In this interview with Yoga U Online, Robin Rothenberg, founder of Essential Yoga Therapy, discusses ways in which yoga can help us become more aware of mental patterning that work against, instead of for us. Also check out Robin's upcoming webinar on Yoga U.

Yoga U: Robin, you have been practicing yoga for most of your adult life, and have taken more than six or seven different yoga teacher training programs. It’s clear that yoga is a great passion of yours! Tell us about how you got started and what spurred your enthusiasm for yoga.

Robin Rothenberg: Well, when I started practicing yoga, I was a basket case. I hurt all over, I had absolutely no energy, and I had two babies. If it were today, the condition would likely have been diagnosed as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, but back then, no one knew about those terms.

Then, I started doing yoga. My first exposure to yoga was Iyengar yoga. I started in a gentle yoga class, because that felt like all I could do. Within the next 24 hours, I experienced this wonderful surge of energy, where I didn’t feel so wiped out, and I didn’t hurt so much. So I quickly became a big fan of yoga, and then started going to classes two times a week and then three times a week.

Within a year, I felt like I was waving a little white flag saying, “Okay, I get it. I just have to do yoga for the rest of my life to feel healthy.” And at that point, I embarked on the first of something like six or seven teacher training programs, so that I could learn more, and share what I was learning and experiencing with others.

The whole experience really inspired me to look more deeply into how I was living my life, including the importance of diet and lifestyle for health. Everything affects how we feel. And that transformed just about everything – my relationships, the way I parented, everything.

Yoga U: So it sounds like your interest in yoga was inspired by your own experience of the health benefits, which is so often the case. Is that what led you to be interested in viniyoga and yoga therapy?

Robin Rothenberg: Well, I was always drawn to the people who knew a lot about the body, who did a lot of adaptations of yoga poses, and who could give very grounded explanations for why one person would need to do the pose in one way and another person another way. That always made sense to me—there just isn’t a one-size fits all approach to yoga.

In my earlier years, the people who had the most impact on me were Judith Hanson Lasater  and Ramanand Patel, who is a senior Iyengar yoga teacher, who also is very adept with yoga therapeutics.

Then I went to the first Yoga Journal conference in ’92, and I sat in on a Sutra class  with Gary Kraftsow.  Gary’s class was on the Yoga Sutras, and he was talking about the importance of our willingness to transform habitual patterns that lead to suffering and about cultivating the capacity for self-awareness about how our thought patterns lead to suffering. He was talking about how yoga is a means to see ourselves more fully, with appreciation, gratitude, and acknowledgment that it’s not all about us, and that we are supported by this source of universal energy.

As Gary spoke, the tears started flowing and I just felt like, okay, this is what I’ve always felt yoga is about, but none of my teachers have been talking about this. They’re just telling me I have to put my pinkie finger in this position in Downward Dog, like that’s what it’s about. And it’s not about that for me.

I realized that I really wanted more of that deeper understanding of the inner transformation of yoga, beyond the musculoskeletal positions, the postures, and even the fine tuning of adaptation of posture. I wanted more of that.

That was a life-changing moment for me, a real watershed moment. At that point, I was a certified Iyengar teacher, and I started studying with Gary and went through his viniyoga training. He and I worked very closely together; I went through his therapist training as well, and assisted him with his therapist training as it was evolving. And of course, we co-wrote the protocol for Karen Sherman’s study on yoga for back pain together. So the transition from Iyengar to Viniyoga was a huge turning point in my yoga practice and teaching.

Yoga U: On your website, you say that we all have a responsibility for reducing suffering in ourselves and then going on to assist in the healing of others. Do you feel that yoga offers a particularly useful path to be able to do that?

Robin Rothenberg: I’m a big believer that yoga is an inside job. As yoga teachers, we’re practitioners and students first, teachers second. The best teachers are the most avid students, who are doing their own personal work.

Studying the Yoga Sutras, working with pranayama and meditation, and working with Vedic chanting really helped me personally to shake me free of beliefs and patterns that were causing a lot of suffering for me and for the people I lived with. It helped me become wiser and more compassionate with myself, much more open and positive about things.

Yoga U: Can you share an example of that experience?

Robin Rothenberg: Well, I’m going to tell a story from two different perspectives, yet both are true. The first perspective is that I had a lousy childhood. My mother was clinically depressed; my father, was a driven perfectionist with bad temper, who tended to be physically and verbally abusive. That’s the environment I grew up in. I could never get it right, never be good enough, all of that. I carried that with me through my twenties and through part of my thirties.

The other story is that my mother, by the time she reached middle age and I had young children, was the most loving and wonderful grandmother.  She had really grown tremendously.

At one point, she said to me, “You know, Robin, I have done everything I can to make up for what I didn’t give you when you were a child. I know I wasn’t the best mom, but I’m doing the best I can now to provide a loving support for you and the girls. If it’s not good enough, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pull out of the relationship, because it’s too painful for me. There’s nothing more I can do.”

And at that moment, I realized I was the one who was holding on to the past and not allowing her or our relationship to evolve and be in the present.

In the same way, my father is now one of the most loving, supportive, compassionate people. He’s one of my best friends. My granddaughter, his great-granddaughter, adores him. My children adore him. My husband adores him. He’s a very loving and wonderful man and is deeply apologetic for years that he pushed himself and he pushed all of us kind of over the edge.

So there is a tremendous amount of growth in them, and in my ability to make peace.  It’s not that the past isn’t true, but I don’t hold on to that. I don’t hold a sense of being a victim of that childhood or being an abused person. Overall, I feel the compassion that has grown in me with the realization that we have the capacity within us to be the best of people and the worst of people.

The truth is that we’re complex. The more compassion and warmth and honesty that we bring to the table, the more we can truly help ourselves, support ourselves in transformation as well as other people.

Yoga U: Yoga has this wonderful concept of creating space or stepping into the witness, where we increasingly are able to look at our own emotional and mental reactive patterns.

Robin Rothenberg: Exactly. I don’t think I would’ve really understood what my mother was saying if I hadn’t started yoga at that point. I had the ability to say, “Oh, I’m not holding present time reality. I’m living in a past reality and she’s inviting me to join her in the present. If I look at her through the lens of the present, there’s nothing wrong here. This is really a beautiful relationship that is evolving.”

Yoga U: In your upcoming webinar on Yoga U, you’re focusing on how to deal with those patterns of emotional angst, worry, stress, and anxiety that we all struggle with from time to time. You say that certain yoga techniques can help rewire your set points so you’re less likely to react to a stimulus the way you would previously have flown off the handle. Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Robin Rothenberg: I teach from the foundation principles of the Yoga Sutras. The Yoga Sutras are all about how to transform our mind, so that we stop creating suffering at the root source, which is in the field of the mind.

Looking at everything through that lens, we can see how our perception colors our reality. As that famous yogi, Mark Twain, said, “We see the world not as it is but as we are.”

Asana can be done in a very introspective way to help us to see our patterns. Our breathing patterns are even more subtle, however, and are more closely linked to our nervous system. And of course, our thought patterns are even more subtle.

When we become more observant of our breath patterns, our thought patterns, and our emotional patterns, we can start to see how some of those patterns really are like pouring kerosene on the fire, as opposed to cooling the fire of our emotions down.

We often have these emotional responses to things that are well beyond what is really being called for in the moment. The yoga practices are about regulating our own nervous system, taking charge of our nervous system, recognizing when things are revving us up unnecessarily, and then using our breathing practices or physical movement practices to discharge that tension, whether that means doing your yoga asana practices or going for a vigorous walk or run.

And, it’s one thing to discharge that physical tension, but you can go deeper and say, “What are the thought patterns that are circulating, that are continuing to throw kerosene on this fire, as opposed to cool it down?” That can help us make more conscious choices about how we really want to proceed, and get us back to our innate wisdom.  I strongly believe that is what Patanjal’s Yoga Sutras and the ancient wisdom teachings are all about—helping us to find our way back to our own innate wisdom.

Yoga U: How will you work with people in the webinar to help create a framework for working more consciously with those kind of mental or emotional patterns?

Robin Rothenberg: In my own experience, I find that that education about how the practices of yoga impact the physiology, the nervous system, the digestive system, the cardiovascular system, and the respiratory system are a useful tool to feel more empowered in utilizing the practices of yoga. It’s useful to know why these practices feel so good; it’s because you’re actually changing the physiology.

So we’ll take a look at what happens in the brain when we get hijacked by emotion, and how yoga practices interrupt those processes and get us back on track.

We will go one step further by working deeply with some specific practices that I’ll be outlining in the video that accompanies the webinar, where we will play with this whole idea of perspective. We’ll be exploring how using our yoga practices to keep our nervous system calm, we can actually revisit some of those emotional trigger points, but from a slightly different perspective, and start to open up the space around how we’re holding feelings.

I’ll also be sharing the teachings about Yoga Nidra. My new CD, Soothing the Spirit, which is a Yoga Nidra specifically targeted to reduce anxiety. That is a little redundant, because Yoga Nidra in general is really oriented towards calming the nervous system and reduce anxiety.

We’re stepping away from the things that make us feel anxious and then stepping towards them to start to build our resilience. Yoga is not about rainbows and sunshine. It’s really about cultivating courage and developing our resilience so that we can handle the things that are challenging with more equanimity. It’s not about just putting ourselves in a little bubble room, where we only have the vegetarians and the soft music and the people who agree with us. It’s about being able to step out into the world with a real sense of centeredness, grace, receptivity, and not feeling fearful or vulnerable, because we’re solid inside.

That’s what I’m hoping to share in the webinar –how to pull on specific yoga practices to work with the mind-body connection to reformat our thinking and create a broader base of understanding, and a greater capacity to take on the adversity that is a part of life. Life has a lot of challenges. So we want to help ourselves to have the great flexibility of mind that enables us to ride the waves of life and not get pulled under.

So in short, the webinar will provide a resource for people, who are interested in learning more about the possibilities that yoga has both for health and healing, and for growth and transformation in life.

Leslie Howard is a long-term yoga teacher, who specializes in women’s health issues - particularly pertaining to the pelvic floor. In this interview with Yoga U Online she shares her insights into how to maintain lifelong pelvic floor health. Also check out Leslie's webinar on Yoga U.

Yoga U Online. On your website, you say that stabilizing, stretching, and softening the pelvic floor helps to create the correct foundation for every movement in the body. That’s a pretty bold statement! What exactly do you mean by that?

Leslie Howard: Well, the pelvic floor is really the foundation of the whole body. The pelvic floor is sitting at the bottom of our torso, so it literally forms the floor for all our organs - especially for women, because of the way women’s pelvises are designed. Women are designed to have a baby’s head come through that pelvis. So the interior outlet of the pelvis for women is actually larger than in a man. And that creates instability.

Now instability, interestingly enough, can manifest in different ways. What I found is that the prevailing belief is that if you’re female, you have a weak and loose pelvic floor. Particularly after women have a couple babies they’re weak in the pelvic floor and may become incontinent and develop other long-term issues like prolapse, and so on.

But now that I’ve been teaching and studying this as long as I have, I have found that this is actually not necessarily always true. You can have quite the opposite problem, which can wreak just as much havoc. There are all kinds of other problems that could happen. And when the pelvic floor is not working correctly, then again your foundation - your true foundation - is not supporting you in all of your movements throughout your day. It’s a strong statement, but in my experience, that’s the case.

Yoga U Online: What are some of the symptoms that women might want to look out for that could indicate a pelvic floor issue or pelvic floor weakness?

Leslie Howard: Well, in the general population, the largest problem is incontinence for women with a weak pelvic floor. After that, I would say the most common problem among in women is pelvic pain from too much tone in the pelvis. This is a new concept; I don’t think it’s generally accepted that women can have too much tone. I get asked by women in my workshops, “What? I can be too tight in that area?” I would say those two problems are the most common, and then followed by hysterectomies - but that’s a whole other subject. There are somewhere between 500 and 600,000 hysterectomies performed every year in the United States. And the fallout from a woman getting a hysterectomy can be very, very challenging.

Yoga U Online: So the hysterectomy would typically occur if there is a prolapse. Is that correct?

Leslie Howard: That is correct. A prolapse is a very common reason to have a hysterectomy. In a prolapse, most frequently the uterus is dropping, and it usually drops towards the opening of the vagina. There are degrees of prolapse, but, if you’re in an earlier stages of a prolapse, it can often be completely be fixed with pelvic floor exercises. However, many in the medical community have the attitude that well, if you’re done with your uterus, i.e. if you’re done having children, then why not just take it out?

However, there are a lot of complications for women’s health after a hysterectomy. And often, surgeons don’t talk to you about that. I had really severe fibroids and the doctors said, “Ah, you’re 45. Let’s just take your uterus out.” And I was like, “You know, I think I want to hold on to my uterus.” I had to go to a couple different doctors to find one that would actually try to save my uterus, and I’m happy to say I have it now.

But women aren’t as informed as they could be. Maybe some medical people aren’t as informed as they could be. There are other ways to deal with a person’s problems than just to take out their organs.

Yoga U Online: Issues like incontinence and prolapse become much more common as women get older, why is that?

Leslie Howard: Muscle tone all over the body lessens as we age. We lose 5% of our muscle tone with every decade of our life simply via aging. The number of babies you’ve had can contribute to it as well; it doesn’t matter whether you’ve had your children vaginally or through C-section. Studies have shown that it’s not the labor that makes the pelvic floor weak, it’s carrying the baby on the pelvic floor – especially in the third trimester.

Also, being overweight can contribute to pelvic floor problems. Posture is another huge factor, the way you sit and stand has a big impact on the long-term health of the pelvic floor. That is something I talk about a lot in my workshop. There is a correct way to sit and stand, and if you have any pelvic floor problems, you really need to pay attention to that.

You can do your exercises for 30 minutes or an hour a day, but then you’re sitting for 12 hours a day in your car, your office, at home. Many of us are sitting for hours a day, and if you’re sitting really poorly, you could do pelvic floor exercises every day for an hour, but those other 12 hours when you’re not sitting well are going to win out. It’s a numbers game.

Yoga U Online: In subtle yoga anatomy, the pelvic floor is typically associated with the root chakra, Muladhara. Imbalances in this chakra is said to cause issues around sense of security, grounding, and centering in life. Is this something that you see coming into play when people begin working with the pelvic floor?  And if so, how?

Leslie Howard: Well, you can certainly look at pelvic floor issues from the perspective of blocked prana or issues associated with the muladhara chakra. But which comes first?  A tight pelvis or a feeling of insecurity in the world?  We all bring karma with us.  I prefer to approach my work from the view point that we all need to develop a healthy loving relationship with ourselves and the pelvis is a good place to start! If you heal your pelvis, without a doubt, you will have a more secure place in the world and be more grounded.

Yoga U Online: What is the approach to working with pelvic floor issues, which you will discuss in you upcoming workshop on Yoga U?

Leslie Howard: I use a multi-pronged, holistic approach when I work with people for their pelvic floor issues. You can’t do just one thing to fix a problem. It’s not an easy fix. You have to look at the whole picture.

Yoga U Online: What does yoga have to offer for pelvic floor health?  What is it that you feel makes yoga a useful tool in this respect?

Leslie Howard: Well, again, it’s not one thing, it’s not a quick fix. I got a call from a major medical foundation, and they said, “We’ve heard about your work, and we were wondering if you could give us a list of poses that work for the pelvic floor.” And I replied, “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t just give you a list of poses; it’s what you’re doing in the poses.”

It’s cultivating awareness that is healing. The comments I hear the most in my workshops from women who are trying to find their own pelvic floor muscles is, “This is so subtle. This is so subtle.” But yet, as you start to get more aware of it, you realize it’s not so subtle. And you start saying to yourself, “How come I never noticed this before?”

So that’s number one. It’s not just a pose. It’s how you’re doing the pose, and where your awareness is in the pose. And some poses are more conducive to finding the pelvic floor than others.

Number two, “What does yoga offer to the pelvic floor?” It’s the mind-body connection, the breathing. Another thing I see all the time with women with pelvic floor problems is that they are not breathing well. They’re chest breathers, and they’re not breathing into their abdomens. It’s not that chest breathing is wrong, per se. But diaphragmatic breath has been shown again and again to be the most efficient way to breathe. You get the most oxygen, the most benefits, if you breathe into your abdomen.

And that goes back to our cultural messaging of how women today are told that their belly should be flat and hard. I’m not saying not to tone and exercise, but the abdominal exercises taught at the gym involve doing tons of crunches.  Abdominal muscle toning, if not taught mindfully, can actually cause a prolapse or incontinence.

If you’re not even aware that you have a pelvic floor and you’re obsessed with getting a flat belly, you’re putting all this intra abdominal pressure down into your pelvic floor. And if you have a weakness there, then you’re going to get pushed to the limit. That’s another thing to keep in mind when doing abdominal exercises – do them in a particular way so that you’re not putting too much pressure on your pelvic floor.

Yoga U Online: What experiences have you had working with women with various pelvic floor problems? Did you see women recover from incontinence or at least improve from a prolapse?

Leslie Howard: Absolutely. A lot of women come to my workshop just for general knowledge, which is great. But a lot of women come because they’ve been struggling with one of the issues we’ve talked about and have not been so happy with the medical community. Kegel exercises are still the most recommended, or really the only recommended exercise for women if there’s a problem. It’s like a catch-all. If you have a problem there, the doctors say, “Do your Kegel exercises.”

So when they come to me, we take time with the muscles, we talk about it and we dissect it a little bit more.  I’ve gotten emails from women that said that they were looking at this newer surgery called bladder pinning where they literally take a prolapsed bladder and tie it up with a mesh sling. I’ve had a couple women looking at that, and then they wrote me after my workshop and said their doctors couldn’t believe how much they had improved their condition. They were able to lift their bladder back up with toning exercises.

I’ve had a lot of women who had pelvic pain and said my workshop was transformative. They didn’t realize that, number one, a too-toned pelvic floor might’ve been the problem. And number two, they didn’t know how to address it. Again, as a culture, we want to do something. If something’s wrong, we want to do something. And a lot of times, actually, we need to undo something. We hear that principle in yoga all the time. Yoga is all about slowing down and not pushing so hard and cultivating subtlety.

Yoga U Online: Lastly, Leslie, tell us a few things about what we will be doing in the two-part online course you’re preparing for us.

Leslie Howard: My biggest goal is to create awareness - awareness that your pelvis needs attention, how to figure out if you might be on one end of the spectrum or the other end, and then how to identify your muscles.

There are three layers, three primary muscle groups of the pelvic floor. And I have a couple different ways to try to access them. It’s all about awareness - how to find your pelvic floor muscles, how to diagnose if you’re on one end of the spectrum or the other, and then of course, taking into account cultural messaging.

Yoga U Online: Do you have different videos for the different types of issues that people have?

Leslie Howard: Yes, I’ll help them to figure out which end of the spectrum they’re on. And then when they know that, the video yoga practice offers three very short sequences targeting those issues. That’s three practices for each end of the spectrum that they can follow and incorporate into their own practice or do it every day or every other day.

Yoga U Online: Thank you so much for your time and this wonderful knowledge you have accumulated. We hope that you will be reaching millions of women. I know it’s a very big issue for many women, particularly as they get older, around 50. And we’re really looking forward to your webinar on Yoga U Online in March.

Leslie Howard: Thank you, I really look forward to connecting with your students.

Looking and sounding far younger than her 74 years, Jane Fonda talks about the “third act” of life in this wonderful TED video.

In her speech at the recent TEDxWomen conference, Jane Fonda points out that in the last generation life expectancy has increased by 30 years—the equivalent of an entire second adulthood. Rejecting the idea of age as pathology or as a peak followed by inevitable decline, Fonda urges her audience to take make the most out of their third act by living with authenticity and wholeness.

Hip deep in her own third act and loving it, Fonda offers many insights into the opportunities for growth offered by these added years. By reflecting on the first two acts and deepening their understanding of the past a person can change their whole relationship with their past and thus, with themselves. This, Fonda says, is how wisdom is gained.

Watch the whole inspiring talk below:

The medicine of the future will have to focus on healing the epidemic of lifestyle-related diseases by changing behavior, says Tom Myers, author of Anatomy Trains in this interview with Yoga U Online.

Yoga, bodywork and other therapies that tap into the transformative potential of the body’s fascial network have an important role to play in this process. In this interview with Yoga U Online, Tom explores the transformative potential of the body’s fascial network and its implications for the future of yoga and yoga therapy. Also Check out Tom Myers' webinar on

Fascial Fitness—An Emerging Evolution in Movement Science 

Yoga U Online: Tom, you trained with Ida Rolf, the founder of Structural Integration, before developing the notion of the anatomy of connections. How did you get interested in this area?

Tom Myers: Well, Ida Rolf was giving a demonstration in Santa Monica, close to where I lived. I went there with a friend of mine, and as it happened, Ida chose my friend as a model to work on. He was one of these people, who looks normal when you look at them from the front, but when you look at them from the side, you can hardly see him because his chest was collapsed so badly, his breast bone was nearly on his back.

In 45 minutes, Ida Rolf took a hold of his ribcage and changed its shape so that he was visibly deeper from front to back. His voice changed. Even his emotional affect changed. He became, if you will, a deeper person. I was so impressed at the level of change that this woman could generate in a short time that I thought, “Hmm, I really want to do this.”

Yoga U Online: Ida Rolf developed her work in part inspired by yoga, is that correct?

Tom Myers:  Yes, she started studying yoga in the 20’s in New York with a kinda rogue tantric guy named Pierre Bernard. She studied yoga for many years. At the time, yoga was totally unheard of in the States. So she never thought that there would be the kind of resurgence of yoga in the West the way there has been.

When she created Rolfing, she was asking, “How do I create a yogic experience in a western way?” Rolfing or Structural Integration was aligned with the goals of yoga as “a physical system that enriches the student’s body, mind and spiritual well-being through an understanding of structural balance.”

When Ida first started working with people, she started putting them into yoga positions and looked at where they weren’t stretching properly. She would then grab the tissue and start stretching it. Later, as she got in contact with osteopathy, it evolved into table work. But it was still trying to get that experience of yoga, still trying to get that fundamental thing of Hatha yoga which is, if you change the body, you can change the person.

That’s not an idea that we’ve really gone with in the West. We mostly thought, “Oh, well, if you change your mind, you could change your body.” We think of it in terms of stress; you have to reduce the stress in your mind, and then you can reduce the stress in your body. However, we all know now that if you reduce the stress in your body, you will reduce the stress in your mind as well.

So the theme in my approach to body work over these past 30 years has been to do just that – reduce the amount of structural or gravitational or oppositional stress that was going on in the body, so that the person could be more themselves.

Yoga U Online: Part of your work has been to draw attention to the all-important, but much overlooked role played by fascia in the human body. What is the role of fascia in this picture?

Tom Myers: Fascia is that network that connects it all together. We are made up of somewhere between 70 to 100 trillion cells. That’s 70 trillion cells acting together. Most of your cells are little packets of water, like little water balloons. Something has to hold all those 70 trillion cells together. That’s the fascia.

Fascia—or connective tissue—is what glues us together. So, it’s a broad use of the word fascia. What we’re really talking about is the body-wide extracellular net that holds us together.

Yoga U Online: Yet, as it is turning out, fascia is more than just the ‘wrapping’ of the body?

Tom Myers: Yes, what’s really exciting is the new research on fascia that’s coming out.  Up till recently, everybody was thinking of fascia as just the packing material that goes around the other tissues. Now, we’re finding out that it’s a regulatory system in the same way that your circulatory system is a regulatory system and your nervous system is the regulatory organ balancing your inside and your outside world.

The fascial system is also a regulatory system. It has an organizational dimension that keeps us in the shape that we’re in. It’s that role that’s being explored now, which is really exciting.

Yoga U Online: Fascia is often referred to as the ‘organ of form.’ Does it play a wider role as a regulatory system than that?

Tom Myers:Yes, it’s the organ of form, but it goes far beyond that.  In the development of the embryo, it’s actually the connective tissue cells that are organizing the brain. The brain cells of the neo-cortex are originally born in the ventricles in the middle of the brain. And they have to migrate out to the surface of the brain. That’s not very far in a little tiny little embryo, but it’s incredibly long, as far as the cell is concerned.

So how do the cells which get born in the middle of the brain know where to go on the surface of the brain? The answer is that they put their little ‘arms’ around a connective tissue fiber and ride that connective tissue fiber out to the surface of the brain and are deposited in just the right spot.

The same thing holds for organs. The fascial bags for organs develop before the organ develops. So there’s a bag for your liver. And then the cells that are going into that bag become liver cells.

Yoga U Online: Fascia also seems to be linked to the potential for mind-body transformation in a major way. You referred to your friend who was transformed when Ida Rolf worked on him; you said not only his posture and the way he appeared changed, but he himself was transformed.

Tom Myers: Yes. I’ve seen that again and again in my practice. You make these changes and the person changes. The nervous system, the circulatory system, and the fascial system are never separate in a human being. They develop together and they work together. So when the fascial system changes, everything else changes.

For example, think of someone who’s depressed. The image that comes to mind is somebody with their chest collapsed—you certainly don’t think of someone with their head held high and their chest stuck out.

So you can approach depression from a neurological point of view, and look for things in their past that contribute to their feeling of depression. You can approach it from a chemical point of view, and say that serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac or Zoloft might be helpful, because there’s a chemical effect, when someone is depressed.

But depression also has a fascial effect as well. It also is expresses as a specific look and shape of the body. You really don’t see people with their chest puffed out going around saying, “I’m so depressed.”

So we’ve gone after the talk therapy solutions to depression, and we have more recently gone after the chemical reactions to depression. But I think we really ought to be looking at how people hold themselves and how they shape themselves.

That relates to what we talked about before, fascia as the organ of form. We have to change the connective tissue, change things at that level. And that in turn changes people’s breathing, and when their breathing changes, their chemistry changes and their outlook changes.

So, again, people have been paying a lot of attention to the chemistry and neurology of conditions like depression, and not much attention to shape. But shape is hugely important, and that’s where yoga and bodywork really shine.

Yoga U Online: What are the implications for health professionals and movement teachers of looking at the body as a functional whole, rather than as an assembly of muscles, bones, organs and biochemicals?

Tom Myers: We’re really just looking at the very beginning of the potential offered by body work, yoga, Rolfing, osteopathy, and so on—all these body therapies contributing to this realm.. This next century is going to be the century of the body, because this is the century in which we need to learn to change behavior.

We need to learn how to get people to change behavior, because so many of the big diseases are all lifestyle-related. At the heart of big, epidemic conditions like heart disease and diabetes really are behavioral, lifestyle issues. These are conditions where people need to change their habits more than they need to take the medicine. There’s plenty of medicine on the market but that’s not really solving the problem. That’s just pushing back the symptoms.

Medicine is great at changing chemistry, but it is lousy at changing behavior. And bodyworkers movement therapists, and yoga teachers may not administer things through the mouth or through needles—but we’re wonderful at changing behavior! We have to get better at it. But this is basically our realm: How to change behavior or to change movement, which is behavior.

We’re just starting to really examine this potential now. Yoga was very small until quite recently. Pilates was very small until quite recently. And bodywork was quite limited until very recently. Going forward, I think we will see these unite into a very powerful combination of manual therapy and movement, where everybody is speaking one language.

On that note, to get yoga the seat at the table that it deserves, yoga teachers need to learn the language of anatomy. If yoga people are just talking about energy and how everything is connected, then they really won’t get a seat at the table, because anatomy is the language that everybody speaks. And I’m talking about bringing orthopedists and physiotherapists and athletic trainers and yoga people and body workers all to the same table and developing something that is very strong and very powerful.

And I think yoga has a lot to say about that. So I’m really hoping that yoga will improve its training standards and improve its ability to talk its walk so that the value that yoga has will make it into this new science.

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Fascial Fitness—An Emerging Evolution in Movement Science