Yoga Workshop: Samskara & Synapse: Yoga to Rewire Your Brain

Recent studies in neurobiology reveal how yoga can influence the creation, strengthening, and changing of the brain's neural pathways. This workshop offers a diverse toolkit of yoga practices, informed by modern research, to help rewire unconscious and unhealthy habit patterns.

In yoga, our unconscious habit patterns are known as samskaras. Yogis and modern science agree that when these patterns repeat, the brain's synaptic connections strengthen and speed up until they run as automatic habits rather than conscious choices, and that these patterns can be changed. This workshop draws on pranayama, asana, kriya, mudra, vairagya (non-attachment), tapas (disciplined effort), and drishti (focal point) to work with that process directly.

You'll learn what samskaras are in yogic philosophy and how they relate to neuroplasticity, how breath practices, mudras, and drishti can down-regulate the nervous system, how sustained isometric asana holds function as engineered mastery experiences, and how to use the neuroplastic pause, the brief gap between a trigger and your habitual reaction, to strengthen a new pathway.