LoveYourBrain Spotlight Feature

Kyla, what can you share with us about your journey into finding yoga and meditation? 

I first began practicing yoga as a collegiate athlete as a way to cross-train during soccer season. Throughout my life, I had played group sports and thrived on the competition and collaboration among teammates. But, with yoga, I became increasingly hooked by the feeling of a physical challenge that brought my awareness inside my body and connected me more deeply with the layers of my inner self - mind, body, and heart. For the first time, I felt a sense of really seeing, feeling, and welcoming my whole self through my own eyes instead of through the eyes of others. This was huge for me, since, during my teenage years, I had struggled with an eating disorder and crippling anxiety public speaking, and could now see so much of both stemmed from searching for approval from external sources and suppressing difficult emotions. Yoga revealed how I could look inside for my own self-worth. It also taught me how to feel--instead of run from--my vulnerabilities from a place of kindness, which shifted how I related to myself and others, all in positive ways. A few years later, when I was living in Udaipur, India, I chose to do a 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. I came away with a deeper understanding of mindfulness/loving-awareness as a pathway to greater freedom, love, and connection. Ever since then, I’ve been committed to learning about and sharing how yoga and meditation are doorways into the mind, body, and heart so that we can show up in our lives as the open, authentic, and compassionate beings we are.

When did you realize that yoga and meditation held benefits for people living with traumatic brain injury?

The unlock, for me, started with the transformation I saw in Kevin Pearce from his own practice following his injury. Kevin had never practiced yoga or meditation before his TBI, but became increasingly drawn to it a few years following his accident. We could see visible changes in Kevin’s level of concentration, awareness, balance, and self-empowerment. I also noticed that he thrived from the agency he felt from engaging with what he deemed was a fitting challenge (be it focusing the mind in meditation or holding a strength-building yoga pose), instead of measuring his progress based on some external benchmark. When he practiced yoga, he no longer felt defined by his injury. While his other rehabilitation regimens (Speech, OT, PT, vision) were crucial to his healing, practicing yoga in his community was offering him a way back to his whole self. We soon began integrating yoga into our LoveYourBrain Retreat program and piloting LoveYourBrain Yoga classes for people with different TBI severity levels and witnessed  similar transformations, so I knew we were onto something important. 

Over the years, you and your team have pioneered the use of Yoga and Mindfulness as an important healing modality for TBI. What can you share about the medical community and its responsiveness to LYB programs? 

Overall, I’ve been blown away by the support and collaboration of the medical community. Yes, there are always the skeptics, but because our programs have a suite of research supporting their benefits, we’ve found that the vast majority of clinicians are eager to refer their patients to our programs. Clinicians often share that they believe our programs are filling the major gap in access to community-based services for the TBI community. We’ve also seen that more and more clinicians want to personally learn more about the benefits of integrative health services, like yoga and meditation, for their own self-care and want to integrate simple tools into their clinical practice. In response, we now host 20-hour trainings for clinicians that empower them with yoga, meditation, and pranayama tools for brain injury patients and for themselves as a way to enhance self-compassion and prevent burnout.

Tell us about your new role at LoveYourBrain! What opportunities does this bring to LYB and the TBI community? What are you most excited about?

Ah, I’m excited about so many things! Now that we’ve hit our 5th year birthday as an organization and served over 12,000 people through our Yoga, Retreat, and Education programs, we’re moving out of a ‘proof-of-concept’ stage and into ‘proof-of-value’. Meaning, we know what we’re doing improves a range of health outcomes, that no one else is doing it at the scale and quality we are, and that we can’t meet the demand for our programs. So, my role is designed to capitalize on the huge opportunity we have to enhance the efficiency, scientific understanding, and integration of our programs to bring the value of what we offer to more people in our community. Right now, I’m particularly excited to take our lessons learned over these past five years and innovate our program delivery to address the current challenges we’re facing from COVID. For example, in a matter of months, we launched a new online yoga, mindfulness, and education program, LoveYourBrain Mindset, that offers anyone in the brain injury community four simple tools to enhance resilience from their own homes. By blending together my expertise in yoga and mindfulness, research, and program delivery, I wake up every morning immensely energized by the opportunities that lie ahead, even in the face of these unprecedented times. Ultimately, I feel like I’m living my Ikigai. 

You’ve been with LoveYourBrain from the very beginning. What drives you to keep expanding and evaluating our programs? 

Many things -- our deep and wide impact all the way from the individual stories of people’s lives being changed by our programs to the research studies we publish demonstrating our programs’ benefits on a large scale. The unparalleled dedication and heart of the people I work with, including the talented team at LoveYourBrain and the yoga teachers and clinicians from across North America who have joined our movement to shift the culture around TBI health and wellbeing. LoveYourBrain’s startup mentality to think big, start small, and continuously innovate. I also feel an extreme privilege to have many touchstones with the community we serve - people with TBI and their caregivers who participate in the LoveYourBrain Yoga, Retreat, and Mindset programs I teach, yoga teachers and clinicians who participate in the trainings I lead, research and outreach collaborators - which fosters the human connection that all of our work strives to create and keeps our mission and impact close to home.

COVID-19 has brought about challenges for all people, but in particular, it’s compounded some of the challenges that those in the brain injury community may already experience -  like isolation and the need to adapt to a new normal. What words of wisdom would you offer to someone who has experienced a TBI and is having a particularly difficult time right now?

I’ll share a phrase from the poet Pablo Neruda that I come back to often -- "You can cut the flowers but you cannot stop the spring." Whether you realize it or not, you already have the inner resources you need to carry you through these difficult times. We often forget this, and it can sometimes feel like the world is caving in on us and there is no way out. But, I’ve found that when I allow myself to be with my present experience, and hold it in all of its messiness with gentleness and compassion, I connect with an unshakeable inner resilience that has the truth and energy of spring, no matter how long or short the periods of winter can feel. This takes courage, patience, and practice -- courage to not turn away from the anxiety and overwhelm, and let these feelings motivate action for the small ways you can take care of yourself. The small ways matter, and add up. Patience for the times that feel particularly hard, but will always give way to times that feel uplifting. And, practice connecting with the place of steadiness inside yourself so that you can navigate the ups and downs in ways that better support yourself and others.  

And similarly, what words would you offer someone who might be sceptical of the benefits of yoga and mindfulness for TBI?

First, that I hear you! It’s said that mindfulness is one of the simplest yet most challenging ways of living life. This doesn’t surprise me at all knowing how much conditioning our minds have to occupy the past and future and to judge or resist our experience. And, it’s not like the present is a vacation - it’s hard to be with our own stuff and completely understandable that it often feels easier to avoid what we don’t like. My invitation is for you to ask some questions -- does this approach feel like it’s working for you? Do you feel steady in times of discomfort? Do you feel connected to your inner kindness and compassion? If so, keep doing whatever you’re doing! If not, it may be worth trying mindfulness, in a way that feels safe for you, and learn from your own experience. There is no one way to practice mindfulness, so you may choose to explore mindfulness through yoga, cooking, walking in nature, taking a few conscious breaths, or formal meditation. Notice what comes up, and see if it’s possible to soften into it. I can only speak for myself, and I’ve found that when I use mindfulness to tune into the truth of my feelings, become aware of how they’re taking shape in my body, mind, and heart, they have the capacity to soften me and to dissolve the barriers I put up between myself and others. 

What’s the most special element of a LoveYourBrain program?

That they’re driven by the belief that everyone affected by TBI deserves to fully access their resilience, connect with a compassionate community, and reach their full potential. You’ll walk away with a different relationship to yourself and life.