The Mind-Body Connection

Introductory series to Yoga & Writing

Original artwork for Y&W by Therese Rausch Potgeiter at TRP-Studio

Welcome to Yoga Culture’s Yoga & Writing! We are a new community with a podcast, courses, and retreats coming soon. Stay tuned for ideas, tips, and conversations.

Those of you who have been with me for the last month or so may be surprised by the name change! Yoga & Writing isn’t going anywhere. It’s one of the two sections in this publication. You can check out my new About Page and choose at any time to receive posts from either section (here’s how).

Thanks for joining us today! We would love to hear about your experiences with the mind-body connection in the comments.

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First, two things for you:

Here’s a new video on my YouTube.com channel about Moving and Writing a Little. Here’s some help with the Haiku if you try it.

And, I recommend this recent conversation on Dr. Chatterjee’s podcast (which is generally awesome, by the way). Sadhguru is an Indian yogi whom I referenced in my Parenting article on my other publication. He has a great laugh!

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The Mind-Body Connection

**You can view/listen to this post on my youtube.com channel.**

My next post will discuss the 8 limbs of yoga, where you’ll see that the mind-body connection is part of yoga already. But it might not explicitly be part of the yoga you have practiced in the past, depending on your relationship with it.

I first witnessed this connection in myself especially in my time as a competitive athlete which I mentioned in the last post. When I was in high school and university, I found that track & field workouts made me feel more relaxed and helped me to focus. It was also the community, though, of the team that motivated me to not only run faster or jump higher, but to be a better person. 

I was lucky to have coaches, especially Peter Slovenski at Bowdoin College, who talked about wellness regularly and as well as positive types of team building and creating confidence in all athletes. We celebrated individual improvement as much as team wins. We practiced visualization in place of physical practice at times, especially at the high jump pit. On van and bus rides, we often talked about ethical issues, sometimes personal as well as political, sometimes touching on religion, environmental issues, or sociology. All of these are elements of yoga and the 8 Limbs. To be honest, it was a little bit like the locker room environment on Ted Lasso! (What happened in that last season though?!)

Practicing sport helped me as a student and in my relationships; in turn, writing and the process of it that includes thinking, reflection, articulation, and sharing helped me as an athlete. 

Do we have evidence?

I have witnessed firsthand the power of the mind in helping me recovery from injury as well as the detriment that sickness or injury can have on the mind. Many people talk about the mind-body connection as well as mindfulness these days; they are hot topics to include in the workplace or schools. But what is it really? 

The reason these areas are no longer seen as hocus-pocus is because they are also scientifically proven, at least in some cases. Research allows us to go further in validating the way the mind and body influence each other and therefore bring it our practices as teachers, coaches, doctors, parents, and reflecting on our own life balance and health. 

Here are a few researched examples — 

A scientific academic article published nearly twenty years ago called “Mind-body research moves towards the mainstream” summarized several other studies particularly about the effect of both psychological and physical stress on the body by saying: “Mounting evidence for the role of the mind in disease and healing is leading to a greater acceptance of mind–body medicine.”

Ten years after that in 2016, another article offered “new insights into how the mind influences the body.” Researchers at the university of Pittsburg showed that their “findings provide evidence for the neural basis of a mind-body connection.” Beyond stress, they also looked at depression and other “mental states” ability to directly change organ function.  

It should be no surprise that stress impacts the body, and this kind of narrative is much more mainstream in just the last five years or so. But what about the healing side?

Injuries & the mind 

If we look at meditation first, there has been a lot of research about its ability to heal specific injuries, partly by providing blood flow as well as reducing stress and inflammation in the body, as well as its daily benefit on the mental state of the person as this academic article in Positive Psychology states: “Functional MRI showed that experienced meditators had more brain activity in areas related to attention and inhibition response and less activation in regions related to discursive emotions and cognitions, suggesting a correlation between hours of practice and brain plasticity.”

I’ve also read compelling research on specific case studies in books like David Robson’s The Expectation Effect, Jennifer Heisz’ Move the Body, Heal the Mind, and Candace Pert’s Molecules of Emotion.

Yoga research

Yoga specifically has been researched lately to prove what a lot of people who practice already consider to be the benefits. As a certified yoga teacher with Yoga Alliance, we get access to published research and are also frequently asked to be research subjects for new projects. This research has proven benefits to areas like anxiety, depression, respiratory problems, immunity, and the aging process. A quick search in JStor, which is an academic journal database, will show you further published articles that demonstrate yoga’s effects on further areas like hypertension and pregnancy as well as suggestions for its use by medical professionals in treating diseases. Of course, many cultures have long practiced this kind of mind-body and even spiritual treatment for patients in need of help. 

Here, Harvard summarizes research showing yoga’s effect on a person with regular practice.

Writing heals, too?

By now, a lot of this information is commonplace, even if people aren’t always sure where or how to begin. But did you know that the practice of writing has also been researched to show the effect on the mind and body?

While we sometimes think of lonely, depressed writers as a kind of trope, this isn’t really the case, or when it is, it’s not due to the writing itself. Instead, writing offers healing powers. Two extensive research projects were conducted 25 years ago to show the benefits of some forms of writing on not only mental illness but also physical illnesses like arthritis, asthma, HIV/AIDS, and overall immunity. The studies showed that writing about emotions and stress rather than simply venting them, for example to a friend or a health professional, directly improved their physical health.

Further studies since then have shown other benefits from regular writing practices such as cognitive function and memory, emotional functioning and confidence, and reductions of stress. And there’s more: writing by hand can improve learning; it can help cancer patients experience a better quality of life; expressing gratitude in written form can help you sleep better; it can help to lower blood pressure. 

Here are a couple more:

• 6 Unexpected Ways Writing Can Transform Your Health

• Emotional and physical health benefits of expressive writing

In fact, some of the studies link the practice of writing itself with a type of meditation. This is something I’ve written about before and will also link it in the notes. 

A holistic approach

The approach of Yoga & Writing is holistic and the methods are as well. Your goal might be to improve your confidence, cognitive function, or specifically how good of a writer you are. Or, instead, it might be to be to get physically stronger, feel more relaxed in your body, or be less tired.

For all of these goals and more, the benefits of combining a yoga and writing practice are well proven. But don’t worry if you can’t commit to a large amount of time, even small tweaks and routines can help you to achieve these goals. I try not to put an endpoint on my own goals, rather making them a continuous journey. I’m not sure where I’ll get to exactly with these practices, and we can continually experiment and respond to what’s working and what’s not as well as how we feel. The key is to consider it mindfully. 

What’s your experience with the mind-body connection?

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