How to improve your students’ experience with yoga visualizations

Our brains store huge amounts of information that needs to be kept organized and ready so that we can pull it up quickly. The brain keeps this information organized in categories, similar to how you keep your computer files in folders. This is called “categorization,” and this is how your brain sorts all information. For example, you have a “folder” in your head that stores all instances of “dog” you ever encountered. If I asked you to think of a dog, your brain would probably pull up an image of a dog you saw recently or the breed of dog you like. This is called “the winning instance” – the image that gets pulled out of thousands of similar images from the same category.

Here is a remarkable thing, though. If you own a dog and adore it, your brain would conjure an image of your dog with a feeling of love mixed in (or what it feels like to hold it, look at it, or play with it). If you want a dog but cannot have one right now, your brain would pull up the image of the puppy you saw in the pet store with a feeling of longing mixed in (of what it felt like to look at that puppy and want it, but not being able to take it home). On the other hand, if you were recently bitten by a dog, your brain would pull up the image of that dog and the feeling of fear you had when it happened.

The entire technique of visualization is based on the ability of the brain to pull up images tightly intertwined with your emotional-physiological responses to those images. But, of course, the tricky thing is that when you guide your students in yoga visualizations, you never know what kind of associations your students will have with those images. Imagining a beach would be relaxing for most students, but if you recently got a bad sunburn on the beach, your brain will pull up that instance and will interlace the image of the beach with how it felt to have a sunburn – not so relaxing. Or if you ask your students to imagine as if they were floating on water to facilitate a feeling of lightness and buoyancy, but one of them had a near-drowning experience at some point in the past, the feelings that come up for them would be the opposite of buoyancy and relaxation.

Ultimately, we have no idea how individual students would respond to specific images. Because of that, it is best to warn your students ahead of time about what you are planning to do (as in, “We will do some imaginary floating later on – is anybody uncomfortable with that?) or give them an opportunity to opt out (“If the image doesn’t work for you, just focus on your breath”).

It is also best to stick to more neutral images that are less likely to be jarring for the brain. I remember that during my teacher training program, one of the lead teachers was instructing us on visualization. She asked us to envision this big beautiful orange, imagine holding it in our hand, smelling it, and so on. And then she said: “Now take a nice little knife and cut it in half.” Now, I don’t have any specific experiences with violence involving knives, but even I was jolted out of my relaxed state by that image. Simply introducing an object like a knife into such a receptive state was jarring for my brain and set off alarm bells. Other fellow teachers were even more upset afterward. Although it was more of an oversight on the part of the teacher, nevertheless, I learned a lasting lesson from that exercise – be mindful of the images you introduce into your students’ consciousness.

Our brains constantly pull up images of the world interlaced with our own emotional-physiological experiences, so we end up living in a world of our own making. This is why some scientists argue that there is no such thing as rational thought; no thought exists outside of a person’s brain. This means that every thought you have is loaded with meaning that comes from your inner state while you are having that thought. “The bottom line is this: the human brain is anatomically structured so that no decision or action can be free of interoception [inner sensations] and affect [basic feelings], no matter what fiction people tell themselves about how rational they are. Your bodily feeling right now will project forward to influence what you will feel and do in the future. It is an elegantly orchestrated, self-fulfilling prophecy, embodied within the architecture of your brain.”(1)

See Also

The role of the inner practices of yoga for working with clients and small therapeutic groups around trauma

If all our thoughts and actions stem from our inner sensations and basic feelings, it also means that creating a balanced internal environment would result in a more balanced, clear-eyed outlook on life. No wonder yogis were mostly concerned with balancing their energy and physiology!

References

1. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett

As you move through your day, you experience various physiological shifts that either deplete your energy or regenerate it. We can think of it in terms of your physiological “body budget.” Everything you do in your daily life acts either as a deposit toward the body budget or as a withdrawal.

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