I have with me another amazing guest, which means another amazing conversation. I have Lauren Porter with us, who is a certified Synergetic Play therapist. She’s a coach.
She’s also a yoga instructor. She’s a mom. She’s amazing.
And I have invited her to have a discussion with us specifically about yoga as a practice to support us as clinicians in getting to know ourselves more and expanding and widening our own window of tolerance. So I’m going to introduce Lauren in a second. But listeners, some of you maybe have never done a yoga class before.
You might have your own ideas about what yoga is. Some of you maybe have a yoga practice and you still have your own ideas about what yoga is. My invitation is to spend the next 45 minutes with us, listening and deepening into an understanding of the possibility of what yoga can bring us so that we can be able to facilitate our clients in a much deeper way.
So this is a really exciting conversation if you’ve never done yoga before or if you’ve been doing yoga for years. Lauren, hi. I’m so glad you’re here.
We’ve been talking about having this conversation for a long time. Yeah, I’ve known you for a long time. I’ve been inspired by your work for a long time.
I so appreciate who you are and what you’re doing out in the world and helping people understand yoga from a new lens. You’ve had just amazing clinical experience, and I’m really excited for this conversation. So yay.
Thank you for having me here. It’s a pleasure. Can we just start with an understanding of what is yoga really? Okay.
Yoga is a practice of connecting to self. Okay. How might that be different than how people might think of yoga or what they think yoga might be? Well, so I kind of think of there’s two worlds that we move in and out of.
We move in and out of a conceptual world, which is this world of this is who I think I am. This is a concept of me. This is a concept of who I think I should be.
And of course, those concepts come from life of social conditioning and cultural context and family. So this is a concept of who I think I am as reflected back to me by the world around me. And then there’s the embodied me, the felt experience, the lived experience of me.
And I honor both because it is our makeup. We will go through the conceptual, back to the felt, back to the conceptual. And it’s my belief, it’s my experience that the yoga practice helps us understand those two worlds.
It helps us understand, oh, I’m in a concept of me right now, versus, oh, this is the felt me, and almost hold those two at the same time. I think that what’s interesting about that is that yoga itself as a practice has become very conceptual. Like, this is what it should look like.
There’s all kinds of styles of yoga. Some yoga classes are heavily focused on alignment. So if you’re going to practice triangle, it needs to look like this, and your body needs to do this.
And it becomes very intellectual, actually becomes very heady. Whereas the practice that I’ve been cultivating as a practitioner and a teacher is more mindfulness based and experiential based, that curiosity based. I’m going to come into a practice or yoga posture and just check out what’s going on, which is easier said than done because there are so many mental, emotional, and physical blocks to just that.
So the other thing that yoga does, it helps us work through those mental, physical, and emotional blockages that are preventing us from having the lived experience. Lauren, as you’re saying that because, as you know, I also do yoga. Yoga is my name, practice also.
And one of the things that I hear often, that’s a real misunderstanding in yoga. So please correct me if I have a misunderstanding about this. Also is I hear people say things like, oh, I’m having a really bad day so I’m going to go do some yoga.
Or oh, I’m feeling not so great about myself so I’m going to go do some yoga. As if yoga is meant to help the person feel better or more peaceful or more something. And that’s always been really confusing to me because my experience of yoga has been I go to my mat to develop a greater sense of who I am as I am in that moment.
Not necessarily to change my state, but rather to get to know myself, my resistance, the part that wants to flow, the part that says, lisa, why did you even show up today? And that’s more of my understanding of what yoga really is about. That it’s more about a opportunity to look and an opportunity to be with in an embodied way. Is that an accurate understanding? That’s exactly how the practices become conceptual, because I have to adhere to something that says I should not be feeling the way I’m feeling.
I need to be something else. I need to experience something else. So the yoga practice opens us up to as we are meeting ourselves, as we are even in the resistance, meeting the resistance as it is.
And if you think about yoga as the word, the translations, there’s a couple, but essentially it means to yoke or to integrate. And when I think of connection to self, it’s like, okay, I get to be present for all the parts, all the parts of self that integrate into one.
We’re talking about engaging in this experience that helps us know ourselves. That’s what I hear you saying. Why is that important for therapists and play therapists especially to consider as maybe something to engage in, right? I just smiling bit because I’m like, yeah, I could talk about this for a long time and from a lived experience, okay, so this is not me showing up to say, like, I’m any expert in this.
I bump into myself frequently. I bump into myself frequently. So if our work as therapists is to facilitate connection to self for our clients, right? And yoga is a practice of connecting to self.
So if that’s our goal, let’s just assume that’s the goal, to support our clients in connecting to themselves, then I can only do that through the connection to myself. The thing that I get really nerdy and excited about is this idea of state integration. So how do we move in and out of states, different states, different states, while staying connected to self? And one of the key lessons that I’ve learned, and I’m still learning, it’s a forever learning curve.
In my work in Cape Town, which you and I were a part of, and working with children and families there, I was working in children hospital settings where there was a lot of emotional shutdown. The state felt very rigid, and oftentimes I would show up to a session highly dysregulated, miss the child completely because I couldn’t locate myself. I was struggling and struggling to locate myself.
And I remember even talking to you one day. And folks, for those of you that are listening, I’ve studied synergic play therapy. I am a certified synergic play therapist.
And one of the tenets of play therapy is to attune to self and other and to work within the window of tolerance. And I was like, Lisa, I feel like every time I come to a session, I am outside my window of tolerance, and I want to normalize that, because at the time, I had a lot of shame around that. I was like, I should be inside my window of tolerance.
I don’t even know what that looks like right now. I don’t know what that feels like. And so the yoga practice, because we’re working with the power sensations, the vestibular, the proprioceptive, the tactile, the interoceptive systems of being able to locate ourselves in different states of being, it became a, let’s say, like food.
It became help me nurturance. Nourishing, it was like the supplement I needed to proactively, get into connection to self. So yoga can be two things, and it can be two things at the same time.
One, it can be a practice of connecting to self. So I arrive at my mat, and in this particular let’s say in this particular moment, I arrived to my mat, really flooded, really disoriented. Okay, let it in.
Let’s let that be here. The yoga practice is more about exploring that disorientation, more than it is I got to get out of it. And I know the difference in myself.
I’ve learned the difference between I’m trying to get out of this state, which just disorients me further and fragments me further. So that’s what you want to look for. Whereas when I’m able to lean in and this is the practice, we learn how to do that to the disorientation, make space for it, then from there, we can move into another state.
And this is what’s talked about in Spt. This is what we talk about when we go down the curve. For those of you that are Spt trained or in training, that we go down the curve of exploring what is okay, so why is that important? Well, because as I started to learn that and folks, it was like years, okay, this is not an overnight thing.
It’s a practice. And as I’m sure some of you have recognized, that as we work through one challenge, then another challenge comes. So it really is this learning curve.
But what I noticed was when I came to my sessions, connected to myself, whether I was hyper aroused or hypo, I was able to stay in the experience of that. I started picking up cues for my clients in my body, and one that’s really popular now. I work with adult clients, and I work with adult clients through the screen.
And my body will pick up when that person is clenching their jaw, when their shoulders start to creep up to their ear. The attunement through the mirror neuron system is just toned. It’s strengthened.
And so that’s really what yoga is offering us. It’s offering our capacity, track ourselves, track our clients, build our window of tolerance. And the flooding part, for me, it’s given me yoga.
I’ve come to my yoga mat many times, flooded many times, disoriented, and it’s been a way to hold me in that. Yeah. So beautifully said.
As you’re talking, of course, my mind is reflecting on the why do I do yoga? And for my practice, it’s usually the first thing in my day is how I start and what that has done for me. Not going to one yoga session, but over time, like when I really look at my experience over time and I love what you are talking about, how it almost heightens our own internal awareness, which talk a lot about interoception. And for those of you that are not familiar with interoception, I encourage you to go listen to the episode on this podcast series where I talk about it.
But until then, as a reminder, interoception is the part of our sensory system that gives us the cues to let us know how we’re doing. Essentially. It’s also fundamentally the part of our system.
When I am with you right now, Lauren, as we’re having this conversation, as you are talking, as you’re sharing, as you’re breathing, as you’re moving, I’m having an internal experience of you in response to you. And my interceptive system is giving me that information. And that is so key for attunement.
How can I attune to you if I cannot be aware of the subtle shifts that are happening in me? It’s not possible. And so I look at the last many years and my ability to attune has heightened my ability to sense, my ability to trust those subtle shifts and movements in my body that cue me into wait a second, what was that? Oh, wait a second. Was that, OOH, I just had a little wave of hypervigilance.
OOH, I just had a little wave of tightening in that part of my body. OOH, I just had my tummy just slightly went bloop bloop, bloop. And what is that telling me right now about what’s going on with the child? Yoga is such a profound practice.
I’m hearing you say this for the development of that. Yes. Well, it makes me think of reflective awareness as well, right? Like the information coming up and then my ability to receive it.
And I’ve heard you say and teach many times that we’re always getting like, the information is there, we’re just not aware of it. Exactly. Which I find fascinating because it also just humanizes it because I don’t have to try and get like, it’s there, it’s already there.
I just have to open my awareness to it. And again, it’s not that simple because we do have blocks to our awareness. And a lot of those blockages, the way that I’ve experienced them as physical, like locking in the diaphragm is a very popular or common one for us and mental blockages.
And I know as therapists, we all have a set of training that can become a set of shoulds. Like, oh, even this, right? I should be listening to my body right now. I don’t know what my body’s saying or the mental blocks of I have to stay in a certain paradigm.
It’s very scary to go, I’m just going to see what comes in totally and let it guide me totally. That’s exactly what we’re cultivating in the yoga practice with the Asterisks. Again, that not all for some of the listeners.
They’re like, well, I’ve never had a teacher that’s supported me in getting curious about what’s happening inside my body. That’s probably more the norm these days because yoga is taught from kind of more of an outside in, and this is how it’s got to look, and you got to move a certain way anyway. There’s a set of shoulds that block us from listening to our intuition and receiving those messages.
Absolutely. The word window tolerance just keeps sticking with me since you named it. And I think there’s a beautiful place in this conversation for as.
We get to know ourselves and develop a relationship with the different sensations, with the different states. I love that language that you’re using. Those same states emerge for us when we’re in the room with a child.
So if I’m on the mat and all of a sudden I find myself frustrated, this would be a true story. Frustrated because my hips are pretty tight, which often means that I can’t go deep into a pose, if you will, the way everyone else around me can. And so there are moments when I find frustration emerge in my awareness, and I am, in that moment, asked, Lisa, can you have a relationship with frustration? Not, can you push yourself further into the post so that you look good compared to everyone else in the room? But there’s an invitation to, how could you learn to appreciate, honor, be with frustration, and not lose yourself? Because I’m going to get frustrated in the playroom, too.
I could be in the middle of a process with a child, and part of the setup, part of what I’m being asked to experience with a child, is a deep level of frustration. If I haven’t spent time in that state consciously or mindfully, if I haven’t spent time learning how to be with, I’m going to want to run out. I’m going to want to leave that state as quickly as I possibly can.
Yeah. Yes. Well, this makes me think of when teachers say that being in class set your intention, and that drives me nuts.
But actually, from this angle of like, okay, I’m going to use yoga. So I’m going to use yoga as a tool to expand my capacity as a therapist and cultivate my interceptive pathways. We can come to yoga looking for a challenge.
Now, some folks go to yoga to, like, just relax, and that probably can there’s probably a lot of benefits to that. The way that I teach and the way that I think of yoga is that there needs to be, like, a rainbow of experience and option in the classroom. Everyone’s different.
Everyone’s body is different. So one of the things I teach is holding your arms up for three minutes, and people are like, that sucks. I don’t want to do that.
But if you pair it with the intention of, oh, this is interesting. Let me see what my relationship to this intensity is as it builds. Do I push myself through it? Can I let myself put my arms down when it gets too much? Do I start contracting in all other areas of my body just to keep my arms up? Because that’s the goal.
So there is really room for setting this intention to experience the range, the spectrum of felt experience from frustration to indifference. A lot of indifference. I know I’ve been in the yoga world kind of like 1ft in the yoga world and 1ft in therapy world for 18 years.
And it’s interesting that the yogis like their way of advancing is, well, let’s make the sequence. Really? Let’s just keep adding to the sequence so the focus becomes on really complicating the movements versus tuning into the felt experience of the practice. So we start getting more and more conceptual.
There was something else I was going to say on that note. Pause for a second. Listeners, we can pause with Lauren and take a breath and tune into our bodies to see where she wants to go.
Do you have an exercise, actually, since there is a pause here, is there an exercise or a practice that you could actually offer us right now to give us a felt sense of this discussion? Yes. So this is a Pranayama exercise that I have found really impactful on unlocking the diaphragm. Okay.
So many of us breathe just up here. We don’t have access to the diaphragm. So when you say, take a deep breath, Lisa, and you’re like, I can’t.
It’s just going this deep. Right. So that’s when we can be sure our diaphragm is probably tight.
So if you put both hands on your belly. Okay. And Lauren, since not everyone can visually see us, some people are just listening as you’re walking us through this, can you also just guide us in what this would be like if there isn’t a visual cue? Sure.
Right now I have both hands on my belly and I’m just going to talk a little bit about what’s going to happen and then guide us through it. So we’ll take a breath in and hold the breath for three counts. While we’re holding the breath, I’d like for you to explore pulling your navel in and letting it relax out a couple of times.
So it’s like pumping, called pumping the navel, moving your belly in and out while we’re holding the breath. While we’re holding the breath. So the breath is going to be in the whole time.
So we’re expanding our lung capacity here. And then on the exhale, we’ll let the exhale out through the nose and just stay with empty lungs for a count of three. All right.
So both hands on your belly and go ahead and inhale through your nose. Let your belly expand and let your chest expand. Hold your breath for three.
Pump your navel in and out. Two, one. Exhale out your nose.
You feel your belly and come in with your exhale or relax out with your exhale. Now hold empty lungs for three, two, one. Inhale.
Slowly fill up your lungs. Expand your belly and your rib cage all the way up to your collarbones. Hold for three, two pumping your navel.
One. Kind of feels weird. Exhale out your nose slowly.
Push all the air out of your lungs. We’re going to hold for three, two, one. Let’s go one more time.
Inhale slowly and notice if anything’s shifted in your capacity. If you feel like you can take a deeper breath. Now as you hold at the top of your breath all the way up to your collarbones, pump your navel in and out for three, two, one.
Exhale. Just organically letting the air out through your nose. Relax your jaw.
Hold empty lungs for a few moments. Three, two, one. Can let your hands rest back on your lap.
Awesome. All. What was it like for you? I noticed that the capacity of my lungs seemed to get larger, that there was more room for more air.
Every time we did that, I had a curiosity as it was happening. So I’m going to ask you when or where could this type of practice be useful for a play therapist? When would we do this in the session? I literally do sometimes. So with my adult clients, we take a three minute sitting practice at the start of every session.
And if I’m feeling like I can’t take a breath and I’ll just turn this pranayama practice on anywhere, anytime in the car with my husband when my daughter’s having completely losing her, you know what? I’ll do that. Yeah. In the practice with a child, it’s your breath.
You take it everywhere with you. So I get we’re increasing lung capacity. Can you explain to the listeners why is that important? Great.
Now I could take a fuller breath. What’s the implication of that for us as we head into a session? Well, it comes back to the vagus nerve and the way the vagus nerve innervates above and below the diaphragm. And in this case, we’re working with a ventral channel.
When we hold a bigger breath, we have more blood flow. We get more of that. So the vagus nerve, 80% of the vagus nerve is bringing data up from the body into the brain stem and letting the brain know, hey, we’re low breath capacity right now, or we’re high breath capacity, we’re good.
Why is that important for our work? The more capacity we have, the more we’re able to access the ventral vagus response. So that an spt. You talk about is a 1ft in, 1ft out.
We’re able to stay connected to self in whatever’s happening in us, around us. Yeah. So those deeper breaths, beautiful.
Another question that I want to get into is someone may be listening to this and think, oh gosh, I really, I’m feeling inspired by this, or gosh, I’ve never thought of yoga that way before, but I don’t really want to go start, I don’t want to go, I don’t have time. Maybe I’m in lockdown. Who knows to go do yoga classes on a regular basis? Can yoga look different than going and doing an hour class? Are there ways that we can also help listeners understand that even how the practice happens also has its own shoulds around it? Are there ways that therapists can think of embodying a yoga practice that doesn’t look like, well, now I got to go sign up for a yoga studio and buy a punch and or something like that? What could this look like? Yeah, well, Lisa, I am going to be starting my own library of classes and I will be starting to do some live classes and then create a library.
And one of my focuses is going to be on creating shorter classes. So like 20 minutes classes, sometimes an hour just is too much. I know for students that I’ve heard give me feedback about coming into yoga, they’re like their first ten minutes and they’re like, that’s enough.
That is enough for me today. So I think giving ourselves permission to and I know that it’s difficult because there’s so many preconceptions or misconceptions about yoga, giving ourselves permission to do three minutes of a cat cow stretch. I know for myself, mindfulness, meditation has been a big part of my yoga journey.
Sitting is yoga. Sitting meditation is also part of the yoga, the eight ones of yoga. And I know if I’m thinking to myself, I really should sit for 15 and then I never do it, but if I just say, okay, I’ll sit for three minutes, then I do it.
And those three minutes make all the difference in kind of hitting the pause button and taking the wind out of my sails. That tense the state integration. So oftentimes we get locked into a certain state and we’re like, no, got to stay in this state and we’re just going to keep going in the state.
And the pause button is, can you step out of it for a second and see what else is here? I have even just asked my body, body, how would you like to move? And that’s yoga. Yoga. The asana part of yoga actually only came later, much later.
Much, much later. In the last couple of hundred years, the first ever yoga posture created was a sitting posture. It was just cross legged sitting, tuning in posture.
So yoga really is the practice of being with and being with myself in a down dog, at the grocery store, in the car, in a play therapy session. That really is the yoga practice. Being with all of me, all the parts.
I love that so much. There’s so much permission in what you just said because it takes the rigidity and it takes the oh, I’m only doing yoga if it looks like this out of it. And if we can remind ourselves what you just said so beautifully, which is yoga is the practice of being with.
And I can do that at any time, anywhere. I could do that for 1 minute, I could do it for an hour, could do it for 2 hours. Right.
I get to decide how I would love to experience myself, what’s the can. I can choose where and how I want to look. So, listeners, please take what Lauren’s saying into deep consideration.
What kind of yoga practice could you create for yourself that is meaningful for you? Now, Lauren, you were just talking about these classes. I’m assuming these are online. They will be online.
Okay. So if anyone is also finding yourself inspired by Lauren and wants to know more lauren, how can they contact you so they can get more information? Where do you want people to find you? I think the best place is on Instagram. My instagram handle.
Lauren ray Porter. You’re also welcome to hand out you have my email address. I can spell it out here.
So it’s Porter. Laurenray. Laurenrae@gmail.com.
But I post little stories daily on Instagram and it shows up on Facebook as well. And that’s where I intend to advertise when my classes will be, which is going to be more in mid November of this year, 2021, for listeners that are already in 2023, hopefully by then. I’ve seen you in class.
Yeah, exactly. Laura, this has been such an eye opening, inspiring conversation. I said at the beginning that I’ve been inspired by you.
It’s just been such an honor to watch you and follow you and get to know you on your own journey. And I just love what you’re bringing to the yoga discussion. It feels fresh, it feels new.
It feels cutting edge. It feels embodied. Just really appreciate what you’re doing out in the world and how you’re wanting to serve and help us clinicians that need support in becoming more embodied ourselves.
So I just thank you so much for being here and for having this conversation with me. Yeah, you’re welcome. And thank you because you’ve been a big inspiration and Spt has been a huge inspiration for my journey.
And I really appreciate how our paths have intersected and paralleled with each other. Absolutely. So, listeners, as we come to a close, I’m going to invite everyone to take one more deep breath together.
You know that I say be well because you’re the most important toy in the playroom. And maybe we can add another layer in this conversation, which is take care of your body, take care of this aspect of you that is giving you so much information to help you be connected to yourself, be able to do what you are doing in the world, to. Develop yourself, to know yourself more fully.
So, yes, you are the most important toy in the room, and part of the toy is your own embodied experience. So, everyone be well. And I look forward to the next time that we get to have a discussion together.
