SOAS,Autumnsummit,Learninginyoga
Organiser(s)
Katherine Nicholls
Tutor(s)
External Provider
Description
SOAS BWY AUTUMN SUMMIT 2024
Yoga: Health, Harm and Healing
This event has happened, you are welcome to purchase a ticket to access the recordings.
Join us in London (or online) on Saturday, 2 November 2024, for the inaugural SOAS – BWY Autumn Summit, entitled 'Yoga: Health, Harm and Healing.'
This initiative marks a unique collaborative event between renowned scholars and leading yoga practitioners. Our aim is to provide a day of learning, reflection, and thought-provoking discussion on contemporary themes in Yoga Studies. This year's summit is delighted to welcome five speakers, who will explore yoga and its relationship with health, harm, and healing.
The full-day programme is divided into three themed panels, featuring prominent researchers from fields such as medicine, criminology, neuroscience and religious studies. Participants will have the opportunity to engage with the speakers via Q&A sessions. Additionally, the intellectually stimulating panels will be interspersed with two yoga practice sessions led by senior teachers within the auditorium.
We will ask: Does yoga contribute to health? Does it instil hope? Can it foster healing?
Together, we will consider the latest scientific research on yoga's applications, examining specific techniques such as yoganidrā. We will reflect upon the efficacy of yoga in certain contexts, such as prisons. We will explore various perspectives and approaches to yoga and mental health. Importantly, we will allocate time to calibrate our bodies and minds through embodied practices as we engage with this enriching material.
The day promises to be an opportunity to forge new connections and rekindle old ones, fostering a warm and collegial environment.
Questions for speakers: each session will end with questions to the speakers. These questions will be taken from the auditorium, time-permitting. If you are attending via Zoom and would like to submit a question or are attending in-person and would like to submit a question in advance, please send it to events@bwy.org.uk by close of play on 30 October.
The Autumn Summit is proudly presented by the British Wheel of Yoga (BWY) and SOAS University of London – Centre of Yoga Studies (SOAS CYS).
Important Notes:
1. If you are a BWY Member, please login to purchase tickets.
2. You do not need to be a BWY member to attend this event but you will need to create a free user account to book tickets. Once logged in, please search for 'SOAS BWY' in Yoga Search and you will be able to purchase tickets.
CLICK HERE TO SET UP A FREE USER ACCOUNT: https://portal.bwy.org.uk/register/step_3
3. Please bring your user ID (membership number or free user account number) with you to register on the day.
4. BWY teachers may accrue 6 CPD points for this event, which will be added automatically to your profile after the event if you attend in person. If you attend online and would like to have the points added to your profile, please contact events@bwy.org.uk
Tickets
- Early bird tickets are available until Wednesday 31 August, thereafter full price tickets will be available.
- The event will be recorded and all ticket holders will be able to access the recording via the BWY website/My Resources/Events.
Additional Information
Timetable:
Please note that the timetable is subject to change on the day.
| 09:00 | Refreshments provided |
| 09:15 | Auditorium opens |
| 09:30 | Welcome and introductions |
| 09:50 | Yoga and Meditation in Prisons: Promoting Health and Wellbeing. Prof. Rosie Meek, PhD CPsychol AFBPsS, Royal Holloway, University of London. |
| 10:20 | Looking outwards as well as inwards: towards a model of anti-discriminatory prison yoga teaching Rose Parkes, Associate Dean (Academic Programmes) for the Institute of Law, Jersey |
| 10:50 | Q&A with the speakers |
| 11:30 | Practice session with Ranju Roy: Yoga, Union (saṃyoga) and Discernment (viveka) (for details see below) |
| 12:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:15 | A psychoneuroimmunological investigation on the effect of Yoga Nidrā on chronic stress. Carola Chiarpenello, MSc Cognitive Neuroscience, King's College London |
| 13:45 | Honouring Yoga Nidrā Śakti – the healing power of rest. Dr Umā Dinsmore-Tuli PhD |
| 14:15 | Q&A with the speakers |
| 14:45 | Practice session with Jo Bogacz: Yoga Nidrā - Hiraeth, reconnection and coming home (seated, for details see below) |
| 15:15 | Break - refreshments provided |
| 15:45 |
HEADLINE SPEAKER Yoga as Therapy for Mental Health: The Rationale, Science and Research Evidence |
| 16:25 | Q&A with the speaker |
| 17:00 | Close |
Meet the speakers, moderator, host and practice teachers:
Click the names to download the biographies
Headline speaker:
Moderator:
Host:
Speakers:
Practice teachers:
Practice with Ranju Roy
Yoga, Union (saṃyoga) and Discernment (viveka)
By understanding yoga as a particular quality of relationship, we can tease out a model of health. There are no ‘things’ which exist entirely independent of context; everything is in relationship. For me, yoga is a project which seeks to clarify the potential confusions and misunderstandings which can arise within relationships to create a freer, more spacious feeling – the move from duḥkha (compromised space) to sukha (open space).
Patañjali describes this duḥkha as arising from a confused perception, which he calls avidyā (YS2.4). We can think of avidyā as a ‘global’ term, slightly abstracted, but its embodied experience is saṃyoga (YS2.17). We get stuck.
The movement from this stuckness to a greater sense of freedom – sukha - requires viveka, an ability to see things differently, to appreciate nuance and distinction (YS2.28). It demands of us a loosening of fixed thinking and dogmatism and a letting go of what blocks perception.
In this workshop we will explore the practical application of this theory, including some simple ideas for yoga practice.
Practice with Jo Bogacz
Yoga Nidrā - Hiraeth, reconnection and coming home
Yoga nidrā is a practice where we have time and space to rest and be guided back home to ourselves so we may encounter our essential nature and remember the fullness of who we really are. When we are in our true home we are cherished and safe, we can connect to the power of creativity and healing that naturally arises from this place. Our true home is a place where we may drink deeply from the source within. In Wales, hiraeth (“here-ayeth”) embodies a similar heartfelt desire but it has no direct translation into English.
As a Welsh woman who has grown up and lived in Wales the majority of my life, with English, Polish and Spanish roots, I learnt Welsh at school but am not a Welsh speaker. I understand hiraeth as a yearning for our true home, a remembrance when we are exiled, a sensation of deep longing reconnecting us to a forgotten place, or wistful nostalgia for a time of long past childhood. Hiraeth is a universal concept that we can all understand, a known but forgotten sense of belonging. Hiraeth could be likened to an umbilical cord that sustains us and the time before severance, it offers us safe welcome into open and caring arms that will always reassure us in the dark times. A simple felt sense of hiraeth may be when we hear much loved music or see a cherished image in our mind's eye and keep revisiting it so that we do not forget.
Hiraeth reveals to us an idea of how we want to live and gives us a personalised map to embody happiness and bring it into the everyday. Through reconnection to the seed or sankalpa of our own hiraeth we remember to remember what is most important to us, our own essential knowing.
What to Bring
- Note taking equipment
- Water
- There will be university food outlets open or you may bring your own food.
- The practice sessions will be done seated or standing in the auditorium so there is no need to bring mats or props.