Mental Health Awareness Month: Meet Yoga Therapist Dana Jalovick
May is Mental Health Awareness Month! Each week, we’ll examine a different area of mental health and what you should know about it. Next, check out Jillian’s interview with Yoga Therapist Dana Jalovick.
Mental health involves more than just the mind. Books like The Body Keeps the Score and others have increasingly highlighted the ways our bodies and minds interact to maintain health. Mental health is impacted by physical health, and vice versa.
As we learn more about the mind-body connection, one area that has gained attention is yoga. Yoga combines mindfulness, breath, stretching, and many other skills to help you slow down and become connected to your body. By practicing yoga, you can actually support your mental health alongside your physical health.
I sat down with yoga therapist Dana Jalovick to share her experiences about yoga, mental health, and the connections between the two.
Tell us about yourself.
I am a certified yoga therapist through the International Association of Yoga Therapy. I got my training through YogaFaith, which happens to be the only Christian organization that’s accredited with the International Association of Yoga Therapy. It gives me great confidence in what I’ve learned and provides a lot of support for the path that I’ve chosen, so I’m grateful for that.
How were you introduced to yoga?
I was initially introduced to yoga through physical therapy for scoliosis. My PT had worked with me for about a year and a half when I asked, “What do I need to do to keep my progress?” She told me, “Keep your core strong. Do yoga.” So, in 2012, I started taking yoga classes. They didn’t address the scoliosis, but it did help with my strength and conditioning. Going to class five days per week made me feel more and more drawn to the practice of yoga. It had a calming effect on me that I couldn’t explain and didn’t know how to talk about. I kept wanting to come back.
What has been your experience with yoga and healing?
In 2013, I began a journey of discovery and healing from the effects of childhood abuse. I started doing some recovery, went to a counselor, and attended twelve-step meetings for adult children of dysfunctional homes—along with my morning yoga classes every week. During this time, I began to notice how my mind was dis-integrated from the way I experienced the trauma. I remember going into the twelve-step room for the first time and saying, “I don’t know if this is where I need to be, but I just know I need to find a way to connect all of these parts of me that are disconnected.” As I learned more there about how trauma affects us, I noticed that I became much more calm. I could tolerate talking about difficult things and work through complex emotions. In my mind, it was the combination of yoga regulating my nervous system and having a safe space to talk. I became more calm, confident, and in touch with my body. I realized I had lived most of my life dissociated, and it all helped me come back into my visceral, physical self.
How does yoga benefit mental health?
Well, yoga is unique in that it unites breath with movement. Nerve cells in our brain are activated when we breathe. Breathing and the lengthening of an exhale slow the heartbeat down, and everything calms down. When you breathe with your movement, you’re consciously breathing. It’s not like a natural breath that we do every day without thinking.
Alternatively, when we’re in distress, and our nervous system gets fired up, it produces hormones like cortisol to prepare our body to fight and defend. Our breathing becomes rapid and unsteady. Or, we may freeze and collapse, unable to move in any direction. When we get too overactivated or underactivated, we need to balance it out.
Yoga, through breathing and movement, helps to find that balance. It gives us a better opportunity to increase our “window of tolerance.” We slow things down because we want to give people the ability to sense what’s going on in their minds and bodies. We help people feel grounded and stable so they can calm down when they’re feeling anxious. Using movement, we release energy from the body.
Eventually, these skills will allow you to find calm in other places. For example, maybe you’re at work and start to feel really triggered and activated by what someone said. You can just go into your own space or the bathroom and practice these things, using these techniques to calm down the body and, through that, the mind. The key is to use tools to help you regulate, ground, activate, or deactivate, depending on the need. We use physical ways to calm the mind and the breath to maintain balance in daily life.
Can you explain what you mean by the “window of tolerance?”
The “window of tolerance” is a term coined by Daniel J. Siegel to describe the optimal emotional “zone” we can exist in to best function and thrive in everyday life. On either side of the “optimal zone” are two other zones: the hyper-arousal zone and the hypo-arousal zone.
The window of tolerance gives a framework for understanding how to calm down hyperactivity or bring up the collapsed feeling of hypoactivity. It describes that balance: we don’t want to live life overactivated and stressed, leading to anxiety. But we also don’t want to be underactivated and dissociated, leading to depression. We want to live in the middle, in the “optimal zone,” where we may feel uncomfortable sometimes, but it doesn't overwhelm or pull us out of the present.
When we learn how to tolerate sensations in our body, like emotions, we can use yoga to help expand our optimal zone and our ability to tolerate stress without getting overwhelmed. We are opening up our window of tolerance by allowing ourselves to experience difficult emotions without activating or collapsing. That’s what I love about yoga. When I teach yoga, it’s not about getting a perfect form; it's about feeling the sensations in your body and honoring where you are at any given moment.
How would you explain mindfulness in yoga?
When teaching a yoga class, I often invite them to close their eyes and notice whatever they can notice in their body. Attempting to still their body can be really difficult for some in the beginning, but as we teach them to open up this window of tolerance even for silence or stillness, we can then help them become aware of thoughts in their minds or sensations in their bodies. It’s important to do it all without judgment—just notice them and see them for what they are. I think this is a key way to help people begin to cultivate self-awareness.
That was my own experience and as I was learning to tolerate some difficult poses in a yoga class. I learned not to judge myself because I couldn’t do it, even if everyone else in the room could do it. I learned to say, “This is where my body is right now and that’s okay.”
What’s a standard yoga session like?
A yoga instructor has a planned sequence of moves that highlight an area to work on such as your core, shoulders, hips—whatever. Personally, I work with a lot of older people, so working on their balance and core is important. I’ve been working with people who started out saying, “You have to know that if I get on the floor I don’t know how to get up.” That’s usually the first thing we work on.
You can start out working very basically, working all of the angles of the spine, and then move into things that build energy, build strength, things that will build heat in the body, and then there’s usually some pivotal pose you want to work on that’s a little bit more difficult. From there, you would slow things down some more until you get to the end of the class. We always weave in some sort of yoga philosophy, such as kindness, equanimity, or other important concepts like that.
As a yoga therapist, the work would depend on the situation, as working with scoliosis is different from working with trauma. The movements would be much more intentional in a yoga therapy class. They would be specific to how movements evoke the kind of response that we are looking for, like feeling more relaxed, feeling like they can move things out of their body, slowing down breathing, and eventually finding stillness and quiet. That will give them enough time and space to go back and work through some really hard things, likely with a counselor, and also to find their own rhythm to create peace and quiet in their lives.
What’s your favorite thing about being a yoga therapist?
I get to connect with people and help them understand what they can do to draw more closely to God and to themselves. I love working with people and knowing that if someone is in distress, I can say to them, “I can help you.” I can give them hope that there is something they can do to alleviate some of their distress, whether that’s pain in their back or emotional pain. Then, as they begin this journey, they start to see themselves transforming. I love finding ways to empower people that way.
How do you implement mindfulness in your daily life?
I have a couple of people that I listen to on YouTube, and I just let their voices guide me. When it comes time for the ending pose, I will turn them off and listen to my Lectio Divina app, which means “divine reading.” It gives me a way to focus on scripture, time to ponder, and time to think. I also like to sit out on my porch in the morning and listen to the birds. I just really love connecting with nature. Every day, I walk with other women or on my own up and down the road. I do that and listen to the Lectio Divina, do my Bible reading for the day, and that helps me feel grounded to begin my day, knowing I don’t have to think about all the stuff I have to do yet. It’s really easy for me to get busy and spend all my day without really having a connection to myself.
What might you say to those who may be curious, skeptical, or considering trying yoga?
You don’t have to know how to do anything other than breathe to do yoga. Everything else is a journey. If you can breathe, you can do yoga. It doesn’t matter about your limitations. While there are a few exceptions, you really just need to have a mind and a willingness to learn.
Live.Move.Breathe.Yoga
Living and Moving in congruence with Christ,
Being fully alive and aligned in mind, body, and spirit.
Learn more about Dana Jalovick and her yoga therapy practice at livemovebreatheyoga.com.