Yoga Practice: Yoga for Caregivers | Scott Blossom

Brendon Orr (00:00) And so we're touching on Alzheimer's a little bit and it seems like it's one of those 600 or 800 pound gorillas in the society room in terms of like a health issue. And you shared a little bit about this impacting your family with your mother and there may be listeners who are also being impacted by this or have it coming or they've gone through their own experience. For those listeners who may be caring for a loved one with cognitive decline on some level. What's one embodied yoga informed practice they can begin today to support both either their loved one's well-being or their own resilience as a caregiver? Because it's, as you know, it's not just about the person going through Alzheimer's. It really is about what that, ripple effect that's having in the care system around that individual. Scott Blossom (00:49) Yeah, thank you for asking that. You have touched right on the central point of it all, which is that... caregivers of people who, it's like this too with anybody, people that are dying or people that have any kind of disease, but people who have Alzheimer's, which is a particularly long caregiving left. And out of all of the ⁓ types of chronic diseases that family caregivers can really be a large part of supporting their loved one for, ⁓ is by far the most impactful because they don't even have a way to measure the financial, emotional, physical impacts yet. But we also know that it's in and of itself Alzheimer's dementia is about twice as expensive as any other chronic disease. And that doesn't even include the lost work, the emotional stress, the physical stress. And so as a result, caregivers of people with Alzheimer's are six times more likely to get Alzheimer's themselves. And so if there was one practice, the single thing that I would say to them is that they need to take one day off at least a week where they get caregiver support for their caregiving role. And that could include sleeping outside of the house. Because when you're used to sleeping every night, it's like when you have a newborn baby. You're used to have a one-year open. That is really hard on you. And you know with a newborn, it lasts a year or two, maybe three, you know, but with this situation is much more long term. It could be a decade of that. And so if you get wired up to be hyper vigilant as a kind of patterning, and then if you were going to think about a specific yoga practice, I would say yoga nidra. where they're actually going into a practice where they're going to pull themselves all the way back in because I had a friend just recently call me whose mother was diagnosed last fall and she had abandoned all of her self care for eight months and then she got some blood tests and she said, oh my gosh, there's some worrisome things here. Will help me understand this and give me some support? And it was basically that, that it was like out of her love and devotion to her family, she had to put everything else on hold and you can't do that for very long before it really starts to take a toll. So those are my two things. Number one is actually taking a day off and making sure you actually are getting support and number two would be some of these deep relaxation and sort pratyahara type practices that really draw you and you have to train your mind to do that and there can be a lot of guilt and a lot of anxiety about all of those choices but without doing that, you could actually be setting yourself up to be where you may have your own health crisis that happens in the middle of your caregiving process, as well as when with Alzheimer's, the person dies or you're caring for a person with a life threatening illness, after they die, that period of time is extremely vulnerable for the person's health. And if you're burned out, that's when the cards sort of fall off them for people. Gina Clingerman (04:14) I'm wondering if you, I mean, we all know what yoga nidra is, but could you describe what a yoga nidra looks like just for some listeners who maybe haven't encountered that before? Scott Blossom (04:24) Sure, one of the definitions from the Bihar school where you get some of the most developed expressions of Yoganidra is the... They call it the rotation of consciousness. So what you're doing is putting the body in a passive position, but then you're keeping the mind conscious as it moves around. And you know, if somebody happens to be exhausted and they fall asleep, no harm, no foul, because it is called yoga mitra, which means sleep. So it's this yogic sleep where you're going to get yourself, if you want to use some brain language, you're going to get yourself into an alpha wave state. You're going to get yourself into these deep states where you're no longer running your to-do list.