Integrating Western psychological understanding with Eastern spiritual and body practices is pretty much what I do, both in Holistics (exercise and personal growth) and Integration Training (business). I was happy then to find a kindred spirit in Thomas Larkin (ugly one pictured) and his monthly Yoga Therapy class in Brighton. He’s a qualified yoga instructor and integrative psychother
apist and I really enjoyed his fusion of the two on Saturday.
He started the yoga therapy class with the observation that spiritual practice is often not integrated into daily life and is seen as something separate and exotic, as a specialist in taking aikido “off mat” this reverberated with me and other there for their own reasons. I’ve seen enough “black belt arseholes” to know that just doing the bodywork is not enough. Similarly intellectualising and reading the books doesn’t shift who we are and just sitting on a cushion trying to “spiritually bypass” personal issues leads to trouble (see guru abuse 101). Thomas’ brief and respectful analysis of the Buddha’s psychology and attachment issues (pun intended) was also really interesting – his mother died while young, he had an overbearing father who he rebelled against, was given milk to heal after asceticism…etc.
Thomas led sequences of yoga postures as a way of accessing the body as a repository of the unconscious and our patterns. He also asked people how they felt, asked participants to get specific about the location they experienced the bodily feeling in and a dialogue continued from there. This seemed fruitful for all there, myself included. He observed that we disassociate from our bodies for good reason and that there is normally “bad news before the good.”
Nuggets I jotted down from the Yoga Therapy day included:
• “We tend to treat our bodies the way we’ve been treated”
• A beautifully simple exercise where we looked at our own standing posture and then instead of rushing to fix it straight away – took time to note how we would change it and why. Which judgements were there in Non Violent Communication terms.
• The observation that as we speak less, and our words get slower, and more metaphorical. I noted that the body tends to “speak” 
like dreams in either images or sensations, or with short poetic phrases laden with meaning and association rather than explanatory chatter.
Thomas noted that a relational approach of integrating awareness and expression is more difficult than detached awareness alone, and also more rewarding. I’ve wondered if the challenge of this – and it’s a whole lot less comfortable than just doing your thing on your yoga-mat-island – is why people often say they really like Holistics then don’t come back!
Thomas’ approach reminded me of Ken Wilber’s Integral theory, linking Eat and West and incorporating various “modules” as they say in Integral Life Practice. Personally I enjoyed the uncomfortable challenge of both seeing my own approach from another perspective and doing the static postures of yoga which are quite different from my normal practices and challenge my Tigger tendency.