529: From Burnout to Balance with Sarah Finger’s Chopra Yoga Training

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Yoga is more than just stretching and striking a pose—it’s a powerful science of healing, balance, and transformation. In this episode of the Learn True Health podcast, we sit down with Sarah Platt Finger, director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, to explore how yoga impacts not just the body, but also the mind and emotions.

Sarah shares how simple breathing techniques and mindful movement can lower stress, improve heart health, and create a deep sense of inner peace. Whether you’re a seasoned yogi or a complete beginner, this conversation will inspire you to integrate yoga into your daily life for better health and well-being.

Ready to discover the science-backed benefits of yoga? Tune in now and take the first step toward a stronger, calmer, and more resilient you.

Highlights:

• Sarah Platt-Finger, director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, shares insights on yoga's impact on emotional, mental, and physical health.
• Yoga is a science of balancing the nervous system, not just a fitness trend or religion.
• Breathing techniques (pranayama) help regulate stress, improve heart health, and enhance mental clarity.
• Scientific studies support yoga’s ability to lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and stress while improving flexibility and muscle tone.
• Holding yoga poses builds physical resilience and mental strength, training the nervous system to manage stress.
• Meditation is a core component of yoga, promoting deep relaxation, emotional balance, and self-awareness.
• Yoga helps individuals reconnect with their body, making them more mindful of their diet, posture, and daily habits.
• The Chopra Yoga 200-hour certification program teaches yoga foundations, breathwork, meditation, and how to integrate yoga into everyday life.
• Alternate nostril breathing (a yoga technique) balances brain hemispheres, calms anxiety, and enhances focus.
• Yoga is accessible for all ages and fitness levels, offering modifications for individual needs.

Intro: 

Hello True Health Seeker and welcome to another exciting episode of the Learn True Health podcast. Today we have with us a very special guest. She's the director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Her name is Sarah Platt Finger. She's an author and an expert in yoga and a wonderful teacher. This was an amazing interview to converse with her about how yoga can help you on the emotional and mental level, as well as the physical level. She brings some great science to the table. 

It’s really interesting how a simple practice of breathing and moving that you can squeeze into your busy day can affect in a positive way your hormones, your mental clarity, your energy, your sleep and even your heart health. So today we're going to talk about that and before we do, I want to make sure  that, if you'd like to study this program, it's an online course. It's a 200-hour Chopra Yoga certification and it's taught by Sarah Finger. There's a few other teachers, including Dr. Deepak Chopra and Dr. Sheila Patel, board-certified physician and expert in Ayurveda. When you take this course, you will learn Ayurveda, meditation, breathing, physiology and, of course, stretching, the wonderful practice of yoga. But there's science behind it, which is really cool, that certain positions that we get in and hold isometrically and breathe while we're doing it not only strengthen the heart, but it lowers and balances blood pressure and it strengthens our muscles, tones our muscles. It’s such a nice break from running on a treadmill or a bicycle or  going to the gym and doing the hamster wheel. It's such a nice break and what I love about it is you can do it anywhere. You can integrate it into any aspect of your day to improve, enhance your body's healing function. It's like a special golden button you can hit inside you that turns on super healing mode. 

So I love that through taking this online program, you can learn the tools to access your own healing mode, and a lot of practitioners because I know a lot of practitioners listen to my podcast. You can integrate this with your clients, with your patients, and we talk about that as well. If you're interested in looking into it, you can even schedule a free appointment to talk about whether this is right for you and to learn more about it. You go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That's learntruehealth.com/coach. Of course, the links will be in the show notes of today's podcast at learntruehealth.com and wherever you listen to this podcast when you go to that link learntruehealth.com/coach, it's going to take you to IIN's courses. Not only will you see if you scroll down, it's in the third row, it's called the Chopra Yoga 200-hour certification, which is what we're going to talk about today, but you also see the course that I took, which is the health coach training program, and I absolutely loved it. It was wonderful. 

It's such a phenomenal experience if you're looking for your own personal growth, for your own healing and health and ongoing healthy relationship with your overall life, health and joy in every aspect of your life. About half the people that take it take it simply for their own personal growth and health, and the other half take it because they want to integrate it into their business or that it practice in some way, or they, too, want to start being a health coach and taking on clients and they teach you how to do that. They hold your hand, teach you how to do the business as well. So if you are interested in becoming a health coach and actually doing it as a business, this is a wonderful resource for you. So go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check that out. But they also have other certifications. This is what I love, because the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, they actually coined the term health coach and it's the oldest school online. But before it was online it was in person. So they've been teaching for many years and they merged recently with dr chopra and all of his trainings and so together they offer so many wonderful courses. You could take courses on Ayurveda, meditation, mindful eating course, hormone health, gut health, and a lot of these courses actually weren't available to the public until you became a health coach, but now they have altered them so that if you're just interested in gut health or you're just interested in detox, there's a whole course on detox and it's very affordable, and for the larger courses they have payment plans. They want it to be accessible to everyone. 

The most important thing that I want you to know is that they offer a really big discount to all my listeners all the time, no matter what. It's the biggest discount they'll ever offer, so you don't have to wait for a sale. If you're interested to take the courses, use my discount coupon code, which is LTH as in Learn True Health, or if you decide, instead of signing up online, which you can do, you can call them to sign up and speak to one of the health coaches there. All the staff that answer the phone have taken at least the flagship training program, the health coach training program, but many of them have dived into the other courses so that they can share their experience with you, and their sales staff are not in any way. They don't pressure you. They're just here to help and they can talk to you about your goals and answer questions you may have. But if you mentioned my name, Ashley James, the Learn True Health podcast or the coupon code LTH, you will get that great discount. 

You can go back and listen to my interview with the founder of IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, Joshua Rosenthal. I've interviewed him. I've also interviewed the new CEO, although not new anymore, she's been around for a few years, but she's the CEO, the current CEO. I've had her on the show and I've had over a dozen of the faculty. The wonderful teachers and professors and doctors have come on the show and taught and it's it's just been such a blessing to work with them, because what they're doing is helping people to access true health through all the tools and everything that you can learn to find a balanced life to nourish your whole being, and so I encourage you to go to learntruehealth.com/coach and check it out. 

You can just keep scrolling and looking at all the different really cool courses. You're probably going to go, I want to take all these courses but if you're interested in what we talk about today the Chopra Yoga 200-hour certification definitely sign up. It starts a few times a year. The cohort does it, you do it together as a group and no matter what time of year it is whether you're listening to this now or in December or in April or wherever it is when you sign up it unlocks the beginning of the course. So you get to actually start the course, no matter when you sign up, and then you get to do basically the pre-work and then the whole cohort takes off together three times a year. So no matter when you sign up, you'll be able to access the training and begin immediately, which is wonderful. If you're interested in becoming a health coach, like me, definitely click on the health coach training program, which is the very first option on the page. You'll see it and you'll gain access to learning more about it and it will take you to a free webinar that will teach you more about it. But there's lots of resources on that page. See a sample class as well If you scroll down the page. Once you click on the health coach training program option, you can scroll down, it'll say sample class and you can sign up for a free sample class. It's very inspiring and it'll give you a good idea as to what it feels like to take this course and what it looks like and how it works.  What I love about their trainings is that they hit every learning style. 

School was really difficult for me. I'm an excellent learner. If you've listened to my show, you know that I retain a lot of information. I love learning. I'm an auditory learner, so for me, like if I hear something, I'm really going to remember it well, and some people remember things better by reading and some people remember things better by watching videos, whereas others remember by doing. There's different learning styles and  sometimes teachers, when we're in school they're not as great at hitting all of the learning styles, so some students fall through the cracks or feel very disenfranchised. 

In IIN, I never had a problem as a student. I really struggled in school because the way the teachers taught wouldn't necessarily hit my learning style or if you struggled in school like me and then. But then as an adult you're like why is it? It's so easy for me to learn when I want to learn something, when I'm on my own, when I'm diving in and I'm doing my own research, but when, when I was sitting in a classroom with 30 other kids, it was like I could beat my head against the wall. It was so frustrating. So I know everyone has a different experience with school, but what I thought was really refreshing is I did not have any problems with learning when I went through the year-long health coach training program through IIN and they also have a six-month program, accelerated program as well, and it really fits into your busy life. It's about 20 minutes a day. 

If you're going to dedicate 20 minutes a day for a year, then you will absolutely love their health coaching program, similar to the 200-hour yoga training program, the Chopra Yoga program. You can dedicate a chunk of time each day or a larger chunk a few times a week and you're able to be flexible to fit it into your life. We talked a little bit about that in the interview. But if you're interested, go to learntruehealth.com/coach, scroll down and see the title that says the Chopra 200-hour yoga training and click on it and from there it's a beautifully laid out website with wonderful information that gives you all you need to know. Like I said, if you want to check out the Health Coach Training Program, click on that, because you can gain access to videos and a whole sample course as well as a webinar. So there's lots of resources on that page. So enjoy today's interview. 

If you have any questions about my experience as a student at IIN or what I've been able to do since graduating many years ago and how wonderful it's been working with them and interviewing them and them as a company, I just love them. There's just very, very high integrity and that's why I continue to share their message with you, because I feel that you, as the listener, would benefit from taking their courses. Of course, I'm not a mama bear, but I want to be very protective of my listeners. So there's something I don't believe in or don't trust. I'm not going to talk about it. I'm not going to bring it to the table. I really do trust them and I trust that they'll take care of you. Have yourself a fantastic day. Enjoy today's interview. Thank you so much for being a listener and thank you so much for sharing this podcast with those you care about. Together, we're helping to turn this little ripple into a tidal wave and help as many people as possible to learn true health.

Welcome to the Learn True Health Podcast. I’m your host, Ashley James, this is episode 529. 

Ashley James (0:12:53.161)

I am so excited for today's guest. We're going to have such a fun conversation today. Our guest is Sarah Platt-Finger, who is the director of Chopra Yoga at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition and co-founder of Ishta Yoga LLC. Deepak Chopra called Sarah, our wonderful guest, an extraordinary teacher of yoga that has called enormously to my well-being. How amazing! You also co-authored a book with Dr. Chopra, Living in the Light: Yoga for Self-Realization.

I've had some wonderful experiences with yoga, and I just want to say right off the bat, I am also a Christian, and I know some Christians want to stay away from yoga. So this episode, although it might not be for everyone, that's okay. Yoga really served me, and it actually really, really helped me. I'd love to talk about that. I think there's a place for practice for everyone. I don't think we have to say that it's a religion.

Right off the bat, I think we can look at the health benefits of yoga. One of my closest, dearest friends—just love her—runs an addiction recovery center in Woodinville, Washington, Bajra Recovery, and she gets incredible results helping alcoholics and other people who have addiction to other substances recover. She gets extremely high results and she incorporates and attributes it to yoga. She says yoga is a big part of her system to help people fully recover from addiction and get their life back.

I believe there's so much here for mental health, emotional health, and physical health. I think it's really important for us to keep an open mind and look at what we can gain from this conversation—what we can gain from yoga to support our overall well-being.

Having said that, Sarah, I'm so excited to have you on the show today because we're going to learn more about what it is to take your yoga teacher training program, and it's online, so it's accessible to everyone around the world. Welcome to the show.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:15:07.992)

Thank you so much, Ashley. It's really a pleasure to be with you. I'm excited about this conversation of redefining what the practice of yoga is.

Ashley James (0:15:18.604)

Exactly. I think that like a lot of people if they haven’t experienced it they don't know. There's so much evidence to show we're actually going to get into the science. This is what I'm really excited about. We can talk the talk, but let's show where the rubber meets the road. You're bringing today some studies today to show the science behind the health benefits that we can gain from yoga. Before we do that, some people don't even know what it is. So let's start with: What is yoga?

Some people imagine, we all know like Lululemon, spandex. We know that, okay, we stretch and maybe some people sweat, but beyond sweating, stretching, and maybe some breathing, what is yoga?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:16:00.603)

Such a great question. Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means union. I don't think of it as a religion. It's not even really an exercise or a fitness trend. I really think of yoga as a science. It's a science and a lived experience of balancing the different aspects of our being, our nervous system. The more solar and lunar energies, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system, the physical poses, which are called asana, the Sanskrit word for it. 

Yoga did originate in India about 2500 or more years ago, which is why a lot of the verbiage we use to explain the concepts of yoga comes from this ancient language, Sanskrit. It's this practice of unifying the different disparate aspects of ourselves to experience who we really are, who we are beyond or behind our physical body, our thoughts, our identity, our sense, our emotions. What is that seer, the witness, that is able to experience the whole, the rising and subsiding of life experience, and not be changed, not be afflicted, if that makes sense? So it is a practice of essentially returning back to the aspect of yourself that's unchanging.

Ashley James (0:17:57.085)

When I was a teenager, I don't know if you remember being a teenager, but it was pretty intense. I just remember a lot of really intense emotions. My mom took me to yoga classes with her. I remember going in feeling angsty, stressed out, just very, very anxious, very angry, like just these bursts of anger, which I'm not an angry person, like hormones, man, puberty.

Going in, just feeling all riled up, ready to kind of snap and start a fight and coming out back to myself, feeling back to my center. It really helped me through the mental, emotional turmoil of puberty. 

I studied Hatha yoga, which was a really big shift from the regular yoga classes I was used to because my yoga teacher, who’s from India, told us to keep our eyes open. She said she was more, she was very militaristic. So you became very aware of your posture, how you hold yourself even outside the yoga class. It was this awareness of your strength and where you hold your shoulders, where you hold your neck, how you hold your shoulders back.

How you breathe, how you can let sort of that strength and energy flow through you and have that strong calmness inside. When you say yoga means unity, I think of the unity where you come into alignment with yourself, where you're not scattered, where you're feeling like your emotional, mental, and physical body are doing really well together and in alignment together. That's what it feels like for me.

Then I went to Kripalu and studied there. Spent over a month there and did Kripalu yoga, which is different. Every time I would choose a different type of yoga, it was very, very different, yet the outcome was very similar. I found more strength inside me, physical strength, but then I found more of this like being on a balance beam and being unshakable emotionally.

So as opposed to feeling like someone could look at me the wrong way and I could cry. That would be me going into class, and then afterward it’s like, I am unshakable. That has a lot to do with calming the nervous system and tonifying the nervous system. So we're not caught up in that fight or flight all the time, which we really, really need to do on a daily basis to optimize our immune function and optimize our body's ability to heal itself. 

We need to ask ourselves to come back into that healing mode, the parasympathetic rest and digest mode, which we are almost never in these days. We're always caught up in that stress response, and stress isn't an emotion. That's a really important thing to know. Because so many people go, “I'm not stressed.” I'm like, I bet you are. When was the last time you were in rest and digest mode?

Because we really don't feel it. We feel the effects of it. So then, down the road, you live in stress mode. Down the road, your body breaks down, and we have all these diseases that are really attributed to years of stress. So that's why I love that if we all took this training together, this online training, and we learned how to turn on healing mode, how to turn on rest and digest mode on a daily basis and did it, we'd be protecting our nervous system, protecting our immune system, protecting our mental and emotional health. There's so much we could get out of it. So that's why I see that there's value in this.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:22:03.613)

Absolutely. This is the human nervous system and its real power. There's a power in our nervous system and that we are able to dial it up and dial it back down. These ancient practices that we have to adjust our energy, sometimes we do need to dial it up. Sometimes if you're feeling depressed and unmotivated, you might need practices to energize you and awaken you. Yoga can do that. It can also give you practices, which the majority of our culture need, which is to down-regulate the nervous system. So we start from a baseline of homeostasis.

You're right, most people are not familiar with that state. It's almost like a foreign concept to be in a space where your heart rate is in its baseline, your brain waves are more slowed down, your blood pressure is in a healthy space, and you're able to explore the world and see the world as it really is.

Sometimes we like to use this analogy of a lake, that your mind and your thoughts, the fluctuations in your mind, which in Sanskrit they're called vrittis, are kind of like ripples in a lake. As we become more hypervigilant, as our nervous system gets heightened because of external stressors, daily pressures, et cetera, those ripples become more and more fluctuating. Like a lake, when you have a lot of activity, you're unable to perceive the images, the reflections that you see in the lake with clarity.

It's the same thing with the mind. When we have so much turbulence and fluctuation in our mind, we're unable to perceive things with clarity. So it's like you see a quarter in a lake and you think it's a big fish. It's the same thing with our relationships, with our decision-making processes. We're not always in a clear, coherent space to be able to take actions and make choices that are for our highest good because we're so busy fighting that sympathetic nervous response.

Ashley James (0:24:46.619)

The fight or flight is meant to keep us alive, but only for a very short period of time. We're only really meant to be in it when being chased by the bear, we run away from the bear, we're good. Or there's a fire, we get away from the fire, we're good. It's supposed to turn off. Then we're supposed to be, 95% of the time we're supposed to be in rest and digest mode, but it has actually been reversed.

Now we're in that fight or flight almost all the time because you look at your phone, there's going to be a trigger. You look at the news, there's going to be a trigger. You look at your bills, there's going to be a trigger. You're driving. We're driving these death machines around. It's wild. We have no peace. I just came from the country. We went out, we drove out into the mountains, into the Okanagan Highlands of Washington and there's no cell service. This is just to give you, paint the picture. You can't see anyone. It's crazy. You're on top of these beautiful rolling, gorgeous golden mountains, sprinkled with forests and you can't see your neighbor. No, you see more cows than your neighbor. It's just gorgeous. There's no amenities, there's no restaurants, there's nothing. It's just you and the wind and your thoughts.

I would sit there and think, our ancestors, this is how they lived. Even like the Bible, you think about like this is, we had our herd of goats or our sheep and we had our fields and we had our thoughts and we had nature and we looked up at the stars and we breathed and we were at peace in the world most of the time. Then if there was a wolf or a bear, that's when we went to stress mode. Now it's the opposite. Now we are not at peace with nature. We are not in tune with our body. We ignore our body. Then we wonder, where did it all go wrong? We don't listen to the whispers. Things just start to break really poorly. But it actually started 20 years ago when we entered stress mode and didn't leave it.

So this is why we've got to stop what we're doing because what we're doing isn't working. When we look at the statistics of the disease rates, looking at one in three people will have cancer. One in three people will have diabetes, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome, obesity. 70% of adult Americans are on at least one prescription medication. Many people are on pain meds. We're sick.

We need to look back at the root cause. What's going on? Our body is almost never in healing mode. When we're in stress mode, our body shuts down healing. It actually just shuts it down so that we could do immediate survival things. That's what I love about this practice, even just sitting there and breathing. I believe it's called asana, breathing. Is that it? Did I say that wrong?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:28:00.303)

No, you said asana correctly. That's the asana's physical poses.

Ashley James (0:28:04.067)

Okay. What's the breathing?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:28:05.908)

It’s Pranayama. 

Ashley James (0:28:07.700)

Pranayama, that's right. So breathing, which I teach breathing to my clients because they’ll come in hot, and I'm like, okay, I've got one thing for you to do. They're like, my gosh, I feel so much better. We just took eight slow breaths. We took eight slow breaths. It takes like two minutes, and they're like, I can't believe how much of a difference that would make. You don't need to carve out these 90-minute yoga sessions every day. How about just giving me two minutes of breathing?

I’d love for you to guide us through a pranayama. This has been a bit like maybe 20 years since I studied yoga, but I'd love for you to guide us through one at some point in this interview because I want everyone to experience that. If you haven't ever experienced it, I want you to experience it. We don't need to use beautiful, fancy, foreign words. It is breathing with intention in order to bring calm to your body, in order to turn that switch on in your body that tells your nervous system you're safe and it's okay to go back into healing mode.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:29:25.317)

Correct. The interesting thing about the breath is that it's really hard to tell our minds to be quiet, or tell your heart rate to slow down, or your digestion to start to function more optimally. These are all functions of our autonomic nervous system, and breathing is included, but the breath is one of the only maybe two functions of our nervous system that's happening but that we can also control. So we have the power to shift the way that we breathe.

By shifting the way that we breathe, we automatically impact not only those other nervous system responses but our mind, the quality of your mind. I could say, stop thinking.

Or stop thinking thoughts. By using thoughts to quiet thoughts, that's a very hard formula, but breath molds and shapes our mind and the activity of the mind. So in that way, it's really an immediate and very profound response and impact that we have to shift the present moment. Like you said, it really doesn't take a long time. You can do three to five breaths and, in a moment, re-regulate your nervous system and just change your whole outlook.

Ashley James (0:30:54.729)

You mentioned if every child was taught just simple breathwork to regulate their nervous system. Every child in day one kindergarten, we're going to do some breathing. Then every time there was a child who clearly was in anxiety, the whole class did two minutes of breathing. If everyone was just taught Math is important, English reading is important, and learning how to regulate your nervous system and calm your nervous system so you get full control of your mindset, your brain back—that would put people back into a learning state. What not everyone realizes is that when we go into fight or flight, when we go into that stress mode, you don't feel stressed, so you don't know it, but we actually lose critical thinking.

We lose the higher function of our brain. Our brain goes more into that survival mode, and optimal learning does not happen there. But think of our children and the environment they're in. If your child goes to regular school, we homeschool, so it's a little different. I probably need to have a big reminder somewhere, like breathe, breathe. Just imagine if the children were taught this, how much of the time are children in stress mode and not in learning mode? Because it is a tumultuous experience to be in these very busy classrooms, very overwhelming, constantly feeling judged, constantly bullied. It's not a healthy place to be. It's not really a productive learning environment. That's where we came from. All of us survived that, or we have our scars and our wounds from our early childhood education. We never learned. We learned to cope. We turned to drugs. We turned to alcohol. We turned to addictions. We turned to other coping mechanisms. We turned to TV. Think about what you turned to when you got overwhelmed when you were a teenager. What kind of coping mechanism did you turn to to help regulate your nervous system?

So many of us turn to even sugar, substances outside of ourselves instead of learning how to regulate our own nervous system. Can you imagine if the entire planet just learned to pause and breathe when they felt themselves come out of that rest and digest mode? When they start to feel like, my heart rate's kind of rising, I'm kind of feeling antsy and anxious, I'm starting to get tunnel vision.

That they learn to just pause and breathe. Just that alone would shift the entire world. This is your ticket, this is your key to taking back control of your life. That's why my friend Jessica has such a high recovery rate with her clients when she does her coaching, when she does her mental health counseling for addiction, because she teaches the alcoholics and those addicted to substances when they come to her, she teaches them how to regulate their nervous system through yoga, and they walk out of there feeling strong inside, and feeling like they have control because now they have the button to push to down-regulate and control their nervous system. I want you to do some breathing with us for sure.

Before we get to that though, do you have any studies specifically around your nervous system, around the effects of practicing yoga on our mental, emotional health, or our nervous system control?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:34:49.738)

Well, there's definitely studies that have been shown of the heart benefits of yoga that lower blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, and there's another study that found that practicing yoga improved lipid profiles. Yes, as well as in patients with coronary artery disease, lowers excessive blood sugar levels in people who have diabetes. So there's all kinds of studies. One study, there were several small studies that found that yoga has a positive effect on cardiovascular risk factors. So it does help to lower blood pressure in people who have hypertension. They think that's because it restores baroreceptor sensitivity.  That's what affects what allows your blood pressure to move from high to low blood pressure. Some of that can be based on some of the asanas that we do. For example, when we go upside down for an extended period of time, it can open that baroreceptor and shift your blood pressure from an increase to a more decreased state. So that's an interesting thing.

There's also been research that shows that small groups of individuals who are more sedentary, who hadn't practiced yoga before, that after eight weeks of practicing yoga at least twice a week, for a total of 180 minutes, participants had greater muscle strength and endurance and flexibility and cardiorespiratory fitness. So I think that aspect that you said about feeling strong is also a part of the practice. We've spoken a lot about the re-regulating of the nervous system and moving from that state of hypervigilance into more of rest and digest. But I think it's a really important key to recognize that the power of the physical poses and of being able to, and there's all kinds of benefits in holding poses for an extended period of time, that they do also increase your muscle tone, your cardiovascular endurance, flexibility, the fascia intelligence in your body, and that holding poses for an extended period of time on top of the physical benefits of it, it builds resilience in our minds, where we are able to kind of hold and experience, perhaps feelings that might feel uncomfortable or irregular or more challenging. If you think about holding a pose where you're in a semi-squat position for an extended period of time, that requires strength and endurance. 

When we can hold that and breathe at the same time, we are increasing our muscle, strength and power, and at the same time using the breath to quiet and calm the nervous system down. These two components of strength and ease and surrender really create this resilient response in our bodies that we can move through challenging situations. Sometimes yoga poses are challenging situations that we experience in life. That's how I like to think of them. Any given situation can make you feel excited, elated, free, or you can have other situations that make you feel fearful or anxious or angry. Any shape that you create with your body can also evoke those different responses.

It's not about how do you run away from those responses, but how do you hold that in your field of awareness and learn how to move through it and get on the other side of it? That is the experience that we take with us from yoga. The yoga experience is, yes the practice, the class is on the mat, so to speak. The yoga mat, that's where you do your downward-facing dog or any other type of part of the practice. But when you step off of the mat and into your life, you're carrying with you all of the residue of that practice. It's like information that you can recruit at any given moment, like that stressful talk you have to have with your child or your friend or a coworker. You hold this pose for an extended period of time and you get through that, then you can say to yourself, “What, I can get through this too.” So it's really about applying some of the benefits that we receive on the mat, off the mat into our everyday life.

Ashley James (0:40:22.263)

I love that you said that because just recently I took my husband to actually his first yoga class, he had never done one. The next day I was like, wow, why are my shoulders so sore? What is going on? He looks at me, he goes, we were holding ourselves in a static pose, holding ourselves upside down. It wasn’t like I was holding my whole body weight. It's like you do a downward dog and then you're basically what that looks like for those who don't know what that is. You bend at the hips and put your hands on the mat like you're making your body into a triangle. Then, we were doing basically what looked like yoga burpees and doing these movements of pushing up and getting up and getting down and getting up and getting down. But the next day I was like, I feel like I just did some major weightlifting and I love weightlifting. I love seeing how much I can lift. I love that feeling of strength and I was surprised cause I hadn't done any weightlifting in the last few days. I feel like I just did some major kettlebells, what's going on in it. It was so cool how much I got out of that class because it's, it's just you and your body weight. 

I noticed how much of my internal dialogue happens. Can I do this pose? Like, I don't know if I can do that. I'm going to try it. Wow. I'm doing it. Okay. Hey, I have more balance than I thought I did. You notice how much you criticize yourself, how much you doubt yourself. Then you notice, if you take on the challenge of something you think you might not be able to do, and then you're like, hey, I'm, I'm not doing this perfectly but look, I did some of it. Standing up on one foot, just increasing your balance. I mean, many of us don't do that on a regular basis and should. But when it comes to growing older, we need to develop and build and protect our balance now so that when we are older, we can prevent falls.

It's a real thing. That's a real risk. Dying from falls is a painful and slow death. Falling and breaking your hip, for example. God forbid it happens to any of us. But if you could prevent that by honing and dialing in your body's ability to have strength and balance.

I also love that yoga is really for any age, that it can be adapted to any age and to build us up no matter where we are. I know a lot of seniors do chair yoga. It's like wherever you are, it can meet you wherever you are, which is really cool.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:43:28.030)

It can build wherever you are. It's so important that you said that because where it meets you, where you're at, and a good teacher will provide those different options for their class. Where you have a version where you can step it up or you have a version where you can modify or dial it down a little bit.

This practice of self-study, like understanding yourself, really listening to the feedback you're getting from your body of how much is too much or not enough. My rule of thumb is if you feel something happening and you can still breathe, that's your edge. That's where we want to go and where we want to be in the practice where we feel something happening, but we can still breathe steadily in and out through the nostrils. That's where transformation happens. That's where growth happens.

That's where great opportunity is where, like you say, we realize how capable we are. The body often has so much more strength and power and capability than our mind might give it credit for. I mean, just watching the Olympics, it's just incredible to see the potential of the human body. I'm certainly not a proponent of acrobat yoga, that's certainly not what I'm talking about, but it's more about, again, listening to what is your edge? What is your place where you start to feel like you did, the strength in your upper body or in your legs and just this sensation arising. In that sensation, there's so much information. We spend so much of our day up in our minds, planning tomorrow or reflecting on yesterday or last week and what am I going to do about this or that? 

But to really be present in our bodies, that is a skill set and really a power that we can take with us as we age. As we notice the shifts or deteriorations, like understanding how to ourselves differently. There was another study about mindful eating and the correlations between yoga practitioners and their ability to just make healthier choices in life because you're becoming more aware. You're just in that connection with the physical responses that you're having in any given moment where you can listen, and then you respond accordingly. I often say in my classes that it's like yoga is a dialogue. It's a conversation you're having with your body. We're often like the dictator of our body. You've got to do this and you've got to do that and listen to me. But when we can have a conversation, we can let the wisdom of the body respond, and it creates a whole new experience for ourselves.

Ashley James (0:46:43.159)

I love that. The Institute for Integrative Nutrition, which we had mentioned at the beginning, I took their year-long health coach training program. I've also interviewed the creator of IIN, Joshua Rosenthal. I've interviewed the wonderful new CEO. I've had several, at least a dozen, of the faculty on the show.

I loved my experience with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. I was surprised to find out that about half the people that take the courses there are just doing it for personal growth. The other half are doing it for the career they want to either enrich or get into. But I was surprised at how many people do the courses just for their own personal growth. But it makes sense because I got so much personal growth out of my experience there.

Now IIN has partnered with Chopra, and so through IIN, yoga training is offered. Is it similar to the IIN Health Coach Training Program? Is your 200-hour yoga teacher training also for personal growth? Or do you find that people do it because they want their personal growth, and there's a percentage that actually wants to go out and teach yoga? Can you tell us a bit about that?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:48:11.495)

Yes. I see this a lot, that people embark on a yoga teacher training not because they want to teach, but because they want to learn and grow themselves in their own practice and understand the practice in a more nuanced, intimate way. Folks who sign up for the training will certainly get that experience. But then this other thing happens where maybe 50% are doing it for their own personal reasons. Then by the end of the training, like 30% of those 50% decide, actually, I do want to teach. I'm getting the bite. Something sparks inside of you when you start to practice teaching, or maybe you practice teaching friends and loved ones. You see how the act of teaching is such an elevating experience.

I'm sure you experienced this when you did your course and worked with your own clients. You see that in sharing the gifts of the practice and seeing other people respond in such positive ways, it actually fuels and feeds you. There's a real nourishment we can get from watching other people grow and transform from the practices you have shared with them. It restores a sense of meaning in life that many in the world have lost in the moment.

To have meaning in feeling like I'm helping to change someone's life in maybe subtle ways. It could be something simple like, “I had lower back pain, and now it's gone,” or “I wasn't standing properly, and now I have better posture.” Like for me, it's sometimes those real micro shifts that make all of the difference.

So once you experience the joy of, and I do call it sharing. I think sometimes the idea of teaching feels overwhelming for some people to think that they are going to teach yoga. That's why I say we share the practice. We share the teachings with other people because it's a shared lived experience. I can only teach what is my own lived experience, and I share that with people. They take from that what is useful to them and pass that on.

So it's not about a hierarchy like, “I know more, you know less.” It's like, “This has been my experience, and I share it with you, and you can take from that what suits and serves you.” So yes, it really is an empowering experience.

Ashley James (0:51:03.701)

I like that you pointed that out because I've met so many wonderful, talented, knowledgeable people who don't believe in themselves and who say, “I'm not an expert. I couldn't teach this.” I'm like, “Are you kidding me? You have so much to share. You have so much to give. People would be so blessed to learn something from you.” But they're like, “Who am I? I'm not the expert here.”

We've been, I think, brainwashed or traumatized from the education system to believe that you have to have a PhD before anyone could even possibly listen to you. It's funny because you get there, like even people earn PhDs. They're still like, “I thought something magical would happen where I feel like an expert. I still don't feel like an expert.” I'm like, “That's because it's all up to you.” It's in your head. Like, if you don't believe in yourself, a piece of paper is not going to make you believe in yourself. 

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:52:11.703)

It's about connection; because there are some people who might have those high credentials, the PhDs, and are they then able to connect with other people in a way that helps them to understand? So it can go both ways. That's why, yes, I think this power of connection is really important, especially if you are in the field of wellness and you're wanting to share and help other people, that we do it in a way that's authentic. It is grounded in science and facts and a lived experience, but that we also do it in a way that is like we're seeing each other, we're watching, we're witnessing, and in this space of in it together. That's the healing.

Ashley James (0:52:59.554)

Do you have any more of that science to share with us?

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:53:04.290)

Since we were talking about breath, I think we can talk a little bit about nasal breathing and the importance of nasal breathing. There was a great book by James Nestor called Breath, if anyone has read that book. But it really substantiates a lot of what the ancient yogis knew, which was that breathing through the nostrils not only helps to extend and lengthen the breath, which calms and quiets the nervous system. There is also an air filtration that happens when we breathe in through the nostrils through these little hairs called cilia, which are in the nostrils. When the air passes through the cilia in the nostrils, it has a purifying effect, so it sort of filters through some of the toxins that are in the air that we breathe. Then it also increases the nitric oxide. 

Nitric oxide is what helps the oxygen to circulate through blood into the different organs of our body. Nasal breathing increases the amount of nitric oxide that we're able to produce. So it helps with our blood circulation and the oxygenation of our cells and our organs. So that's really interesting as well. 

Of course, we also know that from each nostril, this is more energetic, but then scientists found that nostrils correspond to an opposite hemisphere in the brain. So the right nostril corresponds to the left brain hemisphere, and the left nostril corresponds to the right brain hemisphere. When we balance the flow of air through both nostrils, it creates a balance in both brain hemispheres, which increases creativity and our ability to think outside the box and be a little more innovative. It helps to calm the nervous system and quiet anxiety as well. So really interesting facts around the benefits of nasal breathing.

Ashley James (0:55:38.962)

I think everyone is feeling a little calmer because they all started breathing more deeply through their nose, closing their mouth if they caught themselves breathing through their mouth.  I think everyone's going, wow, I'm now breathing a little deeper through my nose since we started this conversation. I certainly did.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:56:01.733)

It will help with mental alertness too. Sorry to interject, but just that, your ability to concentrate and listen is also an effect by nasal breathing. So hopefully that helped as well.

Ashley James (0:56:13.139)

Well, everyone wants that and yet they run to Starbucks or sugar or something for mental alertness when we could all just breathe through our noses. Look, we have this built-in system to regulate our nervous system, but I just feel like we all stepped away the last hundred or so years. We all stepped away from how we're supposed to live.

We live such an artificial life that we're now coming back. A lot of people are now interested in coming back to learning about their body, learning about their health, because we have to, because modern, quote-unquote, modern medicine, like drug-based medicine, doesn't have the answers for helping the body heal from chronic illness. They just have more drugs. But they just suck at healing chronic illness because we don't have a drug deficiency.

We need to come back to the root of healing, which is coming back inside ourselves, getting ourselves into that rest and digest mode, regulating our nervous system. I love that through the process of the practice of yoga, it can just be a few times a week. Busy people can fit it in. Listen, my friend has five kids and I think three or more grandkids. She's and she runs her own business. She does yoga on a regular basis. She is a busy woman. I know many very, very, very busy people who are able to fit it into their life because it gives them so much more than it takes. It might take a half an hour, a few times a week, or 45 minutes, a few times a week, but it gives so much more and it lasts like you can see the lasting effects of it. I love that then it helps people to become conscientious of what they're eating and they start to get more connected with their bodies. So they go, wow, that meal really served me. I feel really good. I'm going to eat more like that or wow, that I feel really bloated and slow and sluggish from eating that meal. I think I'm going to do less of that. 

We come back into our body, have more, I keep saying awareness, but that's we're so unaware, we're so numbed out. When we turn to caffeine, sugar, alcohol, these are numbing agents. TV, we're just numbing ourselves. Social media, we're numbing ourselves. This practice allows us to come back in and then we get so much more. So the course you teach though, can complete beginners who've never done yoga take your course? Or do you have recommendations for them to go do some classes before they come?

Tell us who can take your training and I'd love to hear the transformations that people go through when they take the training.

Sarah Platt-Finger (0:59:12.359)

Yes, I'd love to share about it. Well, the course starts with our Yoga Foundations program, which is just that. It's basically the foundations of yoga. What is yoga? What is asana? What does the word “Om” mean? What are these scientific reasons behind some of the practices, just sort of demystifying the practice to help give a better understanding. Again, I worked a lot with Deepak Chopra. He's a scientist and a doctor in his essence. So a lot of what we bring to the table are some of these science-based experiences and also how the practice is affecting us from that physiological perspective.

So the Yoga Foundations is open to anybody, absolute beginners who have never done it before, anyone listening to this podcast like, “Yoga, what's that?” You can do that course, which is about a 15-hour course and includes some of the yoga poses and some of the philosophy and the breath pranayama practices, just to give people a basic foundational understanding of it. Then from there, they do the 16-week, it's a 16-module course. The foundations program is evergreen, so you just take it in your own time. There's no live component to it. But in the actual certification program, which is accredited by an organization called Yoga Alliance, they kind of oversee the standardization process of yoga schools throughout the United States and internationally as well.

That is over the course of 16 weeks and people come in, there's an e-learning component that is self-paced. Then there are a few webinars that happen, two live sessions throughout the week, one of which can be done as a recording, one of which is live and in person. Those in-person live sessions are really where you get the opportunity to practice teaching with your peers. They're done in smaller groups. You can ask questions. You understand more the anatomical aspects of movement and biomechanics and what's happening in our joints when we do some of these shapes. Why are some things easier for some people and more challenging? Our bones are not identical. They're shaped differently. The way they move is different. So it's why it's so important that we say and share that yoga is not a one-size-fits-all practice. It's not the same for everybody.

So understanding where your limitations are and where you might need to adjust a pose to suit your individual needs is really fundamental in your ability to come back to the practice and make it sustainable. So many times people come to me and say, “Yes, I tried yoga, but I'm not flexible enough or I'm not thin enough or I'm not strong enough.” So I couldn't, it was always like not enough. It made me feel so truly sad because there is no measurement. If you can breathe and you have a human nervous system, you can experience yoga. It's really that simple.

What we teach our teachers is to be able to share this practice with a larger population, and a multitude and a different range of anatomies and constitutions and backgrounds so that it's not just for a select group of people, but for a greater mass. So yes, there's a real range of studies that we bring into each week, both philosophical and anatomical and experiential.

Week over week, we focus on a different focus or topic, a different category of poses, different breathing techniques. We also bring in some hand gestures, which are called mudras. Hands, interestingly, occupy about 30% of our motor sensory cortex in the brain. So what we do with our hands lights up different parts of our brain and can affect and impact the way that we feel. Ancient yogis, they knew this. So you can create different gestures with your hands to affect your concentration, to calm yourself down, to help you feel inspired. So that's part of the practice as well.

Ashley James (1:04:12.885)

I love it. At the end of yoga classes, a lot of times there's a moment where we can go within, have a few minutes of meditation. Meditation is so personal and there's so many different ways to teach it. One of my best friends is actually a guru in Kriya yoga, which is not stretchy yoga. It's all up in the head, but he's written a few books on meditation and it just fascinates me because you can hook yourself up to machines and you can measure it and you can go deep into the science of it. But we can see that by lying there and just breathing and just being at peace with yourself for a few moments that your brain enters these wonderful, healthy brain waves that show us that we're actually unlocking creativity, that we're unlocking our potential. We certainly are in that rest and digest. It's a superpower we have to go into that rest and digest mode where the body is in that super healing state. It's so wonderful for our emotional health and our mental health.

I know I keep saying that, but it's like, this is what we get. So for those who don't have very much or any experience with meditation, it sounds boring. It sounds scary. People have different perceptions. I know in your class, you guys do teach some meditation. What do we get from taking your course? Do people end up feeling confident around their ability to have a healthy meditation practice, maybe you could talk a little bit about that, especially for people who don't really have an experience of meditation.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:06:15.298)

I'd love to talk about it, and thank you so much for asking about it because it is sort of one of the limbs of yoga. Yoga has eight limbs that we talk about, and one of them is meditation, and it tends to be bypassed in modern Western society as something separate from yoga. We think of yoga as the poses and meditation as something else, but meditation is an integral aspect of yoga. To be able to merge, to come into union, you have to be able to sit and be still and be with yourself for an extended period of time. That's what meditation is.

We do have a whole module on meditation, which is based of Deepak Chopra's lineage of meditation and what he learned from Maharishi Mahesh years ago. It's a mantra-based meditation. A mantra can be anything; it is like a prayer. If you say something over and over again for an extended period of time, whether it's om shanti or breathe in, breathe out, or peace or thy will be done, whatever words resonate with you, there is a physiological response. The relaxation response that happens when we attempt something over and over again, we do something repetitively, and we attempt to let go of outside distraction.

Meditation, by the way, can also happen when you swim, when you walk, when you knit, when you run. You're doing something repetitive and keeping your mind focused on it for an extended period of time. But the yoga practice goes a little bit deeper. There's that state of meditation where you're kind of in the flow. That's where, yes, you're no longer distracted by limiting beliefs or thoughts that can make us feel inept or unworthy. These thoughts, whether they're in our conscious or unconscious, they kind of govern us.

Sitting in meditation for an extended period of time, you replace those thoughts with something else, whether it's a repetitive sound, a mantra, a prayer, something that resonates with you. That triggers our nervous system to calm and quiet down, the healing response to happen on a physiological level, where brain waves slow down, the nervous system, blood pressure decreases, digestion increases, all of those great effects. But on a mental, emotional, dare I say spiritual aspect, what it does is helps us to understand ourselves as something other than our physical shape, form, body, other than our thoughts, other than our emotions, other than our fears, and return back to this all-pervasive, the word that you've come back to a lot, awareness.

It's like coming back to yourself as the sky. When we understand ourselves as the sky, we then can see when stress happens and other perturbances in life that yes, it comes, but it also goes. It doesn't have to define us. We don't have to identify ourselves as the scared one, the stressed one. It's like I'm experiencing stress, and the stress will also subside, and I can come back to that sky-like nature.

But the importance of doing it on a daily basis cannot be overstated because it's Pavlovian. I love that we're talking so much science because we can bring it in. When you do it over and over and over again, the mind then knows you can take one or two breaths and then come back into that state of peace and relaxation and then take that with you throughout your day. But just as we practice or have our habits of making the bed and brushing our teeth and other daily hygienic practices, yoga and meditation are like the mental spiritual hygiene that we have to do on a daily basis to take care of ourselves.

Ashley James (1:11:03.366)

You said something about when we meditate, we have this moment where it's a break. We have this moment where it's almost like we're plucking ourselves out of our human experience, where we believe we're so stuck in our physical body, we believe our reality is the reality. You can look at politics and how people react, and you realize like everyone really is walking around with the hubris that their version of reality is the reality and everyone else's reality is wrong. It's kind of ludicrous. We're all kind of crazy and stupid, what do I mean? Because your reality isn't the right reality. Everyone has a different perception through the lens of their experiences and their beliefs and their limiting beliefs, their negative beliefs.

I'm so frustrated by the friends I have that believe in the bad things about themselves, like they're not good enough, they're not loved, they're not worthy of love, they're too this or too that or too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, whatever. When we're wrapped up in that, our self-worth is so poor because we believe the lies we've told ourselves or the lies other people have told us when we were young, we're walking around with this belief system like a prison. If just for a moment, we can pluck our consciousness out of that and have this other experience over here where you are not what your dad believed about you, what your mom believed about you, what your teacher, your first grade teacher believed about you. You are not the negative beliefs that you have. You have self-imposed limitations on you, your entire life, and you've put chains on you willingly and the suffering that you choose. We don't want it.

We complain about the chains we put on ourselves because we don't even realize that the belief systems, that actually we can choose a different way because we believe our reality is the only reality. We believe in this prison we put ourselves in. When we learn, and this is through personal growth, dive into personal growth and you will learn that you are amazing. You can let go of these chains of limitations and you can grow. If you're not good at something, you can get good at it. Pluck yourself out of that experience of who you've been. People are living in a body that's hurting and that's there. They believe they'll always have that. It's not true. You don't have to always have that. Or it doesn't have to be your prison.

But when you have that moment where you're somewhere else, like if I plucked a goldfish out of the water, I don't want to torture fish here, but just imagine for a moment this goldfish is not tortured by taking it out of the water. But if I plucked the goldfish out of the water and it saw the air, it saw the water for the first time and it went, “Holy crow, I live in water. I didn't even know that. I thought everyone lived in this. This is whatever was always around us. I didn't question it.” Until we have a different experience. We look down and we go, “That's the reality I've been choosing to live in.”

So I love that experience of meditation, that it doesn't have to be this long like I have to sit there for 45 minutes and it's so boring. But when you have that moment, like breathing eight times slow and deep, if you have that moment where you are not living in that limited reality, that prison, that suffering, then you can go, “Wait. Why am I choosing that to be about me? Why am I choosing that? I don't need that. I can let that go.”

Sorry, go on. I was going to say that I also heard there's a growing concern for suicide. I just can't believe how many people jump off the bridges here onto the I-5 and it happens so often that I have to check ways to make sure that, unfortunately, I have to check to see if there's a giant backup because it's so common that someone's jumping off a bridge to kill themselves. I have a friend whose child killed themselves and I've been hearing more and more that suicide is on the rise.

I just had a wonderful guest who tried to kill himself, and right as he was passing out, realized he didn't want that and he prayed, “Please give me another chance.” He woke up in his own vomit and he said, “Enough is enough.” Thank God gave me another chance. Most people who do survive suicide, they say like at the last minute, “I changed my mind.”

If we just had that tool, like the meditation tool, to know that you're suffering and it is so painful, you want to end your life, it is so painful, but I promise you tomorrow, it's going to be better. I promise you, no matter how hard it hurts and how much you cannot see the light at the end of the tunnel right now, I promise you that you will find the light again, that your life is worth living and there's people that love you.

I believe that teaching this yoga, teaching the breath work, and teaching meditation gives people the tools so that they don't do something like end their life when the suffering is so hard. So that's what I'm hearing. I'm hearing that these tools are essential for children, that they're essential for all of us.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:17:31.358)

Yes. It's one of the beauties of the practice that you are doing. There's a great quote from one of the classical texts of yoga called the Bhagavad Gita. It says, “Yoga is the journey of the self through the self to the self.” It's like you are doing the practice. You are the map that you're exploring, and your expansive self, your consciousness, is the end destination.

"I think there's also something really empowering about that, where it's like nobody else can do it for you. You have to be the one that's going to choose to come onto the proverbial mat and do the practice. But at the end of the day, you are the one that's going to have that transformative experience, as you said, to get out of that cage."

I thought of this—you inspired me—about this analogy that we use a lot about a drop. Each individual kind of spirit or soul or essence or person is like a drop from the ocean. Each drop seems separate. It has its own distinct location and shape and form, but when you look at a drop, you see that it has all of the qualities of the ocean within it. When a drop goes back into the ocean, it becomes the ocean. It's no longer a drop. That is the true experience of yoga.

It's us as our own unique individual drops merging with this ocean of intelligence, which is actually the intelligence that we really are. To be able to immerse ourselves into this ocean of intelligence on a daily basis, to have that direct experience of it, and then take it with us as we go throughout our day. But we have to go back every day and experience it or on a regular basis to really know the true nature of our being.

Ashley James (1:19:59.234)

I love it. I can see that whatever religion we practice, we can incorporate that. Like for me, I see it even in church when we get into this rhythm. My church is one of the kind of churches where everyone stands and dances and puts their hands up. I was raised Anglican, and you don't do that. You don't do that in the Catholic church, Anglican church. Protestant—like, we're just kind of stiff and sitting there. But the church I go to now is alive, and the Holy Spirit is there.

We get into this rhythmic singing where we are in this meditation, singing “Amen” over and over again, singing “Jesus” over and over again. Together, there's this union where it is 100% meditation. My consciousness of my grocery list, what I'm doing later that day—just everything—goes away, and you're just in the moment. Prayer is meditation. It doesn't have to look like someone with crossed legs, sitting there with their fingers together. It doesn't have to look like that. Your meditation can fit your life.

I love that you said that knitting can be meditation. There are activities that you do that you love. Walking—we can do walking meditations where we're focusing on our breathing and focusing on the rhythm of the walking. When everything melts away and you're just being, then you're meditating.

So I love it. I love that we're realizing that yoga isn't this weird foreign thing. It's actually introducing us to the skills that we haven't developed yet but that are part of who we are.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:22:05.010)

Of humanity, it's like the technology of the human body. What is available to us? We say, there's an app for this, there's an app for that. In the technology of our human body exists the potential to adapt, to change, to expand. It's really phenomenal what the capabilities that we have.

In this vessel, this technology that we have with us throughout our entire life, we're constantly trying to escape it and get away from it. But it's like, no, the miracle is here. It's this. So yes, it's quite different.

Ashley James (1:22:54.762)

I'm reminded of Romans 2:15, learn to be conscious of your own consciousness. This is where this isn't something foreign. That's the coolest thing. I wish it was the manual that we came with. When I studied neuro-linguistic programming and timeline therapy and NLP, neuro-linguistic programming is a combination of behavioral psychology and cognitive therapy. It's a collection of tools. Similar to yoga, it's a collection of tools. I was like, man, this is like the manual we should have come with. It is learning how to unlock our own potential. Then I studied acupuncture and acupressure and understanding the meridians of the body. It was this whole other layer of, wow, we have this nervous system we barely tap into in the West.

We just don't even understand that we have the ability to affect our health through acupuncture, acupressure, through understanding our nervous system more. Then yoga is this other layer. It's like you tap into your own physiologic gifts. You tap into it. It's like the light switches. It's like, you want more mental clarity? Here, let me show you nasal breathing.

You want more strength and balance, and the last 25 years of your life, the last 30 years of your life, could be filled with strength and balance? Here, let me show you this switch over here. Let me show you mental health, more emotional health. Here, let me show you the switch over here in your body. That is why I love that journey of personal growth.

So anyone can take your class. Tell us a bit more about how these classes work. They're obviously online. You talked about how most of it can be done at your own pace, and there are a few live classes you have to attend, which is great. It's actually really rewarding to do that. But when does it start? How many times a year does it happen?

If it's starting in a few months, I always tell people, if you want to do it, sign up and do it because they oftentimes will give you pre-study work to do to unlock some stuff. So actually, the course starts the moment you decide you want to do it.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:25:23.638)

Correct. Yes, our next course starts October 22nd. We have about three courses with three cohorts happening per year. Once you do sign up, you have access to that foundations program, which is a great start. It comes with some classes and some digital learning of some of the yoga poses, some of the breathing techniques.

Additional, as I mentioned, information about the sort of classical philosophy of yoga. So all very integrative and interactive for you to get started, to just chew on some of the information. Yes, then it starts in October. It goes over the course of 16 weeks.

Although there are some additional months that you have to complete it if you need that extra time because life happens. We know that a lot of people doing our course are parents, they have full-time jobs, they might have multiple responsibilities, and sometimes things happen where they need to take a pause. We try to accommodate for all of that because really, at the end of the day, this course is about learning how to live this practice. We're not interested in necessarily creating yoga teachers that are not kind in the world or don't have a level of awareness in their everyday life. It's so much more important that you understand the gifts of the practice and live them. That's one way that you teach it. It's just like you embody it and you bring it into the strangers you meet on the street or who you buy your coffee from, et cetera. Yes, it's a very integrated practice. Was there another question to that?

Ashley James (1:27:28.514)

No, so it happens several times a year. When, if this sounds good to you, sign up and do it even so that you can get all the pre-study work, and it unlocks the stuff so you can start learning. There's a discount. Love that IIN gives my listeners a discount. I asked all the way back when I took my training seven or eight years ago.

I think it was actually seven years ago when I graduated from IIN. I asked if I could get a discount code because I knew I would be telling everyone about it. So you guys are graciously giving 25% off, and that's with coupon code LTH. So people can actually sign up online. Of course, the links to all of that will be in the show notes of today's podcast at LearnTrueHealth.com.

They can also call the Institute for Integrative Nutrition if they'd like, and they can ask questions and sign up there. I know that IIN does offer payment plans. Anyone can do it. Don't let limiting decisions stop you. If this sounds interesting to you and you want those mental, emotional, physical, and even spiritual benefits, for me, it's personal growth. Personal growth checks off all those boxes.

It's like, for me, personal growth gives me physical health, mental health, emotional health, spiritual health, and energetic health. Just knowing I can breathe through my nose and get more mental clarity. I quit coffee again, so I'm like, man, am I ever breathing through my nose right now?

That's wonderful. So listeners know that no matter what, they can do it. Busy people can do it. If you're on a budget, you can do it. You make it accessible to everyone, which is wonderful. I definitely want to make sure that we give us enough time for you to teach us the pranayama, the breathing techniques. I want everyone to experience it. Before we get into that, was there anything else, any other studies or science, or anything else that you wanted to make sure that we touched on?

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:29:42.369)

I think I just want to also say that there's a lot of this, we went into a lot of the depths of the practice. But the two things that are so important that we have throughout our experience are how to stand and how to breathe. These are the two things that we do every day in our life that we don't always know or learn how to do. 

There's lots of studies around how we stand affecting the way that we interact with other people and the different hormones that are released when we stand and when we take on a more empowered stance. It actually creates these feedback loops for us in our brain that enable us to hold experience differently and that other people respond to us differently.

So I just wanted to share that as a closure around something so simple in the way that we hold ourselves up. It's also, just to add to it, it’s a choice. We can choose how we organize our bodies in space, how we choose to stand in the world. It makes a difference in how we move throughout the world. I think there's a real poetry in that.

Ashley James (1:32:41.397)

Wow, that is so true. Our confidence can be shifted by how we hold ourselves. There was a Ted Talk on that about the superhero pose where, like, surgeons would put their fists on their hips, pull their shoulders back, chin up, and just smile or breathe, and it would build their confidence.

What's interesting when you study NLP, the first thing you learn is that your state—so your state is your physiology, your emotional state in the moment, and your mental state. Like, what are you thinking to yourself? Are you thinking, I suck? Or are you thinking, I love myself? What are you thinking? Your mindset. But your state directly impacts your behavior.

Your choices directly impact your results in life. If you're walking around with your shoulders hunched, breathing shallow, just that physiology calls forth negative thoughts about yourself, negative thoughts about your life. When you pull your shoulders back and your chin up, you've changed almost nothing about your circumstances other than opening up your breathing. But because you changed your physiology, you now shift your mindset and your confidence, which will change your behaviors, and that changes your results in life.

Something as simple as doing that mountain pose and being aware, conscious of your body in space—like, I am standing here, and wow, okay, I can pull my shoulders back a bit. I can bring my chin up a bit. I can breathe a bit more. Being aware— is your neck way shot out in front of your shoulders, or are your ears in alignment with your shoulders? Would your chiropractor be proud of you the way you're standing? Just coming back into that consciously shifts your emotional state, shifts your mental state by shifting your physiology.

I love that you brought that up because that's such a powerful, simple tool to unlock—to understand that where we are in space, our physiology directly impacts our state. It's wild. Amazing.

Okay, I want to make sure you do some pranayama with us, some breathing techniques. What it does is it makes your heart rate variability healthy and it turns on that healing mode. So if everyone wants that supercharged healing mode and also gives you mental clarity and gives you creative thinking, then you want to do this. I'm so excited. Let's do this. Take it away.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:35:46.211)

Great. Okay, so perfect. Yes, I think since we talked a lot about nasal breathing, I'll share with you alternate nostril breathing, which is a really powerful breath technique that balances the flow of air through the right and left nostril. As I mentioned, it corresponds to the right and left brain hemispheres, which also energetically relate to our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system responses. So it's really creating this balancing effect of these activating, energizing, solar-based energies with these pacifying, quieting, lunar-based energies that we have in us.

In addition to all the great benefits of nasal breathing, that it calms anxiety, quiets nervousness and restless chatter of the mind. It helps us to be more clear in our minds and to pull our sensory stimulus inward. We're no longer—80% of our energy goes through the sense of sight—so when we close our eyes and practice this technique, it actually allows all of the sensory stimulus that's moving outward to move inward. This is called prana, the name for the life force energy. The healing energy can go into our brain and heart and help fortify all of the systems of our nervous system activity, but also that healing response.

What we'll do is sit comfortably on our chair. If your feet are on the floor, just make sure that they're evenly rooting onto the floor. If you're sitting on a cushion, you can place a cushion or a blanket underneath your seat if you're on the floor. Sit up nice and tall with your spine so that we have this balance and ease in the lungs and the diaphragm as we move through this breath technique.

We're going to begin. Before we take the hand gesture, I'll invite you to take a slow breath in through both nostrils and breathe out through both nostrils.

Just do that one more time. Breathe in through both nostrils and exhale through both nostrils, just taking a couple of reset breaths.

Now take your right hand and place your thumb over your right nostril and your ring finger over your left nostril. We're using our thumb and ring finger to manipulate the nostrils.

Then you can either keep your pointer and middle fingers folded down toward your right palm, or if it feels okay, your pointer and middle finger can press up into the space between your eyebrows and a little bit above. So again, the thumb is over the right nostril, the ring finger over the left nostril, and the pointer and middle fingers are either folded in toward your palm or pressing up to the midbrain region.

Once you have that hand gesture, breathe in through both nostrils and breathe out through both nostrils.

Then, blocking your left nostril with the ring finger, inhale through the right nostril, hold and block both nostrils for a moment, and then release your left nostril and exhale.

Breathe in through the left nostril, keeping the right nostril blocked.

Hold and block both nostrils gently, no force. Then release the right nostril with your thumb and exhale through the right nostril.

Breathe in through the right nostril.

Hold and retain the breath, blocking both nostrils.

Release your left nostril and exhale.

Inhale through the left.

Hold and block both.

Exhale through the right.

You can take one more round on your own, breathing in, retaining, and switching to the opposite nostril.

Inhale through the same side you just breathed out of.

Hold and retain.

Exhale through the opposite side.

Now keep your eyes closed if that's comfortable for you. Rest your hands down on the tops of your thighs.

Just notice the air passing freely through both nostrils.

Notice any shifts you feel in your mind, your heart rate, and your nervous system.

Gently drop your chin toward your chest and blink your eyes open to a point a little bit in front of you somewhere in your space. Take in that point with your gaze and then slowly float your eyes back up, taking in the rest of the room.

You might notice shifts in how you perceive the world around you.

That's alternate nostril breathing.

Ashley James (1:43:06.617)

That's wonderful. There are so many more techniques that are available and that they will learn from your 200-hour yoga teacher training through the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Like I said, all the links to that will be in the show notes of today's podcast, learntruehealth.com, along with the wonderful discount that they're offering my listeners.

So if that intrigued you, you're going to love the training. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom with us today. I would love to have you back any time you want to go deep into any of these topics. You talked about the eight legs of yoga. We didn't even get to go down the rabbit hole of all these other aspects. But I feel like we really touched on why someone would want to try this and practice it because it offers them access to control their body, control their state, increase their immune system, increase their heart health, and increase their longevity. There are just so many reasons why you'd want to have these tools in your tool belt.

You are the master that teaches these tools, and they'd be learning from you. They'd learn from many wonderful lessons and teachers, and your teaching is so kind, gentle, and thoughtful. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Sarah Platt-Finger (1:44:55.225)

Thank you, Ashley. It was truly a real pleasure of mine. I'm really honored to be on your show and thank you for the wonderful conversation. I look forward to being with you again.

Ashley James (1:45:05.357)

That would be great. Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Listeners, make sure that you check out the links that are going to be in the show notes of today's podcast, LearnTrueHealth.com.  We will see Sarah Platt-Finger again on the show soon.

Outro:

I hope you enjoyed today’s interview. Wasn’t Sarah wonderful? I can’t wait to have her back on the show. After we finished the interview, she started telling me more about the different areas of yoga that we didn't even go into and cover and how deep we could really go with this conversation. I felt today was a great foundational, just laying it all out, especially for those who didn't really know a lot about yoga or maybe just had heard about it through the media but hadn't experienced it. Maybe took a few classes, but there wasn't any real depth to the knowledge. I wanted to lay the foundation, then when she comes on again, we can go deeper with this discussion and learn more about the science behind it, the philosophy, the history, and the different aspects of yoga and how we can utilize that to strengthen our life and strengthen our healing, strengthen our emotional, mental, physical, energetic health, and even spiritual health.

Thank you so much for being a listener. Please share this episode with those who you care about. If you are interested in taking the course, go to learntruehealth.com/coach. That’s learntruehealth.com/coach. You can use coupon code LTH. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to me. You can find me on our Facebook group, the Learn True Health Facebook group, or you can email me at ashley@learntruehealth.com

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