Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Yoga: Implications for Yoga Therapy

Introduction

Yoga philosophy is formed around the idea of personal transformation. The ultimate goal of yoga — stilling thoughts and achieving the realisation of self-awareness — can be reached through consistent practice. This idea overlaps with modern neuroscience, which holds that our brain can change in response to experience and training. Yoga and meditation could be seen as a form of mental exercise, that transform the neurocognitive processes underlying our personalities. A large number of empirical studies show the positive effects of yoga and meditation-based interventions on mental health (Goldberg & Tucker, 2020; Wielgosz et al., 2019). Inspired by this wave of research, yoga and meditation gradually become well-validated approaches in Western mental healthcare.

Yoga practice has many components, and in the broadest sense can be seen as a holistic approach to wellbeing. Yoga traditions, adopted in the West, vary in their focus on different elements of the practice (postures, breathing exercises, relaxation, and meditation). An individual yoga practice develops and changes over time, following one’s changing needs. The content of yoga practice, and specific instructions can thus hardly be fixed. As a result, yoga interventions do not rely on standardised practices (Sherman, 2012), and clinical research on yoga employ different protocols. Instead of working with standardised protocols and labels, therapeutic yoga is traditionally individualised and tailored to the person's needs.

Every person can have episodes of anxiety, depression or psychotic dissociation to one degree or another. A yoga therapist needs to see the mental health problems on a spectrum, to place them in the context of one’s life events and approach them holistically at many levels of being. It is also essential to understand the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying psychiatric symptoms and map the effects of yoga in terms of cognitive and affective processes. This knowledge may help to choose an optimal approach for a yoga therapy treatment.

In this chapter, we combine insights from the neuroscientific research of yoga and meditation with practical implications for yoga therapy. In the first part, we discuss the fundamental neuroscientific concepts related to the practice of yoga and meditation: attention, emotional regulation, body awareness, and autonomic regulation. We summarise evidence on the neurophysiological effects of yoga from existing clinical research, in relation to common mental health problems. We then present a case study of a personalised yoga therapy intervention in a client experiencing psychotic symptoms. We discuss this case from the perspective of a yoga therapist and show that the intervention has its foundation in the yoga philosophy and the modern neuroscientific concepts. Finally, we discuss future perspectives and directions for the implementation of yoga therapy in mental healthcare.