The Yoga MD with Dr. Shailla Vaidya

Michele Lawrence
You're listening to this as yoga therapy. I'm your host, Michele Lawrence. And I've had the opportunity to interview many of those who are making a difference at the intersections of yoga and health. And I'm here to share with you their stories and conversations. Thanks for listening. In today's episode, I interviewed Dr. Shailla Vaidya. She's a physician and certified yoga therapist practicing mind body medicine in Toronto, Canada. She's worked for over 20 years on frontlines of healthcare with vulnerable and marginalized populations. In 2013, after experiencing burnout, she founded the yoga MD, a trauma informed practice where she integrates Eastern mind body practices with Western medicine to help foster stress resilience. With a focus on helping professionals she developed a yoga based program called the rest reset rise, burnout recovery program. After suffering a head injury she developed another yoga based program called the reconnect concussion program. She is a compassion it and that's compassion dash it change agent and is grateful to be carrying on the work of her ancestors. It's so great to be speaking with you today. Shailla.

Shailla Vaidya
Oh, thank you so much for having me, Michelle, it's an honor to be here.

Michele Lawrence  
Can you share with our listeners more about your work in the frontlines as a family and emergency physician? And why did you decide to leave that work after 20 plus years.

Shailla Vaidya
I mean, I haven't technically left it, I am still doing it. But I'm not doing the traditional emergency medicine practice or the family medicine practice I was doing previously. And I loved it when I was doing it. But there was a lot of stress in terms of the healthcare system and how it functioned. And it never resonated well with me like I just it didn't suit me well, and I experienced a lot of negative personalities and toxic workplaces. And my last episode, like I'd left it multiple times. So as practicing emergency medicine burnt out from there, I decided I wanted to go into family practice to work more on the preventative side because I was seeing people coming in with lifestyle illnesses like heart attacks, diabetes, very young ages, like 3035 40. I just kind of always felt when I was dealing with the emergency that as I was getting tired of doing that, I was like I need to work on the other end like I need to work at where the tap where the water starting to flow instead of downstream. So I went to family practice. And while I was doing family practice and emerge, I should say I was also doing some locums in our First Nations communities in northern Canada on reserve. And that was a real eye opener for me. I'd known about residential schooling, I'd known about the trauma that had occurred in our First Nation communities. But when I was working there and practicing family medicine and an emerge, I really realized what the effect of cultural genocide and the loss of traditional lifestyle practices like how that had such a huge effect on the well being of the person and the community. It made a lasting effect on me. And then when I came back from my locums, and I was working in family practice. I was working in a community with a large South Asian population. And they had the same problems diabetes, high blood pressure, stress, and I just could put it together. It's like, well, you're not living in your traditional culture, your traditional society. And so that's when I started to use yoga and meditation and Arvada in my practice. And because my last name VEDA also means our Vedic physician, I was getting a lot of people who are coming for that type of care. And at the same time, I was working with St. involved youth. And the thing with modern medicine is it's really great for a lot of things. Like if you have cancer, you have a broken bone. It was really designed to fix the problem. It wasn't designed for lifestyle issues, and our society has changed so much in the past 100 years, maybe even the past 150 years, that we've really lost. As people, we've really lost the things that kept our ancestors healthy. And so as one thing led to another in my practice, I just started to implement more yoga in Arvada, as I was going through and then in another practice that I had, it was about 2011. I became aware of the adverse childhood experience score, the a score, and I started screening my patients for it. And what I found was the people in my practice who had high a score, so had lots of childhood adversity, were the ones that I was teaching yoga to, I was teaching breathwork and pranayama. And like movement to help deal with pain and stress and the things that modern medicine wasn't really able to help their symptoms because it didn't fit in the box of modern medicine. And, you know, when I read about the a score, and then I made that connection, and I was teaching another one of my kids Patience was a professor. And I was teaching her meditation for anxiety, her anxiety. And then she said to me, Oh, this is mindfulness. And just about 2011. I hadn't heard of mindfulness to tell you the truth. And I looked it up, I saw oh my gosh, there's this research from Jon Kabat Zinn from Richard Davidson from all of these researchers, were putting out the effects are studying the effects of meditation, meditative practices, yoga, that kind of stuff. And I was like, Oh, this is what I'm going to do next. Like I knew it. This was why I went to medical school. My whole intention starting off, was I wanted to combine the Eastern practices with Western medicine. And then, of course, in the course of learning medicine, it is a very intense training, and it's an intense life, you don't always get the opportunity to do what you wanted to do. But after working in this toxic environment, and burning out, I actually had this time off. And I stopped, and I asked myself, like, what is it like, what am I doing? And what is it I want to do? I knew that knows, like, Yeah, this is my opportunity. I'm going to start up a new practice. I'm going to incorporate yoga and meditation, bring in some Arvada and see where it goes. And so that's what I did. Very cool. Yeah.

Michele Lawrence
Perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about your yoga studies and where you chose to study with whom and why. And maybe you can timeline that a little bit for me. I don't know if that came next, or if some of that had already started?

Shailla Vaidya
Yeah, well, that's a great question. I'll put in a timeline. So I think that gives you a little bit of background. So I am of South Asian descent. So I grew up in a culture of yoga and our VEDA like it was just infused in what we were doing, and like how we were living. And so I grew up with a pundit at our mother. So our mother is that's the Hindu place of worship. Our pundit at the time really brought in a lot of the Vedas, which are 5000 years old, the foundation for yoga, but this Hinduism, all of that come from those teachings. And so that was kind of already there. In my want to say it's in my bones, it's in my genes. It's in my culture, it's what I was kind of surrounded by. So my dad practiced yoga, my dad practices meditation. My mother's very big on chanting. It was something that was just always around me. And then when I was in medical school, when I was an undergrad, I just went to yoga classes. At that time, this was before 2000. So it was before the big yoga boom, I would say that early 90s. And the 1990s, I would go to yoga classes. And at that time, most of the teachers were people who had trained in India or who had, I mean, I don't know, there were people from my community, really. So it was that kind of teaching. And it was really helpful for me. I remember going to a yoga class when I was in medical school, as a way just to relieve stress. And it just did so much for me. And the practice really resonated with me and the teacher who was there I think, was somebody who was trained at Kym Krishnamacharya yoga Minh, in that I'm in Chennai. And in undergrad, I also took a course a comparative religion course with Dr. Ravi Ravindra, who was he was a prof and he had done a sabbatical with Krishna Macharia in Chennai, as well. So I had a little bit of that the lineage of Krishna Macharia in kind of in the community that I was practicing with, as well as the background in the Vedas from our pundit plus what my parents were, were doing. And so that can't became a part of, I guess, the lineage idea as well, but it was more of a culture. So then that's the stuff that I knew. And that's what I was bringing into my practice, but I would go to yoga classes, like after I graduated medical school, and after I finished residency, then we're kind of talking about 2000s, the early 2000s 2001 2002. And that's really when yoga hot yoga anyway, seem to boom and power yoga seemed to boom, and all these different types of yoga started to come out there. And I would go to classes, and there'd be stuff that was they were doing stuff. And I was like, Oh, it didn't really resonate with me. But being the insecure person that I was, I was assuming, Oh, I must not know this, like, I must not know about this, or whatever. And so I was like, Well, I definitely want to do a yoga training so I can learn. And you asked a great question, How did I choose my teachers, and I think that's a really important piece. I did a lot of reading it just because I was interested. So I was reading a lot of books. And my dad is also very much into reading about yoga and the Vedas, the punish shots, all of that. We share books, right. So I was reading books, and I was sharing it with him. And one of the books I had read was a blue book called yoga therapy by the Mohans.

Yeah. And you know, I showed that to my dad, as well as like, this book really makes it very clear the techniques of it and the writing of that book really drew me to those teachers. And so when I was choosing to study I was Looking up, Kym, I was looking, I ended up looking at silvassa dotnet, which was the Mohan program, as timing would allow it, their teacher training kind of came up at a time that I had was able to take off and go and study. And the other thing that I was interested in with them is Ganesh Mohan, who is their son is trained as an ru Vedic physician, and as an MD as a medical physician in western medicine. So I really loved that combination. And I knew that he would be bringing both sides and that I could learn from him and from them, because it was really important to me that the yoga that I was learning and practicing made sense physiologically, that it resonated from that medical perspective, because that's how I was bringing it in. And from based on their writing, I just thought that they knew that it was clear that what I was going to learn was clear, my dad agreed, he was like, Yeah, this book is great, these people are legit, because you do have to be careful, right? Like you do have to be careful who you learn yoga from, not everyone has the right intention. And it's teaching. And what's very interesting is it's often the ones who aren't as famous or who aren't as well known, that are actually the true practitioners. And because they get it, because they are the true practitioners, you're not really hearing about them, you kind of have to do the research around that some of the people that we see on social media and that are really great at the advertising aren't necessarily the best at the practice or the teaching.

Michele Lawrence
That's great. Thanks for kind of painting that whole picture for us. Because it's really helpful, I think, just to understand your process, and to acknowledge where you studied and why all of that. And I also really love what you said about how when you were practicing yoga in the early 2000s, with some of these teachers, and something didn't resonate for you, you assumed something was wrong with you, or that you were doing it wrong. I can so relate to that. And until you said it, I didn't even realize that you know, and then through the years, obviously over study and practice and time and understanding. I was like, Okay, there's a lot more to it than that. So thanks for naming that and saying that, because it really landed well with me. And thanks for sharing all of that. Perhaps what did it look like? Initially, you brought in mindfulness perhaps or yeah, what did it look like initially? And then how did that evolve? And then I know another major event happened a little bit later. We'll get to that in a bit. But perhaps prior to 2018? And tell us what that looks like for you.

Shailla Vaidya
Yeah, well, you know, I think timing is everything or the universe gives you things at the right time, or what have you. But yeah, I got locked into my office went to study when I came back. So the other thing is, I live in Toronto, and Toronto is one of those mindfulness hubs. So even at that time, mindfulness was starting to be quite a big thing. And we have a center for mindfulness studies here that was started by Dr. Zindel. Siegel and Dr. Pat Rockman. And Dr. Central Siegel is one of the authors on the mindful based cognitive therapy program. So MBCT. So when I got locked out of my job, and that was because I was a whistleblower, or executive director was stealing money, it was actually a gift because I felt like and for anyone who's been in a situation where they're in a toxic environment, they know something's going on, or they were threatened some way. It was a very stressful time. And so I in my head was already kind of planning, okay, this is not sustainable for me. What's that next thing, and that's when I thought, Okay, I'm going to do the yoga teacher training. But I also wanted to get some formal training in mindfulness as well. So I started that journey as well. And then one of the teachers who had mentioned Dr. Rockman, Pat Rockman, she was actually leaving an office space that's about five minute walk from my house to build the center of mindfulness studies. And in her office, she had already built a meditation room. So it was like I was looking for another space. And this space had just come up, like it was like, Oh, well, I'm leaving my space. And it's a meditation room. So I kind of fell into this practice that was like, super close to my house that already had a room like a big room. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't plan that myself, because I could. At that time, I don't think I would have had the wherewithal to even start something I was so burned out. So I went from being a family doctor to practicing what we call GP psychotherapy or medical psychotherapy. At the same time as burning out another colleague of mine, who I'm so grateful for Dr. Harry Zeit, was running a program called caring for self while caring for others through our Ontario medical association or local medical association. And he was a big yogi. So I was attracted to his work that he was doing on burnout and when I got to meet him, and he was also doing a lot of stuff on trauma, so of course, because in my family practice, I'd already made that connection between trauma and stress and the benefits of yoga. I started on that kind of path. And then I found Dr. Harry site who was doing that similar work. So one I wasn't on Bone, I would love to tell you it was yeah, it was me. I trailblaze it myself. There were other people who are blazing that trail ahead of me. And I was coming up behind them. And I'm so thankful for that, because it takes a lot of work to figure out what is it that I'm doing and what does it look like? And it did. I started off as medical psychotherapy, I got a bunch of referrals. I just started doing short yoga practices with people. So when I say yoga, I'm not talking like I wasn't teaching them sun salutations, but we were starting with the breath. We were starting with focusing the mind concentration, they may have also been coming for pain syndromes. So we were working with neck pain and just movement in general, like how do we move this out of the body? It was like my little laboratory, but it was some things were working some things didn't work, we didn't continue with those was taking the time to do courses in more traditional psycho therapies, like cognitive behavior therapy, I did somatic psychotherapy is and kind of realizing that, oh, well, actually, that part resonates with yoga, or that we already do with yoga. So my primary tool of practice is yoga therapy is yoga. And I should say it wasn't until 2013 was when I was locked out of my practice, or 2012. I think that happened. I was going to a yoga class, a restorative yoga class, and my teacher was a burnt out RN, she was an ICU nurse who was teaching and she was doing a yoga therapy training program with yoga therapists who again are a couple blocks away from me, yoga therapy, Toronto, and they had studied Kym in Chennai, so Krishnamacharya yoga and anthem. So it was this kind of weird thing that it all kind of fell into place at once I left this other place. And I didn't dwell on it. You know, I had some great advice from people that just told me just move on, you've got a severance, you could try to fight that. But you're going to spend a lot of energy trying to fight that. And I was like, You know what, I've done what I can, I've gotten my severance, I can only do as much as I can do right now in my career, I have to look after myself. I'm burnt out. Yoga was there to help me and all of the people that I was meeting on this new path, we're really helping me form this as a thing that yeah, yoga therapy is a thing people are doing it. That's when I found out about the I fit because I put in yoga therapy into Google. And lo and behold, there's a whole organization dedicated, and it started probably like 17 years before I even found them. It just kind of happened, like people say, Well, what are the steps and I was like, I was given a mold of clay. And I just started to carve away at it until it became something. And I had done medical group visits in my family practice was a big fan of medical group visits and bringing people together with the same type of illnesses, so that they could form that bond because I do believe we healing connection and that medical group visits, we did it for diabetes, we did it for our new moms groups, because because they were all coming in with the same questions. And we're like, why don't we just all bring him in the room, I'll do the exams, the nurse can talk about all the stuff that we talked about. It was probably the most thrilling or the best time I had in medicine. I know most thrilling, there's some other things too. But that was the most enjoyable time in medicine was doing medical group visit. So again, with that background, coming into yoga, and then doing a yoga therapy group, I started to bring people together, what I realized was that the health care providers that I was seeing for burnout needed their own space because of what they dealt with every day. And the other people with stress needed their own space. So I divided my groups up. And then I just started with started with the basics with breathing. And I incorporated aspects from the NBCT program. But also I had trained in Mindful self compassion with Dr. Kristen Neff and Dr. Chris Girma. And that was a program that changed my life. And Chris is a true Yogi like he, he did his PhD in Clinical Psychology. And I can't remember his prior or during that he actually went to India and did some rotations or did some studying in the south of India around psychological practices. So he was a true yogi. And the way he taught that course, the Mindful self compassion course just really resonated with me, I end up becoming an MSc teacher, I bring self compassion into my yoga practice into my yoga therapy practice to help people heal. Because most of the people that I see are women or caregivers, they're people who may have had trauma in their background, and they learn to people please, to stay safe, that they burn out because they've never learned to give back to themselves. And I just put together this program and I must say, it was came out of a lot of the work that I was personally doing. So I tell you, I did all these trainings. And everybody will tell you, once they start a yoga teacher training, you may think you're going in to learn how to become a yoga teacher. But you actually start that training and realize, oh, this is for me, this is the stuff I have to work through. And I have to get through because I can't lead someone else if I still have my own work to do, and it's in the G And in the learning and the application to yourself and the development of the practice for your own self, that you start to realize the effects and that you start to understand the subtleties that yoga is talking about, amongst the changing of the goodness amongst the thoughts amongst everything. So, yeah, I mean, that's kind of how it came about. It was this messy soup that I was thrown into. And I had to swim and heal myself and get training and everything I trained on, or any training I took, really helped me, even though I might have signed up for it to learn about something else, it really helped me. And then from that, the programs were birthed. They're like, what does this person need or what is relevant to like, burnt out health care workers, I was a burnt off healthcare worker, I get it, I get what it's like to be an ICU at four in the morning. I know what it's like to be in the emergency room. Again, at four in the morning, when the stuff is coming in. There's no one else around, and you've been on your feet for 24 hours or what have you. So that's how it came about.

Michele Lawrence  
Thank you for sharing all of that I find it so inspiring, right? And it's also very real. And for anybody listening, that's wondering, like, Hey, am I making sense out of all of this, like all of this experience, and all of these things coming my way. And this avenue that I pursue, and that avenue that I pursue? You know, here's testament to like the power of that, and the result of that. And I think it's so true for so many of us the timing, the things that come your way, the people that surround you, the opportunities that show up that you never would have expected the things you don't plan, right, yeah, yeah. So I find a lot of inspiration in your story there. And I also want to just kind of call out a couple of things. You know, I can't remember what you call the medical group visits, I think, but to me, that's like the power of sangha and the healing that comes from it. And that's what we do when we have like yoga therapy groups, and also the self compassion piece. So important, and I was not familiar with the other person's work only Kristen nafse. I'm so glad that you brought that into and what role that has and what you do 2018 arrives, right, and you suffered a traumatic brain injury. So here again, is another big changing event. And that shifted everything again. So what happens? And then how did yoga help? And how have you integrated that experience into your work?

Shailla Vaidya
Yeah, well, that one came out of the blue, you know, because I was wrapping up it was the day before my summer vacation. And anyone who you're working you know that the week before your summer vacation, you're always wrapping up all the stuff so you can take some time off.  So I was quite busy. I had planning take time off and then when I was coming back I was planning to get the online program of my the burnout program getting that up online. And lo and behold, my like it just happened in a flash. You know, my front tire hits the road. I was like locking key I went sideways before I could even stop myself. I had a helmet on thank God, it saved my life.

Michele Lawrence
And you're on your bike. Yeah.

Shailla Vaidya
Oh, sorry. I forgot to mention I was on my bike. I was you know where I was, I was leaving work. This is the head injury. Sometimes I get a little bit scattered. I was leaving work after a very busy day. It was the Thursday before Friday before my last day. And I was rushing to get to my 545 yoga class, which is a restorative yoga class that was at yoga therapy Toronto with Felicia, fantastic teacher, my favorite teacher, I probably had a little bit too much attachment to that class in terms of it being thing that healed me, which is fine. I've learned. But I was on my bike. I had this accident, I skated hit my head, I got up and I was like, I gotta get to yoga. Like, I got right back on my bike, and I biked to traffic to get to my yoga class. I got there. And you know, my arm was like bleeding. And I got up, you know, everybody just looked at me their eyes popped open just looking at me. And I was like, Oh, I had an accident. And they're like, oh my god and like all these people came up to me and like were like, got like cold compresses to clean, clean off my arms and, and to help me and I was in complete shock. But I knew enough there's like, Okay, I've just had this trauma, I need to shake off my trauma, or I need to reregulate my nervous system, because I'm in shock right now. I needed to get to yoga. And I did so I went to my yoga class. I didn't go to the emergency room right away, because I'm in a former emerge doc and you have to pay me a lot of money to go to the emergency emergency room in the evening in the summertime and no, thank you. But I tried to go to work the next day and I realized, oh my god, like this is really hard. I can't do this. And I've had concussions before I've hit my head snowboarding. I was a gymnast played soccer. This was different. It felt different. It took a lot longer to heal. And I was not expecting that. So the next 18 months of my life was me in restorative poses lying in a cool basement with a, an eye pillow on my head. Just trying to breathe and to get through it and my yoga practice my belief and my knowledge that the brain could change was the one thing that I think because you whatever you believe is true. So if you believe that you've had this injury, and you're not going to get better, you're not going to get better. But I believed that I was going to get better. And I knew my brain could change. And I understood neuroplasticity. And I understood the importance of regulating stress so that my brain could heal and slow movements to retrain it. So as my symptoms started to go down during the day, I was like, Okay, I actually live next door to a Tai Chi center. And I did a lot of yogic breathing meditation. But in terms of body movements, I started to do Tai Chi, because of the balance and the movement. And they have a saying, guy, it was fantastic. Because I was off work for, I would say, I tried to go back to work on and off. But for most of my week, I was off work. And I was somebody who was prior to that quite busy always, always out of the house doing something. So being able to just walk next door and come into a group of people who many of whom had chronic illnesses, many who were retired, but many of whom really appreciate the group and the practice. It was life saving. For me, it was one of the things that I think prevented me me from going into a very deep depression. Because I had somewhere to go, I had some kind of routine, and I had something to do that made me feel better. And so yeah, that it's been three years of headaches, really, my head changes with the weather, I've had to change my diet multiple times, I'm gluten free and dairy free. I read recently that avocados can cause can cause migraines, I'm like, Oh my God, what do I need to do now, it's the slow process that, you know, if I didn't have my yoga practice, I think would drive me nuts. But I have come to a place of acceptance, I have something to do when I'm bored, I can meditate, I have those skills already. So So I was really resourced as a person who had this and I was a physician too. So I was also resourced in that I could try to use connections or my connections could use connections to try to get me the treatment. And what was so interesting in 2018, there's so much changing in the treatment of brain injury, some of the information that I had been taught like, oh, you need to stay in a dark room, you need to like do nothing and whatever, that's all kind of gone out the window. Now, what we know works now is slow paced, return to life, right. And it may take a while it might take me another five years, I don't know. But to be able to be a person who is a patient and the system, but also understands how the system works and where the gap is. Just kind of that was really important for me, but it was an opportunity for me that I could say okay, here I am. I'm not perfect yet. But I know that this is a really important piece that needs to be taught. And as I was going back to work, two of my patients had come in to see me because I'd sent out a letter saying I've had the concussion, my work hours, I might not come back to work, or I may have very different hours, it's going to depend on my capability. Two of my patients came in one was a clinical psychologist, the other one was a yoga teacher. And they knew of my work from previous with the burnout and theirs. They asked me Can we do a group for concussion? And I was like, Yeah, let's do a group for concussion. Let's try this out. So I put together a group, because I figured, well, we're going to learn I have a program, we'll just see how this goes. What I knew from my own experience was that if I was stressed, things were worse and that when I could regulate my stress response, I was getting better. And so I just said, Okay, let's come together, we're going to do this program. And I was on myself, I was stressed because I was adding in the stuff that I thought was pertinent to concussion for healing with concussion. And I had in my head that I was going to have to change the whole course. But I didn't like the group came in, they had all the burnout, the burnout papers, and I said, Every time you see burnout, we're gonna rewrite it for concussion, I'll add a few things here and there. And for the most part, the course worked. And I think that part has to do not so much with the information that we give. But again, the Sangha, like people learn so much from coming together, and then practicing together and sharing their own experiences. That although I did rewrite the program to make it more geared towards concussion and evidence base at the beginning, it was good enough and it was like a place to start and then we kind of all built it together. So that's really how that part took off. Yeah, and yeah, yeah. So for shadowing, and I'm sure like,

Michele Lawrence
you know, you offered it in such a way that there was so much permission for people to take it in in the Moment has they needed it right. So, you know, the presentation of it and the offering of it is part of it too, right? Even though it was designed for something else originally, yeah, like, who is here now? And please know that you're empowered, and you have ultimate permission, because I imagine, I can't imagine that you would have done it any differently. Right? Then you learned how things can be different based on the evidence and the research. But that is so interesting to me. And I totally believe it right, based on my own stories, and groups and experiences and all that too.

Shailla Vaidya
Yeah. 100%, the giving us permission to do what our body like meaning our body where we are, and giving ourselves permission to do what feels right for us at the time. That is huge, and burnout and in trauma. And concussion is trauma, trauma is trauma, whether it's a physical trauma or mental trauma, the nervous system assets acts the same way. And 100% They walked in there, knowing that one, I was somebody that would have headaches or nausea one day and look like crap. And maybe we'd be able to get through this course, you know, the day. And if they had the same issue, same thing. So it worked. And just testament, I guess to it doesn't have to be perfect to start, you just have to start and it will build. I mean, that foundation does need to be there, the little bit of the understanding the not pushing that has to be a certain way. Sure. But if you understand Yoga, you understand that that's what it's about, right? It's not about conforming to one thing. It's about understanding who you really are and where your body is in this moment where your mind is in this moment. And bringing it back and bringing it back. So yeah,

Michele Lawrence
100% Yeah, totally. So let's get a bit more broad now and talk about the pandemic. And its effect on our nervous systems. It's been two years. And the average person is under a lot of stress, right? Yeah, just the average person. And then we talk specifically about healthcare workers who are under a tremendous amount of stress, and experienced trauma every day. And for those who practice yoga and want to tend to their nervous systems right now, what might you offer? And then for those who want to help individuals who've been under extreme stress and trauma right now, whether it's a healthcare worker, or other frontline workers, teachers, what else might you say?

Shailla Vaidya
Well, these are all really great questions. And let's validate the experience for everybody. It's been two years of an unprecedented situation, right? We've not lived like this, most of us who are alive now have not lived like this the last time there was a pandemic was in, you know, 19 1819 2019. And that time, and so all the things that we do to relieve stress, we're not necessarily able to access. And so there's this underlining chronic stress that's there that we've not been able to release. And that's really hard. So for people who are thinking, Oh, it's been two years, I should be used to this right now. No, we can't be we're not as human beings, we need connection, we need people we need our families. And so many of us have been separated from all of that. So that is inherently stressful. So if a person is resonating with that, I would say you know, that's where the self compassion peace comes in. And to be kind to yourself in those moments, and meditate and move, you do the things that if you can, that give you a bit of peace. But what may be happening to a lot of us is we talk about the Gunas and yoga that we can get into a rajasic state where we get heated or angry. But we can also get into that Temasek state where we get heavy and there's inertia, and many of us are going to get stuck in inertia in that Temasek state. And I think the first we can do is not thing we can do is not beat ourselves up about it, like not get hard on ourselves, because we're having a hard time. Everybody is having a hard time. We are not in this alone, although we are isolated. And that's probably the hardest thing. But if you can recognize when you're in those, Temasek states, and then a little self care, you know, do what you can, even if it's just have a cup of tea or glass of water, or whatever it is you can do to give back to yourself, feel free, you know, try to do that. That's really all we can do. For me, it's been a friend of mine sister's a DJ, and she does these online dance parties. And the first time I went to one, it was like, oh my god, she did over zoom, which many of us are probably sick of zoom, but it was just so great to see everybody else dancing and to move and it's Can you think of something that you did before that you may be able to adapt? Now you might not be able to do it all the way. But can you adapt it now? I mean, there's still the outdoors, they're still nature, they're still getting outside and breathing the air, moving your body in some way. Is there something like that that you can do? And then on the days where it's just too heavy, just be kind to yourself? We're all going through this so Many of us probably used to depend on the groups like for me, I still love going to my yoga class for the Sangha, and I missed all those people. But can we create that in another way, I think is how we have to start thinking, if you haven't already started thinking about that, that's important. And then it's the nervous system. When we're in that Temasek state, that's when our nervous system is hypo aroused, it's overwhelmed, and it's shutting down and it shuts down as a way to conserve energy. So we have to honor that. And then it might just be that you do a short meditation practice. And one thing that I've started doing on Instagram is are these one minute meditations that even a minute, even three exhalations, right stopping feeling your feet on the ground, feeling your your butt in the chair, and just feeling your breath in your body coming back to the body, taking a few breaths in for yourself, slowly exhaling out teasers, small simple things that we can do, we can start to incorporate into our lives, just get us back on track a little bit. And then reach out to your friends reach out to a group, if there's a zoom group going round, a lot of people have memberships, maybe that's what you need to reconnect to build that life back in. Because most of us have had the things that kept us alive. And that gave us joy. We've had that taken away. So that's what I would recommend. Just keep going and rolling it together. You know? No,

  
I totally hear you. Yeah. And then for our health care workers, it's been awful, they really are burning out to the point where many are leaving their profession. So I know a lot of people are talking about the great resignation, which has happened, for many people, as we've come to kind of slow down, like COVID has forced us to stop. And to think what really is important here. It's not all my stuff. It's not where I live, it's not you know, maybe it's it is where you live, maybe you need to move to the country, or whatever and do things differently. That's a realization that I hate to say is not falling short on health care workers, many people after this, we're going to be leaving the profession. And that's scary. So we just need to be there to support them. And what's really great is in the height of things, they are supported by each other, their biggest fear is that no one has their back, right? They don't have enough personal protective equipment. People aren't following the rules, right? Like, it's so hard. And it's so frustrating to be on your feet for 12 hours and at work, and sweating in PPE and bending over somebody who had something that could have been prevented, right like this could have been prevented. That's hard. It's equally hard to see somebody who is doing everything they can to be healthy, get an illness like this, and have it overcome them and have them pass away. That's devastating. So it's helping them with grief is one thing that we can do. But then it's also as a society, we have to start caring for each other, whether we agree with each other politically or not. We have to look at this and say, Okay, this is all of us. We're so I feel we're so divided right now on so many issues. And it's like, this is this one issue that pertains to maintaining human life. This is for all of us. So we really need to come together and figure this out and do what we can and take care of each other. I don't know if I'm kind of going off in a tangent. But that's what I think about what I think of like, you know, like, what can we do for health care workers, we really, it's the systems in which they work, and the administrators for whom they work, really need to support them. And then I know at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot of people who were donating food and donating time people banging pots and pans, but we're two years in and it seems like some of our politicians aren't listening. And they're not heeding the call of the scientists. So much of this could have been prevented. Because the thing is, if we don't prevent it, it's still going to spread this thing is still gonna spread. I don't know what to say. It's a passionate issue, but I think I just really feel for health care workers. And you know, I try to do my part in terms of offering classes for free or offering something or even just being an air to listen.

Michele Lawrence
Yeah, giving a shout out, right, raising up the efforts right now. It's like, Man, I would love to do something here locally, but I feel like the time might not even be right now because of the overwhelm. But I feel like there's gonna be so much that we can do and hopefully we'll recognize when that time is and they will be able to take advantage I just hope that it's not too late because it is just been it's been so been so

Shailla Vaidya
 What you said there is that when this pandemic is over, that's really where we're gonna get a lot of the burnout showing right now a lot of them don't have time to go to a yoga class or the last thing you want to do when you come home and you're put your feet up is turn on a screen and watch like do one more thing right like now we want to do less So yeah, that's 100%. It is really hard right now. And I think after this, it's going to be providing those opportunities for people to release stress from their body.

Michele Lawrence
Yeah. And look at ways in which that something can be more fundamentally put in place for health care workers as an ongoing preventative right for the next thing.

Shailla Vaidya
Yeah. And one of those things is more health care workers, we can talk about giving them yoga and giving them other things, but Yoga is not going to cure the problem. What they need is we need more of them. For one, we need more people going into the helping the helping professions, and we need to support them. So think of our teachers right now that are working on a dime, like they're switching their programs all the way over to online, some people have had more support to do that than others. But it's been a real struggle. And then the majority of healthcare workers are women, majority of them are moms with kids at home, right? So that's really tough, too, because your kids are now stuck at home doing online school Plus, you've got to leave and then you're going to go work in a system that you may come back and bring them something. There's a lot of stress. And there's a lot of stress on women. So

Michele Lawrence
well, I know that I my wheels keep turning as to what I can do to help and I'm sure others have to and I'm hoping some some goodness comes out of that. Yeah, let's get to the last question that I asked everybody. And you kind of alluded to it, you know, as you were sharing your story about having your own practice, first about being in a TM training program, which really was about you doing the work, right. So we definitely talk about the importance of having a personal practice to all of our students in our training programs. And that is fundamental, it comes before what you can do with anybody else. Like if you can't do it with yourself, how could you even ask somebody to do a practice? Right? So I always like to ask our guests on the podcast, what is your practice look like on a daily basis? What do you do? And I have a sense based on what you describe, but maybe you can give us some more specifics? Yeah, well,

Shailla Vaidya
absolutely. I never feel I can teach if my practice isn't strong. And what my practice looks like may change during the seasons. Sure, I can tell you that I was really good up until Christmas. And then after Christmas, I totally fell off the wagon. And so then it was like, Okay, I also felt the health effects of that, because of just how my body is now, but January 1 to set even December 31, kind of going to bed on time. And then starting with little things like for me, I started with my back with my evening meditation, my meditate for 20 minutes before I go to bed. So that was a place to start. And then the next morning, I was better rested. So then I got up to do some more physical stuff. And I always feel like I think when your yoga teacher just starting off doing this and building your personal practice, you may think that I have to do an hour and a half or an hour like I did when I go to yoga. And it doesn't actually have to be that long. Like you can just start with 10 minutes of something 10 minutes of breathing, 10 minutes of movement, 10 minutes of meditation, do something small and maybe do it at different times during the day, when it's easiest for you. And that's the easiest way to build it in like, I think and then this morning, you know, I'll tell you the truth. This morning, I get out and I was like, Well, I have to do some yoga. And I really wasn't motivated. But action kind of leads to motivation. And I got up and I was like, Okay, well maybe I'll watch a video. I don't feel like guiding myself, I'll watch a video. So put the video on. But the video wasn't what I need it to be for me. And I'm at the stage of my practice where I know what I feel like I need at my pace. Once the teacher started teaching, I was like, Okay, I started with them. And then I turned it off. And then I did my own practice. I warmed up my body where I needed to be. And then I did some sun salutations, because it was the morning and I find that practice really kind of energizes me. And so that's what I did. And then I did some some breathing. And I think I actually did some planning on before I'd started my sun salutations, but whatever order it's in, it's just start, if you're waiting to get motivated, the motivation won't come until you act. So act. And don't take big chunks of time. If that's overwhelming you anything. 10 minutes is fine. If, if that's what gets you on your mat if you just stand on your mat and breathe or if you lay down on your mat and breathe. That might be the start of the practice. And it will build and you'll want it to build and you'll want to lay on that mat when you start off and ask yourself, where's my body stay? What do I need? And then go into that, build your practice around that. So

Michele Lawrence
that's great. And it's very useful advice. And I find it's so true for me too. And I encourage our students who are starting to work with others to put things in really manageable small pieces to empower others to just to start somewhere. Yeah, so thanks for reinforcing that and it's been so Nice speaking with you today Sharla. I look forward to continuing our work together and sharing more of what you do. And I'll include some links on the show notes as to where folks can find out more about you. The Yoga md.ca

Shailla Vaidya
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was pleasure.

Michele Lawrence
If you'd like to learn more about who we are and what we do, visit us at inner peace yoga therapy.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai