Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Yoga For Eating Disorder Recovery

“OMG, have you SEEN Madonna’s arms? Apparently she’s quit the gym and it’s all down to yoga”

“Geri Halliwell is half the size she used to be since she’s taken up daily yoga”

“Yoga changed my life and my body”…

Yup, my introduction to yoga in the early 2000s came in the shape of Hello! and Closer magazine splashes when, until then, yoga had pretty much been a small niche practice that no one really understood until the likes of Madonna, Geri and Kate Moss sparked a glittery uprising. It came at the tail end of a major fitness craze where women and girls like me spent evenings prancing around in aerobics classes doing grapevines to Physical, Physical, I Wanna Get Physical and leotards were a real thing. And then behold, the most influential woman in modern pop culture was spotted with a rolled up mat under her buff and sculpted arm and her muscular body became a cultural conversation. Despite the fact that Madonna and Geri Halliwell also spoke about the spiritual and mental benefits of yoga, I was sold at the sight of their sculpted physiques. So, needless to say, when I went to my first ever yoga class in my early 20s, I had a rude awakening, and not of the spiritual kind. 

Without a glimmer of glamour in the nippy and cheerless church hall, sleepy looking women spoke in whispers as they rolled out their mats and serenely occupied supine positions, seemingly ready for a snooze rather than ready to hone their inner Madge. 

“Connect with your breath” invited the yoga teacher, “come into your body”, “awaken your chakras”, “inhale, exhale”,  “flow, connect”,  “be at one”..

What was this?! I was here to change my body and my life, Halliwell-style, not hyperventilate and what’s a chakra anyway? The class continued in this utterly risible (on my part) manner, where we were instructed to Salute the Sun rather than tone our buns, and invert on all fours rather than sculpt our cores. I left, disgruntled, concluding that I’d burned more calories trying to pronounce the word Savasana. Evidently, I was light-years away from honouring the Eight (toned) Limbs of Yoga and there I frigidly remained Like A (yoga) Virgin for the next decade.

Yoga in the Western world has been on a seminal journey since those days and is now an eye wateringly lucrative industry. There’s a huge conversation around the authenticity and cultural-appropriation of the practice in the West, and whilst I remain open minded to all views on this, frankly I’m not going to indulge. It may have been Madonna’s biceps that opened my yogic account all those years ago, and that may have been incredibly misinformed, but really, who cares? I returned to the practice some years later, with a little more age-related wisdom, and a little less ego, and that’s when the penny dropped. That’s when yoga became my thing. And that’s when my healing journey came to fruition and all the seemingly disparate elements of recovery unfolded and came together. In union. Yoked. Mind, body and soul. 

But in the spirit of keeping it real, I’m not going to speak about yoga with too much grandiose or evangelism. I want to keep it uncomplicated, because the real benefits of yoga can all be felt in the simple things. Not the tangled poses or even the somewhat verbose philosophy.  I’m honestly not even that good at yoga! I can’t do a handstand and you won’t find pictures of me Insta-bending on a beach. Yoga doesn’t require talent and it doesn’t care what your body looks like doing it. However, I would like to share with you the ways in which practicing  undecorated yoga facilitated my recovery and why I believe it could be a cardinal tool in ED recovery programs. 

It happened gradually. Like most pivotal things in life, there’s rarely that one breakthrough moment. But each and every time I practiced, I got off my mat feeling better than when I got on it. And with each and every class I attended, there was at least one thing that just resonated. That got me nodding, or smiling, and gave me that ephemeral sense of clarity. Of course the teacher who guides you makes a huge difference to your experience and call it fate or call it fortune but I happened to land my mat in the class of a genuinely magical instructor in a studio that just felt like home. 

Forget the aesthetics of it all. Forget Insta-Yoga. Forget the gear and the brands. Forget the pretence. An authentic and bonefide space to come together and practice yoga is one that is non-judgemental and accepting of everybody. Every Body. Because yoga cares little about what you look like, it cares little about success and it cares little about what you own or what you can do. Yoga cares about what you are cultivating in that moment, through your action and your intention. Yoga cares about your purpose. That’s not always something that is articulated or explained but it is something that is felt. In a warm and unprejudiced and open-minded environment, we are able to let go a little, be ourselves, release insecurities and worry less about what people think of us. Yoga is a leveller. 

Personally, surrounding myself in an environment that didn’t judge, that didn’t care if my stomach was flat or if my arse was curvy, was so liberating. 

The Minded Institute carried out some research on this:

“Using yoga for eating disorders can be beneficial in a variety of ways. Initial research suggests that yoga can be helpful in the formation of a healthy body image, with one study focusing on 12 weeks of yoga for women between the ages of 18-30. In this case, the study participants tended to see a reduction in body-image dissatisfaction and spent less time focused on their appearance. With body-image dissatisfaction resulting in a heightened risk of developing an eating disorder, this is an encouraging indication that yoga could be helpful in prevention and recovery.”

Yoga gently encouraged me to let that ego-based stuff go, little by little. Eventually, I realised I could cultivate the feeling of freedom off of my mat too. Because after a while you see it’s not actually about the environment or other people, it’s about how we view ourselves. I would ask myself, does it really matter how my body looks? Or does it matter more who I am, underneath it all? 

It’s certainly true for an ED and I’d imagine it’s true for most mental health disorders, that somewhere along the way we lose ourselves. In the midst of all the chaos and suffering, our sense of self becomes blurred. So that question – does it matter more who I am becomes well, who am I? I was cleaved from my true self, having spent years living exclusively in my head, with one myopic focus, I had no idea who I was anymore. 

Yoga asks a lot of us, right?! During my practice, I was being asked who I was constantly. I found the best way to figure this out is to ask yourself how do I feel? How do I feel today physically? How do I feel today emotionally? A credible teacher will invite you to ask this of yourself regularly in class. It’s the first step to nurturing the relationship with ourselves, and equally importantly, is learning not to judge the answer. To remain neutral, to simply accept the feeling for what it is. Even if it’s ugly. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s messy. And it will be all those things, for that is the human experience!

The ability to access deeper feelings is a crucial step in ED recovery, and another lesson I received on my yoga mat. 

Bessel Van Der Kolk, psychiatrist, researcher and author has spent his professional life studying the impact of emotional trauma on the physical body. In his best-selling book, The Body Keeps The Score, he conducts studies on yoga therapy with his patients. He concludes “the only way we can change the way we feel is by becoming aware of our inner experience and learning to befriend what is going on inside ourselves.”

Feel it to heal it. Basically. 

But we don’t want to feel pain. Humans avoid feeling deep emotions at all costs. It’s in our genetic programming. Being vulnerable is not rewarded in nature and evolutionary survival instincts still govern. Being vulnerable equates to death. Quite literally. And research has shown that emotional pain is processed in a similar manner in the brain as physical pain. Our neurological circuitry overlaps and doesn’t know the difference. So we block our painful emotions, very simply, for survival. We instinctively supress difficult feelings and we avoid facing our life’s problems in a bid to stay alive! But there’s a problem with this approach. Suppressed emotions ignite the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) way more than expressing unpleasant ones do. The SNS response, better known as the ‘fight or flight’ response, is a reaction that triggers stress hormones, elevates the heart rate, increases body tension and hyper-alertness, in order to help you out of danger. In other words, painful feelings and unhelpful thoughts cause a visceral response and put our bodies in a state of physical stress. Our unprocessed pain not only remains stuck in our body but it becomes toxic.

What we resist, persists.

The only solution is to access and feel our emotions. The only way to be free from the grip of the pain is also to free the pain itself, by bringing it close and then letting it go. Acknowledging it, accepting it and as Van Der Kolk says, by befriending it. Not all at once, not at full force, but little by little. As much as you can tolerate in one sitting, you then retreat and return again when you are ready.

Yoga was the vessel that enabled this for me. There was so much supressed pain and repressed emotions, from childhood, those feelings were just too big to deal with, so I had subconsciously blocked them my whole life. Nobody gets away with that. For me, the emotional pain of being abandoned by my father as a baby and then repeatedly rejected by him as I grew up, became an internal poison. It expressed itself physically until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It was either going to consume me altogether or I was going to make peace with it and set it free. 

You’ll be relieved to know it’s not all as heavy as it sounds! It’s not like every yoga class turned into a soul-stirring blubbering therapy session, sometimes it was just a bloody good stretch and that’s also quite alright. It’s also not always conscious. That’s the beauty of yoga. When we move and breathe in specific ways, we can give ‘stuck energy’ (emotions) the opportunity to shift, flow and eventually dissipate. Emotions can be understood as ‘energy in motion’ (e-motion) so we need to let them flow to release them.

There are certain areas in the body that are known to hold emotion, and the pelvis is one of them, particularly for women. Physically, pelvic pain can be felt around the hip and the hip flexors (the psoas muscle) and if you’ve ever been to a yoga class or two, you’d have heard of a hip opener! In yogic thought, the psoas muscles embody our survival instincts and our primal urges to run from danger. Think about where they are located and what they do; they tighten and contract when the body goes into high alert ready to run or fight. The psoas could well be called the flight or fight muscle of the human anatomy. 

I enter the dimly lit and toasty studio one winter’s evening and the calming smell of sandalwood envelopes my senses. Greeted by warm smiles and the sound of gentle acoustics, I immediately relax and breathe a sigh of relief to be here. The theme of the class is water, which, representing the element, encourages fluidity and flow and anatomically, focuses on the pelvis and hips. Cue a class of big hip openers! My favourite. The ethereal teacher guides us gently through a juicy and graceful flow and speaks about letting go of things or thoughts that no longer serve us. The class culminates in the peak pose, which today is Pigeon Pose (or Eka Pada Rajakapotasana). The pose is an extremely effective hip opener that addresses both areas, with the front leg working in external rotation stretching the outer hip and the back leg in position to stretch the psoas, thighs, groin and piriformis. 

I get into position and try to sink into the pose. I know we are going to be here for some time and I mentally prepare for that. My hips are generally awfully tight so I feel the twinges and complaints in my body immediately. Inhale, exhale, I try to slow my breathing down and I melt further into my body. The teacher asks us to stay with the sensations arising and continue to breathe. The class is still and the sound of our collective breath is auricular, we breathe deeply and consciously into ourselves. The twinges around my hip escalate into a throb and the grumbles in my glute become growls. There is an increasing sensation of heat all around my pelvis and the voice in my head is telling me to move, to get up, to get out. To make it stop. “Stay with it” the teacher says, “welcome it” she advises, “just a few more breaths” she reassures* (*lies). The discomfort is discernible, mentally and physically. But I stay there, despite my impulses, and I just breathe into the pain. I feel it. I don’t run. I breathe. I stand by the feelings. And sure enough, after some time, they begin to ease. They gradually soften and the discomfort lifts. And as the physical sensation eases, rising from the pit of my stomach is a big wave of emotion. Soaring from somewhere within, a ballooning vesicle of tears begins to ascend my body, creating a tumescent lump in my throat that I simply cannot swallow. It spills out of my eyes and down my face. I cry quietly into my mat as I hear the teacher’s soothing words “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

Take that as you will, but I have no doubt that this was trauma leaving my body. During recovery, I experienced many similar moments in my yoga practice that were equally visceral, raw and soothing. As an addendum, I have since become a yoga teacher myself and I can safely say that in each and every class of this kind that I have taught, at least one person experiences emotional release as I’ve just described. 

As is clear, I am an emphatic believer in the ability of the body to heal itself. That the body can be its own worst enemy and also its own greatest healer. I also believe implicitly in science alongside spirituality, and I hope I have shown that spirituality is indeed, fully backed by science. Further to this, I too have resounding belief in medicine. Without the course of antidepressants I was prescribed when I was in the depths of my eating disorder, I would not have found the strength to begin refeeding, and without a little more fuel onboard, I would not have had the foresight or the motivation to see a way out of the deep waters. Medication is like a life-jacket you are thrown when you are drowning. Strapping the life-jacket around you is like your insulation, it is taking on the fuel you need to stay afloat. And then learning how to swim to the shore is the self-healing journey. It is the journey home. The journey back to you.

And what if I told you, brave one, that when you get to the shore, that is where freedom awaits. That is where beauty resides. And that is where life begins again.