­i­ta­tion — and through my prac­tice, I could return myself to a base­line of my intrin­sic human­ity, peace, and bal­ance. By say­ing “Let the yoga take care of it” I rec­og­nize the hid­den pow­ers that I pos­sess, and trust that I will even­tu­ally tap into them — or accept that the dynamic is beyond my con­trol and that I just have to ride the moment.

Pat­tabhi Jois likes to say, “Yoga is 99% prac­tice, 1% the­ory.” He may have his per­cent­ages wrong — or they may vary at dif­fer­ent stages of your practice’s matu­rity — but the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ple is true: You just have to show up on the mat with the inten­tion of prac­tic­ing hon­estly and gen­uinely. You don’t even have to try hard. I found that I acquire a whole new vista on my prac­tice when I decided not to push my effort to the max, that I should focus on being aware of my body and my breath. The more I prac­tice, the more I am rewarded in unex­pected ways.

Para­dox­i­cally, my mantra “let the yoga take care of it” has the oppo­site effect. By releas­ing me from my pre­con­ceived mind­set, I gained a sense of free­dom and con­trol over my body, my mind and my life. For almost all of my life, I’ve felt as if I was at the mercy of forces beyond my con­trol — that I was at risk of doing some­thing wrong and I was often beset by a sense of impend­ing doom. This self-​​imposed stress accen­tu­ated my own pre­dis­po­si­tion to depres­sion. Since I did not know that I was depressed, my sense of help­less­ness and despair was even more intense. I always seemed to be bat­tling from behind, at a disadvantage.

Since I started with yoga, pranayama and med­i­ta­tion, I feel that now I have the phys­i­cal, men­tal and spir­i­tual tools that allow me to man­age my life, that allows me to restore my bal­ance. I still get into trou­ble when I for­get that I have these tools at my dis­posal. But since I get to go to yoga classes, they bring me back to my refuge.

I feel at a loss to express what’s going on inside me, but I am going to take another year of the online course, this time deal­ing with the Yoga of Connection.

Vulnerability and Courage

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As I was walk­ing to yoga class last week, I found myself with tears welling up in my eyes. Dur­ing savasana, I held back sobs. It was unset­tling because I had got­ten into yoga to strengthen my body and cor­rect my bad pos­ture. It was going to bring my life back into bal­ance and give me inner peace.

I do sense that yoga is chang­ing me in ways I had never imag­ined, but it is dis­turb­ing. I feel unex­pect­edly exposed, vul­ner­a­ble, even raw. In our prac­tice, we are con­stantly doing hip open­ers, heart open­ers, back­bends that crack open the crusty exte­rior of our mus­cu­la­ture, the hard shell that each of us has built up around me over the years.

I often won­dered why there was all this mil­i­tary imagery in yoga — Warrior’s pose, Hero’s pose. It seemed odd for a dis­ci­pline that was based on ahimsa — doing no harm. But it is clear that you really have to be brave, coura­geous to accept this sense of vul­ner­a­bil­ity and risk that comes out of a yoga prac­tice. By open­ing up from within, we are expos­ing our­selves to the world around us in ways that we had avoided before. By open­ing up to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of inner change, we ini­ti­ate a dynamic that breaks out of the hard­ened chan­nels of our lives.

Post data: This post­ing was orig­i­nally writ­ten for the Open Mind Open Body forum. My yoga men­tor, Kelly McGo­ni­gal, pointed me to The Heart of the Bod­hisattva by Saky­ong Mipham Rin­poche, the head of the Shamb­hala Bud­dhist lin­eage, who describes the traits of the bodhisattva-​​warrior. [ MLS: The text is no longer avail­able online.]

An encounter with pain

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I went to a den­tal appoint­ment in the morn­ing; it was a follow-​​up to treat­ment that had been done last week. By the time the anes­thetic started wear­ing off, my jaw was throb­bing. The nerve end­ings must have been hyper­sen­si­tive the sec­ond time around. The pain was dis­tract­ing and made me feel like a zom­bie. Coin­ci­den­tally, I’ve been read­ing Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Cat­a­stro­phe Liv­ing, which is about using med­i­ta­tion and yoga to face pain. Of course, Kabat-​​Zinn is talk­ing about chronic pain from seri­ous ill­ness, not just pain result­ing from a den­tal visit. But pain is still pain, in the last count.

I decided to see if my yoga prac­tice could help me. At lunch, I went to an avail­able meet­ing room at work and shut the door. I did 15 min­utes of pranayama and 30 min­utes of med­i­ta­tion. It really did help me. The pain was still there but it seemed to shrink. It was no longer throb­bing and radi­at­ing down my neck.

After work, I went to my evening yoga class. Dur­ing warm up, I scanned my body and noticed that the pain had stiff­ened up the mus­cles in my neck and shoul­ders, even though the pain in my jaw was less severe that ear­lier in the day. By the end of the class, the ten­sion had been released and I was drenched in sweat and energy.

And to top it off, I shared the class with my 27-​​year-​​old daugh­ter. We had a light sup­per after­ward, talk­ing about yoga, foot­ball play­offs and life plans. Talk about feel good.

I orig­i­nally wrote this account as part of my par­tic­i­pa­tion in the online course with Kelly McGo­ni­gal. It’s been quite enlight­en­ing and empow­er­ing. We’ll see how it plays out over the next 50 weeks.

Playing catchup

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The hol­i­days do not leave a lot of spare time. I have not gone to a yoga ses­sion since Decem­ber 20. I have been doing my daily prac­tice, but light on the hatha stuff. I have con­cen­trated on my per­sonal jour­nal­ing over the past cou­ple of weeks, and my blog­ging has taken a back seat. I’ve been dig­ging deep and dis­cov­er­ing a lot of things about myself that I had not real­ized before. Sorry, folks, but the writ­ing is for my eyes only. This com­ing year I will be focused in on rekin­dling my cre­ative writ­ing, and I think yoga will play a key role in keep­ing me grounded and focused in this endeavor.

I have started the e-​​mail course from Kelly McGo­ni­gal. She adver­tised the course for 2005, all 52 weeks of it. To my sur­prise, the first con­tri­bu­tion turned up in my inbox on Decem­ber 26. I’ve checked out the mate­r­ial, reg­is­tered in the online forum and posted my first note as well as my per­sonal intro­duc­tion. Kelly obvi­ously wants to get a head-​​start on the new year.

My yoga intention for the new year

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I was read­ing the Bul­letin Board from eSu­tra (brought to you by the NYC’s Breath­ing Project) and saw an inter­est­ing idea: Kelly McGo­ni­gal is offer­ing an e-​​mail based course called “Can Yoga Really Change My Life?” It will last all year and con­sist of weekly course con­tent sent to you (by e-​​mail, nat­u­rally) and include:

“instruc­tions for spe­cific breath­ing exer­cises, med­i­ta­tions, or yoga poses, as well as more gen­eral themes for your per­sonal prac­tice. Prac­tice sug­ges­tions inte­grate yoga phi­los­o­phy and tra­di­tion with cur­rent  psy­cho­log­i­cal and med­ical research. You will also receive ideas for apply­ing your prac­tice to daily life.”

I have cited Kelly’s web­site and her work often. She is asso­ci­ated with Stan­ford Psy­chophys­i­ol­ogy Lab­o­ra­tory. I like her approach to yoga, and her involve­ment in West­ern sci­en­tific research in yoga.

More on breathing

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Alan Lit­tle again com­ments on an entry in this blog and an arti­cle by Kelly McGo­ni­gal. He makes clear that there is more to ujayi breath than just try­ing to sound as if you have asthma.

My acupunc­tur­ist, Kelly Welch, tells me that both in West­ern and Chi­nese med­i­cine there’s not much known about the lym­pa­thic system.

For those who have not inves­ti­gated the Art of Liv­ing side of the site, the daily prac­tice includes deep, rhyth­mic breath­work. Three-​​part breath­ing with a 4-​​4-​​6-​​2 pat­tern ujayi breath; three rounds of bas­trika (a bit com­pli­cated to describe in this short entry) and kriya sudar­shan, which includes three rounds of slow (20 breaths), mod­er­ate (40 breaths) and rapid (40) breath­ing. Some observers say that the kriya tech­nique is a form of hyper­ven­til­la­tion. That might be the case at first, but after the first few ses­sion I have not noted any symp­toms of hyper­ven­til­la­tion. It’s 15-​​20 min­utes of very active diaphragm move­ment — with­out hav­ing to break­ing into a sweat as you would with exer­cise. I sus­pect that much of the ben­e­fit comes from the effect on the lym­phatic system.

The Art of Liv­ing Foun­da­tion pro­motes kriya prac­tice specif­i­cally for med­ical con­di­tions, like can­cer, HIV and depres­sion. It says that it has med­ical research to back up these claims.