Welcome to the tenth episode of Season Two of Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. On this episode I interview Dr Kathie Overeem, a Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Facilitator. More and more we are coming to understand the implications of the mind-body relationship on trauma recovery. Dr. Overeem is also trained as a neuroscience researcher, and is incredibly well poised to offer insights into how this relationship. Her wisdom and kindness come through in this interview, and I have no doubt that you will be inspired to consider how you connect to your body in healing.

Want to keep in touch? Head to @drkaitlin on Instagram or @wisdomforwellbeingpod on Facebook to connect.

What is covered in this episode:

>>Trauma-sensitive yoga allows people to move in ways that they want to with no right or wrong way of doing it, allowing them to explore their sensations at their own pace.

>>This invitational style of yoga is what Kathie calls a ‘physical meditative break’, and this practice is a moving meditation to anchor your body sensations to the present moment.

>>Interoception is the ability to feel what’s happening. Research has shown that as a result of trauma this ability decreases, however, by doing this invitational style of yoga, neural activity for this sense begins to increase.

Links Discussed

• Interoception, contemplative practice, and health (Farb et al., 2015)
• More on Farb’s work: https://sites.google.com/radlab.zone/main/research
• Kathie’s Youtube Video on Enhancing the Benefits of Yoga
• Best way to contact Kathie: www.ivyyoga.com.au
• Kathie’s Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn

Get the Episode Transcript Here (WHEN COMPLETED)

Transcript

Kathie Overeem: [00:00:02.70] Your body is always in the present moment but your mind can travel into the past or the future. So it can be somewhere, somewhere else but using your body as an anchor. Or Sensations in your body as an anchor and really bring you into the moment and there’s that mind-body connection. So when you start to really notice what’s happening in your body, there’s that union between what’s happening mentally and what’s happening physically.

Introduction: [00:00:33.60] You’re [00:00:30.00] listening to the Wisdom for Wellbeing podcast. The show that blends science and heart to bring you evidence-based tips and tricks for cultivating a healthy, wealthy, and meaningful life. Now. Here’s your host therapist, Yogi, and fellow full life balancer, Dr Kaitlin Harkess.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:00:54.60] Hi there, welcome back to Wisdom for Well-being. I have a very interesting interview [00:01:00.00] for you today with Kathie Overeem. So Kathie is going to talk to you about all things yoga, Psychology, and Neuroscience. She bridges modern science with classical yoga to enhance the transformational effects of contemporary mind-body practices. She works both one-on-one and in groups settings supporting clients that have experienced stress, anxiety, complex trauma, PTSD, and eating disorders. So Kathie’s completed her PhD in Psychology [00:01:30.00] and has over 13 years of academic research experience. During that time, she published research and lectured on topics such as Emotional Memory, Personality Psychology, Biological Psychology, Behavioural Neuroscience, Cognition, and Molecular Biology. She’s held research positions in both New Zealand, the US, Australia, and she has transitioned to working with yoga. So she made the career shift because she thought she could be of greater [00:02:00.00] benefit to people while being more aligned with her core passions. So she’s been interested in the transformational effects of yoga and completed research on how beneficial yoga practices can be for mental health and well-being. Since 2016, she has completed over 700 hours of yoga teacher training and has actually transitioned to teaching yoga full-time. Being trained as a research scientist, she is really interested in yoga practices for which [00:02:30.00] there’s an evidence base, facilitating the effectiveness of yoga. She is also a Certified Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Facilitator. She was trained and supervised by the Centre for Trauma and Embodiment at the Justice Research Institute. So without further ado, I would love to introduce you to Kathie so that you can learn about different emotions, how they come up in your body, the default mode network and using yoga as a connection to enhance your mind-body relationship. [00:03:00.00] All right. Here’s Kathie now.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:03:10.10] So Kathie, Welcome to Wisdom for Wellbeing. I am so delighted to have you here today, and I’ve actually already introduced you to the listeners. What the listeners actually don’t know is this is the second introduction because we had some technical issues. So we’ve got an opportunity to practice all our yoga skills. But since they didn’t get to hear the first time would you mind [00:03:30.00] introducing yourself? And what has brought you here today?

Kathie Overeem: [00:03:34.10] Thank you for having me here. Um yeah, so I have a background in Psychology. I have a PhD in Psychology and I started yoga around the same time that I started my PhD and so that happened and then post PhD I went into Neuroscience research. So I had a few postdocs [00:04:00.00] and different countries and New Zealand and Australia focusing on Behavioural Neuroscience. So the link between behaviour and what’s happening in the brain. And that was good ya know, that was a few years of my life sort of 13 years all together in Neuroscience research. And as I said, when I started my PhD, I started practising yoga and I got a real sort of taste for it and became quite curious about it and I was watching some of the research on yoga and I started to notice that there was a lot [00:04:30.00] coming through sort of about mindfulness and yoga and the benefit for meditation, for emotion and stress reduction and just understanding consciousness. Like what is the nature of the self and the mind so really interesting stuff.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:04:47.50] So deep philosophical questions, isn’t it?

Kathie Overeem: [00:04:54.00] Yeah. It’s a broad subject. I remember I had some colleagues saying won’t you be bored when you go, when you’re just [00:05:00.00] teaching yoga? And like and I think I’ll be okay. There’s definitely a few layers to yoga. So yeah, I finished my last post-doc which was in Brisbane and I, towards the end of that I started trauma-sensitive yoga training. So I really enjoyed that because it was a link between psychology and yoga, like a really quite clear link. And so I started I got that qualification and certification and then went out and started [00:05:30.00] teaching yoga full-time in 2016. There wasn’t all trauma-sensitive yoga to start. I did a lot of work in studios, I still do sort of classic yoga, but with a trauma-sensitive spin to it, which is really about introception, which I think we’ll chat about today. And since yeah, and since then I started Ivy Yoga which was about a year ago. I really sort of decided I was going to jump into it and try and [00:06:00.00] bring yoga that has like an evidence base to it. So there’s lots of different yoga methods and meditation styles and things. And there’s research now quite a lot of research now demonstrating how helpful it can be for mental health, wellbeing or sort of thriving and so I wanted to bring this to people because I noticed working in studios particular broad range of people coming in some people that are just there for the physical practice which is totally fine. But then [00:06:30.00] some who are there for sort of psychological support or stress reduction or they want some sort of psychological shift. So what I wanted to have some sort of avenue that people could pursue something more specialized. So that’s where either yoga was born and that’s where I am now.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:06:47.80] That’s incredible. So it’s this journey from going from behavioural neuroscience and through various postdocs and different areas of research to finding your heart in yoga and then starting [00:07:00.00] to look at trauma-sensitive yoga which connected the dots and all of these areas of expertise for you.

Kathie Overeem: [00:07:06.70] Absolutely. Yeah, and especially because my PhD was on emotion. So emotional memory. So trauma memory being having a huge emotional component to it, it really gelled for me. So yeah, absolutely.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:07:22.80] Do you actually mind maybe explaining that because I think that will really set the stage. Understanding what is this emotional [00:07:30.00] memory that we store in our bodies and what is behavioural neuroscience in general?

Kathie Overeem: [00:07:36.80] Okay, so my I guess I come from a real basic research background. So what that means is looking at fundamental mechanisms. So for example, my PhD was looking at how a fear memory is created in the brain and looking at how when a fear memory is created you get a network of cells that [00:08:00.00] strengthen their connection within each other. So it’s like sort of attaching information together. So we would use a basic sort of Pavlovian conditioning paradigm where we would use animals as a model. We used rats. They would be exposed to a tone or a or a light like a very basic stimulus. And then that would be paired with a shock. And from there we could start to dive [00:08:30.00] deeply into what was happening in their brains during that period so what, how did they learn to associate these things together. And so the fear with an emotional memory, the idea is that it’s strong like our behaviours are driven by emotions. Be them positive emotions or negative emotions. And if it’s something like fear that’s emotion, that’s quite [00:09:00.00] adaptive because it teaches us to stay away from something that’s life-threatening. So it has a huge sort of impact when you experience it and the memories that you form around that experience a really strong so because it’s adaptive. So if you’re ever in that situation again, and like there’s a cue or that person or whatever it is that’s a trigger for you go into a response, which is your being, your body sort of saying this is not a safe place for [00:09:30.00] you to be and it creates a sort of fight or flight response. And so yeah that was the fear memory side of it.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:09:38.60] I think that really normalizes like how when we experience a strong emotion, how hard it is not to behave in certain ways. So I guess there’s this like action urge isn’t there that comes with that emotion and you said memory network.

Kathie Overeem: [00:09:55.80] Mm-hmm. Absolutely and we would talk about it. [00:10:00.00] Not that you would learn to associate say stimulus like a neutral stimulus with a fearful stimulus. What you’re actually learning to associate is the neutral stimulus with the feeling of fear. So it’s all it’s all emotional, it’s all driven by emotion. Yeah. Yeah, and then you mentioned the body side of things with that. So when you, people experience fear, be it [00:10:30.00] during the formation of the fear memory or like during a trauma event. That has a huge body component. So your body can go into a fight or flight response but instead of getting you ready to try and get out of that situation and those feelings can be huge, overwhelming. I mean people throw around the word trauma a lot. Like “oh was really traumatizing” but I’m pretty pleased to say that I don’t think a huge number of us have actually experienced [00:11:00.00] real trauma, like the real gut-wrenching feeling of trauma, thankfully.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:11:06.70] Yes, thankfully indeed.

Kathie Overeem: [00:11:08.70] Yeah. So yeah that those feelings are intense and for someone to survive that sometimes they dissociate from the feeling. It becomes so overwhelming so they dissociate from those body sensations. So that can happen during the event or afterwards say they’re triggered and [00:11:30.00] they’re in a situation where it’s potentially quite safe that there’s some sort of trigger there that brings them back to where they were and that and that past experience. And again, they’ve got these strong feelings that they have to try and cope with in order,they might be in the shopping mall or something like that or just driving their car and they’ve gotta sort of suppress them, get past them just to move through what they’re doing right now. So they’re suppressing those body feelings in order to cope and people can experience [00:12:00.00] sort of a shutdown response as well so during the event or after the event where it just becomes so overwhelming their nervous system starts to shut down. That’s where we head into sort of more Polyvagal Theory. So is it what I’m talking about I guess is all these sort of emotional body-based reactions that go along with trauma and with fear that people live with in order to live with them, they can try and sort of dissociate [00:12:30.00] from them and with practice they become quite good at it, so. And it’s a survival mechanism for them to be able to sort of carry on with their life post the trauma.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:12:41.50] So dissociating or in some way shutting down these feelings is a way of carrying on and moving on but it sounds like these feelings are still embedded in the being in the memory networks, in the body’s physiology. Would you be able to share a bit about this and its connection to what you would [00:13:00.00] call Embodied Yoga Practices.

Kathie Overeem: [00:13:02.80] Absolutely. So this is hitting more into the trauma-sensitive yoga, but that’s all good. So trauma-sensitive yoga, it’s very invitational. It’s can be quite basic movements as well. And the idea behind that is it gives people the opportunity to move based in ways that they choose to move. So [00:13:30.00] for example, in a session we might say, you might choose to lift your arms up parallel to the floor or another option that you might have is to have your arms close to your body. And so there’s no sort of right or wrong or more advanced or anything like that. It’s just giving people an opportunity to make a choice in their body and the idea behind that really is just allowing them to explore body sensations at their own pace. [00:14:00.00] So for some people lifting their arms up away from their body, it’s actually quite a triggering feeling and so they have the opportunity to explore that feeling if they want to, if in a safe sort of environment in their session, their yoga class. And then to feel those feelings, to feel body sensations because it’s pretty well known now that body aspect [00:14:30.00] that I think there’s some research in 2014 on Body Maps of Emotion where people asked to like, 200 or definite maybe even 700 people, was a huge study. People were asked to draw where they feel emotion in the body and things like love and hate and fear and happiness and they would draw them in different places. So so it’s we do this sort of embodied yoga practices. We’re feeling parts of our body that are associated with emotions.  [00:15:00.00]

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:15:01.90] And it sounds like it’ll be different for everyone if everyone’s drawing their body map a little bit different. I guess this would mean that you as perhaps a yoga instructor or you know, a therapist may be getting people to do some paired movement in therapy session. It would be different for everyone what comes up then.

Kathie Overeem: [00:15:21.60] Absolutely, absolutely. So that’s I think that’s you really hit the nail on the head there that everyone so different and how [00:15:30.00] people react to different things is, people have different experiences. And so the sessions those particular types of sessions tend to be quite small. It’s eight or so people and you really do get a whole variety of movement going on. And I have people that might be in a child shape, people that are the arms up, their arms down. It’s people exploring their own pace that they [00:16:00.00] start to feel comfortable doing so and um then from there it’s often, it used to be strongly recommended that people were in therapy at the same time that they’re doing trauma-sensitive yoga but that the trauma-sensitive yoga I do is via the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts with TC TSY. They’ve changed their regulations just to make it more available because they realize that people can’t always afford therapy like a talk therapy, but [00:16:30.00] there’s still strongly recommended that people have support while they do this sort of trauma-sensitive yoga because as they start to drop in and notice body sensations. This is when they can start to notice things they haven’t noticed before, they can start to become they can start to be triggered again things that they’re meant to suppress. And also the joy of it is actually is to start to feel more positive emotions as well. Because if you’re dampening down your negative emotions, it’s not just a one-way street. [00:17:00.00] So dampening down your ability to feel positive emotion. So that’s outside of my scope of practice. I’m not a therapist, but the people I tend to see are seeing therapists at the same time. So they come, they practice some yoga. They don’t have to talk about their experience with me. It can just be something that’s happened. You know, they can just feel their own experience and then if they want to talk about it with someone else then they got their therapist or Support Network and process it further.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:17:29.60] So it sounds [00:17:30.00] to me like, you mentioned that sometimes things come up in these practices that people didn’t necessarily know where they are. So I imagine in any sort of a yoga class whether it’s trauma-sensitive or not and moving your body in a particular manner and your body being different to someone else’s you might come across things that have you feeling all the feels.

Kathie Overeem: [00:17:51.50] Yeah, absolutely. I have a personal story that I can share about that when I was first starting yoga. I [00:18:00.00] had a fight with my boyfriend at the time. I’ll go to yoga and just really nice and relaxing, the idea of yoga. Off I went and partway through the session I started crying and it wasn’t like a, you know, sometimes you feel like you’re going to cry and you can kind of hide it or dampen it down, strangely enough just thinking about it, but it came out. It just came out. I just had this shift this emotional sort of outpouring. I didn’t know what was happening. It was the first time I’ve [00:18:30.00] ever experienced that connection between moving my body and having an emotional reaction. I was like embarrassed and people were looking and I was like, there’s something pretty awesome pretty magical about a yoga practice to be able to tap into something that I was trying to sort of suppress at the time and hide that pain. So, yeah and I see that and like just my general yoga classes as well, people start moving and they’re like I’m crying and I don’t know why.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:18:58.60] Well you really normalized the experience [00:19:00.00]. But also I noticed you used the word sort of saying it’s amazing and I wonder if for some people like feeling all those feelings, crying in a session and movement might not feel so amazing. What would be the benefit of tapping into these feelings maybe in sort of a titrated, a slow manner like what’s happening in the brain as you do this? And how could you keep yourself safe emotionally as well?

Kathie Overeem: [00:19:25.10] Yeah, so I guess it’s really you gotta you gotta feel [00:19:30.00] that you’re in a safe environment and a lot of people who, well some people that are going to yoga. They’ve, they’re in a class where they trust the teacher and it’s a safe healing space for them. And when you’re in that space and you’ve got permission and you know, that that sort of thing can happen that it’s normal like you’re saying it’s normalized. I’ve had students that just say look. I just want to feel it. I just want to be in that for [00:20:00.00] a moment. Well, I have students who have just told me afterwards that they were crying, but I didn’t notice at the time but they sort of just I guess it’s a choice that’s an aspect of the trauma-sensitive yoga, especially or just having any sort of trauma or awareness or any awareness that is emotion connected to a yoga practice. As a teacher, just knowing that that can happen is you know supportive [00:20:30.00] for the students and allowing them just to have their experience and it doesn’t have to mean anything and that’s the joy of it is not like a therapy session where you might, I’m not a therapist. I’m just kind of guessing what happens. So you might try and add some sort of meaning to it. Okay. So what is it mean for you? Why why, what happened there? It doesn’t have to happen like that in the yoga class. You can just experience and there’s no you don’t have to go further at that point. It can just be the [00:21:00.00] emotion, just the emotion as it is and they talk about that in trauma, especially that sometimes there isn’t a coherent story anyway. That a trauma memory can be quite disjointed. So just, there’s no pressure, I guess. When you’re feeling those emotions, you can just let them. You can just feel them, let them be. As far as what’s happening in the brain with trauma-sensitive yoga, which really taps into, or [00:21:30.00] any invitational style yoga. I  keep saying trauma-sensitive. But when I say that just think any sort of invitational style of yoga.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:21:37.40] People think of it broader as something where you have an option or an invitation for how you move.

Kathie Overeem: [00:21:42.50] Yeah, yeah and you have you’re allowed to sort of or you’re dropped into your own, own sort of feelings and making those choices. They’re shown that there one particular brain area that’s affected is the insular cortex and the insular cortex is involved in feeling body [00:22:00.00] sensations. So interoception, which is yeah, essentially that ability to feel what’s happening. And they’ve have shown that as a result of trauma, in particular, there is reduced activity in the insular cortex and through that sort of Invitational style of language in trauma-sensitive yoga, then there’s actually an increase in activity in that that areas are recovery of activity. And so it just shows [00:22:30.00] that it is sort of a brain level and neurobiological level. People are starting to feel more in their bodies through the practice.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:22:41.50] So it’s not just being able to move into a deeper posture or to feel stronger in your body. It’s literally changing what’s happening in regards to your brains formation.

Kathie Overeem: [00:22:51.50] Yeah and your ability to feel. And that’s not just from a sense of yoga. I was looking at some research from 2015. If you’re interested [00:23:00.00] in this sort of stuff is a researcher, his last name’s Farb, Farb. He’s done a lot of research on mindfulness and yoga and introception.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:23:07.50] And I can put a link to this in the show notes for all the listeners who are going, what was that? If you’re driving, don’t worry. Check out the shownotes.

Kathie Overeem: [00:23:12.00] Yeah absolutely love to share this stuff. He has done a lot of work. Hope it’s a he, could be a she. It’d hard when you’re reading these manuscripts. They have done a lot of work looking at interoception and mindfulness. So [00:23:30.00] it’s not necessarily again in the trauma space, but just mindfulness. And they talk about mindfulness having those same changes. So people that activity and brain areas associated with feeling body sensations become sort of more enhanced through a mindfulness practice that sort of meditative practice, people can start to feel more of their bodies and I talk about it with regards to I think [00:24:00.00] I need to sort of tell you a little bit about what happens to your brain when you’re meditating and when you’re not so the idea, is that, it’s not really an idea, it’s well-known, that the concept is that when you are not really doing anything, your and you just sort of idly thinking that whatever you want to think about you’ll go into what’s called a default mode network. So it’s part of your brain that’s all sort of about self-referencing, thinking about the future or the past thinking about conversations you’ve [00:24:30.00] had with someone. You know those thoughts that you just have when you’re like, I’m waiting for the bus or something like that all those that sort of mind-wandering kind of stuff. And then through mindfulness practice, the mindfulness practice they were talking about in this particular study was just noticing sensations without giving them like a label, like just noticing without judgment or anticipation. So they showed that there was, Through that practice that there was a reduction and brain activity [00:25:00.00] and the default mode. So people are less likely to be sort of self-referencing and more activity towards noticing body sensations. And if you think about it kind of makes sense because your body is always in the present moment that your mind, you can travel into the past or the future so it can be somewhere else but using your body as an anchor. Your sensations in your body as an anchor can really bring you into the moment and there’s that [00:25:30.00] mind-body connection. So when you start to really notice what’s happening in your body, there’s a union between what’s happening mentally and what’s happening physically which is interesting considering one of the definitions of yoga is Union.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:25:42.90] Poetic. So you mentioned that the mindfulness was around body sensation and you also mentioned that when you’re doing the you know, for instance invitational style of yoga where you’re noticing what’s going on in your body [00:26:00.00] and responding or moving accordingly that in a way sounds like mindful movement. So it sounds like it is a style of mindfulness itself, but we’re bringing some physical action into this practice too.

Kathie Overeem: [00:26:14.80] Absolutely yeah, that’s exactly it and I think I like to gravitate towards that physical side of like a physical meditative practice with it. Yeah, a physical meditative break is probably the best way to say it. I like that because of what I just said that [00:26:30.00] because the body sensations are, your body is in the now, you know? And that’s such an easy anchor to drop into and easier than some things anyway, and I guess it’s quite common for people to start with like a breathing meditation because the breath moves and your mind focuses more on movement, but then that goes along with yoga as a moving meditation. So giving [00:27:00.00] you something to focus on that, in the moment, that’s moving. That can hold your attention.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:27:07.10] That’s incredible to be able to have that anchor as you describe it and you know, our breath goes with us everywhere our bodies go with us everywhere. What a powerful skill to be able to drop in and notice.

Kathie Overeem: [00:27:19.00] Absolutely.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:27:20.30] How does this relate that the default mode network and is that different to I guess the fear network that might have been developed [00:27:30.00] when there was a stimulus that someone might have experienced in their past and their history, again linking it back to trauma and some of the work that you’ve done around emotional experiences and how that changes our brain. Would you be able to talk us through that connection if there is one?

Kathie Overeem: [00:27:47.40] Yeah. Yeah. So I, when we self-reference often, it can be negative. It’s quite common for us to focus on negative feelings and [00:28:00.00] their amygdala network is the one that I was studying. So I was studying how memories are formed, amygdala based sort of emotional memories are formed. But the amygdala is more than just fear. It’s some of those sort of negative feelings as well, as well as positive feelings, but it’s always been negative ones that really stand out because of that.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:28:21.00] Just for listeners who might not have heard the word amygdala before it’s a part of the brain isn’t it? Where it has a particular function in emotions? And as you were saying [00:28:30.00] particularly around strong, scary, or negative, we would call them maybe negative emotions.

Kathie Overeem: [00:28:36.40] Yeah, those negative feelings just to put it in perspective. It’s part of a sort of a subcortical area, the limbic system. So sometimes it’s referred to as being part of the sort of the primitive brain. It works by itself. You don’t need to be consciously aware. Its job is actually to work a lot faster than you are consciously aware to get you out of [00:29:00.00] danger before you can really think about it. So, yeah. The amygdala and its name actually comes from the Latin word for almond. It’s easy to remember, so it’s an almond-shaped structure. Anyway, I digress back to that.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:29:27.20] At least now we’ll all have a visual, I like it. A little almond with a scary face on it.

Kathie Overeem: [00:29:28.90] Absolutely, so yeah self-referencing. Sometimes it’s easier to think about [00:29:30.00] the bad things that have happened or things that we don’t like about our behaviour or things that anything that you might just give that a negative connotation to and it’s easier to notice those things because you’re starting to tap into that adaptive Network and it’s designed to pull your attention towards things that aren’t good for you. And with [00:30:00.00] that knowledge, once you’re aware of them then you can sort move away from them but it’s so easy just to get caught in this, the amygdala’s ability to shine a light on the negative and get stuck there and not be able to sort of move away from those negative thoughts. And the idea with mindfulness is to have the ability to sort of step back from [00:30:30.00] that normal brain process of shining the light on the negative and allowing you to just see it as what it is, the natural part of your physiological processing and just to see it without judgment or anticipation. Sort of having again more self-reflection, when you’re like ah I’m thinking those negative thoughts again. I can’t stop this. This is, ya know it gives you that moment to go, hey, this is just my brain doing what it does and [00:31:00.00] it’s normal. It’s designed to do that, you know, but I can see that now and I can choose how I want to respond to it.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:31:10.20] That’s really powerful to be able to see what your brain is doing as a normal experience and to be able to step back from that rather than judging yourself or beating yourself up or engaging in this sort of internal Civil War-like battle with yourself. And your brain is, as you said, doing something normal. So it sounds like it’s like this [00:31:30.00] metacognitive awareness and by meta, I mean awareness of what’s happening at the level below. So awareness of your thinking processes in a way that’s much more open and kind.

Kathie Overeem: [00:31:45.10] Yeah, absolutely. I guess that’s interesting cause I got into psychology because I wanted to study memory because I was like memories are everything. They’re what make us and they do but then I realized actually that’s just a process. Memory [00:32:00.00] is just a process and what makes us is how we respond to it. It gets very messy like you’re saying because in how you respond to it is also memory, it’s very complex. But yeah, just to know that memories.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:32:12.60] I was just going to say it sounds like the memories can be in your body as well.

Kathie Overeem: [00:32:16.50] Yeah. Yeah so feeling that’s true actually so feeling those emotions, that taps into the William James theory of emotion. It’s been around for a while and it’s been contentious at some times but it keeps coming back, [00:32:30.00] this theory of emotion. So William James who was a very famous American psychologist grandfather of psychology and he came with William the James-Lange theory of emotion. But he came out with this theory that emotions start in the body. So you might have like a sort of a sweaty palm or you feel your heart racing and then how you sort of appraised [00:33:00.00] that sensation. So what you notice about it and what you add to it is the feeling of the emotion. So there’s a difference between the emotion and the feeling. So for example, let’s say you’re in a situation and you feel your heart racing and you’re like my heart’s racing, I’m nervous. So you’ve created that link between the physiological feeling of like heart racing, sweaty palms, and you’re like oh my God, I’m nervous or the same person or a different person same sort of feeling, heart’s racing. I’m excited [00:33:30.00]. Like a different appraisal. Yeah, so

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:33:36.20] That’s really powerful.

Kathie Overeem: [00:33:38.20] It is the idea is that your emotions our feelings in the body, but our feelings are actually the combination of what we make of those feelings. Yeah.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:33:50.00] So then being able to notice what’s happening in your physical body and being able to notice what happens in the mind is your key to creating a new relationship [00:34:00.00] or an openness to these experiences in a different manner than you might have had in the past.

Kathie Overeem: [00:34:07.00] Absolutely. So if we talk about that sort of mindfulness practice about noticing things without judgment or anticipation say you’re in a situation and you feel your heart racing, it’s like, is that my heart racing? It doesn’t have to be like, oh my God, I’m nervous. And this is a bad situation. It’s just like if I look around it’s okay. I’m safe. It’s just my heart racing but just like you said to be aware, [00:34:30.00] to notice.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:34:32.60] Yeah. How does that help in healing from trauma or you know different mental disorders that people might have that might be embodied in their experience when they show up on the yoga mat? How does the healing take place from the trauma-sensitive or invitational sort of model?

Kathie Overeem: [00:34:48.30] Yeah, I guess it’s about, with regards to trauma-sensitive, it’s about bringing people into the moment. So those triggers that they’re feeling. So they might be again in that situation [00:35:00.00] they’re driving a car or in the supermarket. They have a trigger they’re going to the fear response, but to have that ability and I’ve had students say this to me to notice the surface underneath them, to notice their connection to the ground and that, okay I’m in the present moment, and I’m okay. And so it gives them that skill to notice, I’m being triggered, and then to use something, the anchor of body sensations [00:35:30.00] maybe not the triggering ones. But something else is something that like I said the surface underneath you just bring you into the moment. You’re like, it’s okay. I’m in a safe place.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:35:41.10] Yeah, so it allows you to check in with where you are at this moment in time. So like feel the feelings but as you kind of describe before kind of notice that as an experience, and then to check in and re-orientate to somewhere like the Earth for instance.

Kathie Overeem: [00:35:56.20] yeah, whatever feels, whatever [00:36:00.00] they choose and the joy of it is that we don’t teach it, as notice the surface underneath you and you’ll feel okay. We just give them options to explore in their yoga class and most of the time they discover it themselves. They find things that work for them. And that I think is` so empowering because like I was saying people have different experiences. So for whatever reason may be noticing the surface underneath them is triggering. So if you said to someone just notice a surface underneath [00:36:30.00] you or just take slow breaths and everything will be okay, but you just don’t know what someone’s trigger is. So it’s giving them the opportunity in the yoga class to explore. Again without expectations that something’s going to sort of fix them, so to speak. And just letting them notice for themselves what they feel in different shapes. And then using that information that no one’s told them, they’ve discovered it themselves using that information [00:37:00.00] when they need it. And I think that’s the most powerful part of it, it’s that they really, dare I say it, embody it. They really get to experience at a deeper level. Rather than someone saying, you know, if you’re feeling stressed out you just need to take some deep breaths. That’s just such a mental thing but you know to actually have that opportunity to explore in a yoga class feel what different shapes mean for them. And then to use those feelings when they need them. I [00:37:30.00] think yeah, it’s amazing.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:37:31.90] That sounds incredibly powerful and what you described you mentioned the word interoception earlier, being able to notice what’s happening in your body in a way that it becomes one’s own self-regulatory experience because you can notice what you’re feeling and notice what has worked for you in this situation or in the past to be able to self-soothe then.

Kathie Overeem: [00:37:52.60] Yeah that’s what you want to do at the time, exactly. Exactly, yeah.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:37:56.60] What can we give listeners I guess [00:38:00.00] as a takeaway, like what could people go perhaps and practice now to be able to get some of these concepts in a way that might be safe? Like do you have any ideas for how people could start an Invitational movement practice?

Kathie Overeem: [00:38:13.00] Yeah, absolutely. So I just created a video on this the other day. So it’s fresh in my mind as a thing.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:38:20.40] Listeners, we’ll link to your video as well, Kathie then, in the show notes. So there’ll be two ways of learning this.

Kathie Overeem: [00:38:22.20] Yeah, when we approach [00:38:30.00] a yoga practice we can, this is a psychological term, we can do it with an external or internal frame of reference and an internal frame of reference is what we were talking about. Being that, it’s about feeling body, your experience Your body sensations or whatever experience you’re having and knowing that you can use that experience to guide your practice. I’ll just quickly give you the opposite, the external frame of reference just so you can get an idea of the different references when [00:39:00.00] you look for sort of authority outside of your body. Oh in a yoga class that might be trying to replicate a pose that you see someone else doing. Even though their body shape and proportions, their practice would be quite different but just going, that’s how I need to practice, that’s how it needs to be. I need to look like that. It’s using an external authority. The other external authority and sometimes be the way teachers facilitate a class. So a teacher might [00:39:30.00] offer a correction and say this is, you know, you need to do this to make the pose correct and the real key aspect there is your experience, not the external objective opinion of your practice. So I guess the takeaway message there is anyone and this is great for the trauma-sensitive or just for deepening and mind-body connection for anyone to snow that you can drop in and move based on your own [00:40:00.00] experiences. Even if you find yourself in a class with feels that it’s being pushed more towards an external sort of frame of reference know that when you drop in and practice based on your own present moment experiences. That’s where the powerful healing happens, that’s where you build that mind-body connection and you create changes in your brain so that you are more aware of what’s happening in your body and more mindful of what’s happening for you. [00:40:30.00]

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:40:32.10] That sounds like a really beautiful reminder that we can be present with what’s happening for us and allow ourselves the opportunity to connect in with our own wisdom. So to speak rather than seeking the guidance externally.

Kathie Overeem: [00:40:48.10] Yeah, I need to just add to there for safety reasons. It’s definitely an element of guidance and some Yoga practices, especially with like some of the more advanced poses and yeah teachers [00:41:00.00] will offer corrections, but, and that’s good but I guess the real takeaway message is just to notice whether those corrections work for you and they don’t have to. And no teacher really knows your inner workings more than you do so they can offer something and you go, hey that actually doesn’t feel any better, it feels worse. So you always have yeah, you have that power but more often than not when there’s a really good teacher they’ll offer a correction. You’re like, ah I like that, you know, so but [00:41:30.00] then you’ve made the choice still. Even though you’re being facilitated and guided you still you’re empowered to make that choice.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:41:37.30] It’s a beautiful reminder for all of us and probably more situations than just yoga, isn’t it? We can take the options that someone provides us we can try them out and if they feel true and useful and helpful and healthful then we stick with them and if they don’t, then we can shift course again and re-orientate.

Kathie Overeem: [00:41:55.00] Yeah and just know that that’s normal, you know, like not everyone, we are all so different not everyone [00:42:00.00] finds benefit in all the practices. That’s the joy of yoga and all those different styles and different meditation practices, and just a case of trying them out. Try them out for size and see if they work for you. And yeah, and when they, that’s fantastic and if they don’t that’s still information, you still learned something fantastic.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:42:21.40] So there’s a few takeaways then that we can get onto the yoga mat or you know, a mindfulness practice whether it’s mindful movement [00:42:30.00] or various elements and start to connect in with ourselves to notice what’s going on for ourselves, to start to notice what feels like it’s helpful for us and skills that we could then use if we’re starting to feel dysregulated at different points in time. And that this practice is actually cultivating interoception like an awareness of what is happening in our bodies, which is quite empowering in terms of being able to notice the emotion as it’s arising which isn’t necessarily [00:43:00.00] the same as a feeling. But noticing the physical sensational experience of an emotion and then deciding what to do next.

Kathie Overeem: [00:43:09.40] Yeah. Yeah, and then that’s very powerful because then you develop that sense of agency, that self-regulation and go, okay, this is what I’m going to do and what’s more healing than that, you know having that power to heal yourself, so to speak. To find a things that work for you. It’s amazing.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:43:28.70] So we’ll ask [00:43:30.00] all the listeners a little bit of movement now, whether you’re walking and it’s sort of like rolling your shoulders noticing what’s happening there or you know, whatever you could do while you’re driving and just allowing yourself to observe and to re-orientate accordingly and then where can listeners find you Kathie?

Kathie Overeem: [00:43:48.70] The best place to find me is via my website so ivyyoga.com.au and I’m often posting this sort of information. So I have my blog there and different classes [00:44:00.00] and things like that coming up so that’s definitely the place to find me and you can subscribe and stay up to date with all my musings and offering.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:44:11.90] Yeah, that’s fantastic and we’ll link to to your ivyyoga website in the show notes and as well as the videos that you’ve mentioned and we’ll put in your social media connections as well so people can reach out in different formats and continue this conversation. [00:44:30.00]

Kathie Overeem: [00:44:31.60] Absolutely I really appreciate that and yeah as you can tell I love talking about it. So, you know, if you’re a student that just wants to know more about it or a teacher, I’m always open to to chatting love it.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:44:42.50] Thank you for that invitation Kathie and thank you so much for your time and for your wisdom today.

Kathie Overeem: [00:44:47.60] Thanks for having me.

Kaitlin Harkess: [00:44:55.90] Well, I hope that you enjoyed that interview with Kathie as much as I did. [00:45:00.00] I think it’s a really interesting exploration about how your body really supports mindfulness, how your body is the now. And being able to utilize movement is a really incredible tool to be able to connect in with yourself. I thought it was a really interesting point that we have these different frames of references that influence our experience. So perhaps you will head on over to the yoga mat, find your way to the now, and if you [00:45:30.00] have enjoyed this episode, please feel free to reach out. Let us know via social media. Of course, connect with Kathie and all of the amazing work that she’s doing ivyyoga.com.au and I’ll put the links to all of her social media as well as her more recent YouTube video on Enhancing the Benefits of Yoga in the show notes at drkatilin.com. See you next week! Be well.

Outro: [00:46:04.70] Thanks [00:46:00.00] for joining us this week on the Wisdom for Wellbeing podcast. Please visit drkaitlin.com to connect, find show notes, other episodes, and to subscribe. While you’re at it, if you find Value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating or perhaps simply tell a friend about the show Wisdom for Well-being is not a substitute for professional individualized mental health treatment. If you are in crisis, please contact 000, [00:46:30.00] your local emergency number if you are outside of Australia, or attend your local hospital ED.