Episode #13

Episode #13
September 2020

“I refer to yoga as a form of mind-body hygiene.”

Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, PhD.
A Harvard Medical School researcher confirming yoga's miracles on mind and body in a clinical way.

INSIGHTS FOR BUILDING A BETTER NOW

Bring yoga and meditation to the mainstream society: public schools, workplace, healthcare system. Together, these areas constitute the pillars of well-functioning human beings.
90% of all healthcare costs come from non-communicable diseases caused by modern society lifestyle and behaviours: people don't exercise, eat poorly, eat too much fat. Yoga and mediation change behaviour and therefore act as prevention skills. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Develop a mind-body hygiene the same way as a dental hygiene. Yoga is a mind-body hygiene: a practice where you maintain your body, your mind, your spirit and your emotions at optimal functioning levels.
Metacognition: the realization and understanding that, although we have thoughts, that is not who we are. We are above our thoughts.
What to do on an individual scale: teach yoga. It is service to humanity: a fundamental human act of kindness and compassion that, if you have experienced a benefit, you want to share it. We have the solution, we should share it.

SHOW NOTES

“Imagine… we've succeeded in implementing yoga and in every public school in the country for three generations. Now you have an entire society that's been trained in these mind body practices. That's going to revolutionize our behaviour as human beings. Now human beings make up political organizations and countries. That means the countries are going to change their behaviour because countries are made up of people. If people are behaving better, if they're less emotional, that means they're less greedy. That means less poverty. They're less violent, less angry. That means less war. I mean, we're talking about making a better world - because as you make better people, you make a better world. So this is not trivial that, if we can bring these minds hygiene practices into the global community, through our schools, we will change human culture altogether.”

Global Human Functionality

Source: Sat Bir Singh Khalsa, PhD.

“Between the time that I set the goal of wanting to do research on yoga and the time that it was actually happening, was 25 years. That says something about patience in science and in a scientific career.”

“We are starting to understand where meditation takes place in the brain and what other aspects of the brain are influenced. We know that, when we focus our attention, we are engaging what we call the prefrontal cortex. This is in the executive lobes of the brain, in the frontal lobes, where our executive functioning is. And we know that there are connections between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. The limbic system is the emotional brain, and these are inhibitory connections. So the more you engage the prefrontal cortex, the more you are exerting sort of a controlling effect over the limbic system. And that's what we talked about: self regulation of stress and emotion. That is how this is happening - neurophysiologically. In fact, not only are there changes in activity over time that people who are long term meditators and yoga practitioners have better stress and emotion, regulation, and more activity in the prefrontal cortex and the attention networks, but they have less activity in the limbic system because they're no longer reacting to their own thoughts."