Body and Soul

Another snippet from the Speaking of Faith program on Yoga a couple weeks back:

Ms. Corn: In the practice of yoga what we're taught is that there is no separation between the mind and the body, and everything that we're thinking or feeling or experiencing over the course of a lifetime, or lifetimes, has an effect on your cellular tissue. So your body remembers everything and even though we have as human beings a gorgeous ability to reconcile or to reason, our bodies don't have that same ability to heal unless we're moving through experiences in our life in a spiritual way. So what I'm saying is if we're holding onto hate, blame, shame, anger, rage, sadness, or grief, something like that, those emotions can be as toxic on our physical body as a poor diet or as inertia and they manifest as tension, stress, and anxiety. So our physical body is actually masking the emotional resonance that lies beneath it.

Ms. Tippett: Holding it in somewhere and we're not aware of it.

Ms. Corn: Mm-hmm. We repress it.

And so I could feel the anxiety arise, so I came up with interesting tools to deal with the anxiety. And this is what most people in our culture do. Then when it doesn't work, they use drugs, sex, alcohol, power, caffeine, food, anything to self-regulate or numb out. And in the practice of yoga when you're releasing the tension organically through the practice of asana day in and day out, the emotions that are embedded in our cellular tissue begin to arise. Yoga is asking us to take the Band-Aid off the wound and be willing to heal it through a spiritual practice. [Emphasis added.]

Transcript Link.

What an amazing thought and so in line with so much that is going on in addiction research and treatment. We often speak in treatment that the "addicted brain" is "hijacked" by the addiction. We know that all that goes on in our brains is chemical in nature. The idea that "thought" is somehow separate from the physical is just not true. The mix and balance (or imbalance) of brain chemicals can- and does- produce many problems that we have always called "mental health." That does NOT mean that it is all "in your head" other than that is where your brain happens to sit. It is a real, physical- physiological- event.

So we also talk about "re-wiring" or "re-training" the brain. It happens to people who have strokes or injuries and need to re-learn how to do some very basic things. That is exactly what happens in addiction recovery. We learn "work-arounds" that help re-balance brain chemicals and processes that the addiction has hijacked. The result is recovery.

Hence, Yoga. It is often considered one of the pieces of the recovery puzzle. As Ms. Corn so clearly talks about, we can see why.