On the Frontiers of Yoga Research
There’s tons of interesting research on yoga and meditation, especially for stress and anxiety, and on the body, especially for reducing inflammation. Inflammation is a useful immune response that can become chronic if we do not exercise. This article is a stunning overview from Frontiers in Human Neuroscience and it helps explain how yoga actually works in the bodymind. In it researchers posit that yoga improves self-regulation as it grows our ability to sense the body and its inner workings. So the mind becomes more sensitive to the body and better communication (in both directions) becomes the norm.
“Yoga is a complex, adaptive and widely applicable method of physical and mental training with multiple tools for self-development, and for improving self-regulation through other top-down and bottom-up mechanisms.”
“Bottom-up regulation strategies have been described as modulation of emotion-generative brain regions (i.e., limbic) without recruitment of “higher” brain regions (i.e., frontal) that are responsible for cognitive forms of regulation (e.g., reappraisal, suppression). More specifically, bottom-up processes involve the influence of peripheral sensory, visceral, cardiovascular, immune, and autonomic input upon central neural processing and mental activities via ascending pathways.”
In other words, cultivating feeling states improves the brain’s ability to sense more widely and deeply, and become more receptive to what’s going on in the body. The extremity is the famed monk who could slow down his heart rate on command.
“… Specific components of yoga practice may affect cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and autonomic output under stress through an emphasis on interoception and bottom-up input, resulting in physical and psychological health.”
Interoception, or feeling what’s going on inside your body, is helpful for integration and self-regulation. Bottom-up input, again, is referring to the signals sent from the body to the brain, through ascending nerves. Top-down strategies are those of a general to an army–executive control, traveling through descending nerves.
“…[We posit] yoga practice as a comprehensive skillset of synergistic process tools that facilitate bidirectional feedback and integration between high- and low-level brain networks, and afferent and re-afferent input from interoceptive processes (somatosensory, viscerosensory, chemosensory).”
yoga: to yoke, join, or discipline
“… The processes that sub-serve self-regulation become more automatized and efficient over time and practice, requiring less effort to initiate when necessary and terminate more rapidly when no longer needed.”
This last is all about economy of energy, to be discussed forthwith…