The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
Living with bipolar disorder sucks! Each week Michelle Reittinger and her guests explore tools and resources that help you learn how to live well with your bipolar. If you are tired of suffering and want to live a healthy, balanced, productive life with your bipolar, this podcast was designed with you in mind.
The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness
EP 76: From Diagnosis to Self-Awareness: How Yoga Supports Bipolar Recovery with Dr. Ghada Osman
We explore how yoga shifts healing from labels and behavior control to embodied awareness, and how grounding builds real emotional regulation for bipolar symptoms and trauma. Dr. Ghada Osman shares her three-prong model so listeners can ground first, then safely energize or calm.
• mental health labels versus emotional health signals
• witness consciousness and bottom-up healing
• shame cycles, unmet needs and compassionate curiosity
• practical grounding: eyes open, even breath, bilateral movement
• how to choose energizing or calming after grounding
• honoring the body without judgment or “levels”
• seasons, contrast and building resilience
• resources to learn more from Dr. Osman
Website: www.ghadaosman.com
Book on Routledge: Mental and Emotional Healing Through Yoga: A Guiding Framework for Therapists and their Clients
Book on Amazon: Mental and Emotional Healing Through Yoga: A Guiding Framework for Therapists and their Clients
Check out Ghada's online training on using yoga to work with mental health here: Yoga for Mental Health Certification Course
FREE Mood Cycle Survival Guide: https://theupsideofbipolar.com/free/
The Upside of Bipolar: 7 Steps to Heal Your Disorder: @upsideofbipolar | Linktree
website: https://theupsideofbipolar.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theupsideofbipolar/
We are human beings that have emotions. And so can I feel the emotion and be with the emotion instead of always trying to clamp down on the emotion? So a lot of the time when we talk about regulation, it's about how can we make your difficult emotion go away? And instead, can we think of regulation as how can I have a broader lens with which to see things?
SPEAKER_00:Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, Michelle Reitinger, and I am thrilled to have the first guest of the new year be Dr. Gata Osman. I am so excited to interview her again. Anybody who's been listening to my podcast for any length of time will have already heard my first interview with her. But I have been learning so much more from her book. This is my copy of her book, and I've got all of these tabs. If you're not if you're not watching this, if you're listening to this, I have tons and tons of tabs because I've been studying her book more thoroughly and so excited to interview her today because I have better questions to ask her this time that I think is going to make for a much more exciting discussion. So thank you, Dr. Osman, for joining us today. I appreciate you being a guest.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here and excited to be your first guest of the new year, too.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And I've been looking forward to this. She's been on my books for about a month now, I think. And I've just been like looking forward to this with excited anticipation. So we are going to start with Dr. Osman sharing her story with us.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for the opportunity. And again, yes, so grateful to be here. So grateful to connect with you. And the last time you asked me some great questions too. And I'm excited to chatt it, be chatting more. So yeah, I appreciate your reaching out to me. And I'm always really excited when folks reach out and say that they've read the book and come across it and, you know, that it's been beneficial. And so thank you. Thank you for that. Um kind of for reminding me of the importance of yoga and the healing power of yoga. It's really appreciate it. My journey with yoga, where I'll I'll start there, even though I am also a psychotherapist, and my journey with yoga started now almost 30 years ago. And I remember going to my first yoga class at the gym back when doing yoga, you know, it was sort of between two periods where there were a lot of folks doing yoga decades ago, and then it kind of slipped out of the more mainstream awareness and then now has come back. And so it was during that in-between period. And I remember taking a class and thinking, yeah, it'll be good for me to do some stretching, and then coming out of it in a completely different headspace. And I remember getting in my car, and that was back, you know, and like turning on the radio was the best form of entertainment in the car. And I remember turning on the radio and then turning it back off again because I was like, I'm in a headspace I have never been in before, where I'm actually in this place where I feel a little bit of space compared to the usual chatter and hecticness that I'm moving through with that, you know, it's is so rewarded. You know, you're being productive, you're being effective, and even though it actually really pulls us out of being in the present moment. And from then on, I continued with my yoga journey. I remember when I became a yoga teacher, which is now 26 years ago in the year 2000, I thought it was just more to strengthen my practice. And then over time, as I began my psychotherapy practice, I wanted to incorporate something that really brought people home to their bodies rather than engage them more with the chatter of the mind. And that's how I connected more with yoga therapy. I have a good friend who has a yoga therapy program based in Florida, and she and I cooked together a yoga for mental health program back before other folks were doing that. And that's where the journey started. And then at some point I thought, you know, I think I want to get the word out there even more because I see the impact that yoga has on folks, and I see the impact that it has on folks regardless of where they're coming in, where their head is at. And so here I am. So I teach, I train yoga therapists to incorporate mental health. I provide trainings for psychotherapists as well to incorporate yoga into their practices and into their work with their clients. And then I also um oversee a mental health counseling program at a community college district. And so I work with graduate students, folks who are post-degree pre-licensure, a variety of different therapists, as well as my own direct clients. That's amazing.
SPEAKER_00:A little bit about me. Yeah. And that's and tell me what's your educational background again?
SPEAKER_01:Can you just so I hold a PhD from Harvard University, and then I also hold my um clinical degree. So my licensure is as a licensed marriage to family therapist. A lot of the time folks think that means that we work mainly with relationships and families, and of course we do, but it's also the outlook. It's about the fact that we are very much rooted in the idea that therapy and our mental health is very connected to systems and to our original system being our family, but to other systems too. And so we're looking at therapy relationally, which I think also connects really strongly with yoga in terms of that relationship with others, but also with ourselves.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I think that's a very good lead into where I want to start our discussion. In your book, you talk about the difference between mental health and emotional health. And I thought that was such an important distinction because when somebody is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, it disconnects us. Like the diagnosis itself disconnects us because we are focused on a problem in our heads without any kind of reference to anything else in our bodies or in our environment or anything. There's this idea that there is some kind of disease or disorder that is rooted in the brain, and it stops us from being curious about what could actually be causing these symptoms and disconnects us. Like it creates a disconnect, I believe, between the mind and the body. And so I loved in your book how you talked about mental health versus emotional health. And so could you talk a little bit about that, help us understand the difference between those and why that distinction is so important?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, absolutely. So mental health, it's it's interesting, right? It's a phrase. It's we've re-purposed it in some ways, I think, in the last few years, where we own it a little bit more so that it doesn't just come with the stigma of mental health and the odd juxtaposition of mental health and physical health, as if this is not just all our health altogether. But mental health and especially diagnoses are this very odd way of describing a very complex experience where we say, okay, well, to meet this diagnosis, you need to meet four of these and five of these, and that's that's something that's 2D. And we as individuals are 3D. So I can meet criteria for a diagnosis, but the more important aspect is how I'm feeling right now, and that's my emotional health. So there, I will always meet potentially criteria for a diagnosis. But how am I feeling right now? That's my emotional health, and that's the piece where we were wanting to notice more. What is it that tells me, okay, something's gonna shift for me? I can see it coming around the corner, and maybe now with my relationship with my body, I can know how to meet that. That's my emotional health. Maybe I feel like, oh, there's like a fluttering in my body that I don't notice typically. And I excuse me, I'm beginning to notice it. Ah, yeah, there's that shift coming around the corner. Or I feel like a certain tension in my neck, even, or my sleep is impacted. But what's my first tell that it's impacted before I really feel the impact? Those are all parts of our emotional health. We all have emotional health because we all have emotions, because we're all human beings. And so, how can each of us track what's happening within ourselves? And that's building that relationship with ourselves. We live in this culture of toxic positivity, and everything is supposed to be so great, and we ignore what's happening for us internally, and that's the big shift. A lot of the time when we work with mental health and mental health diagnoses, we work on behaviors and decreasing behaviors. Well, you know what? While you're experiencing this, how about you don't shop as much? So we're gonna say you use your credit card only this many times. That has nothing to do with how I feel internally. So I might ego might be pleased that I spent less money. Okay, that it has nothing to do with my feeling in my body and my relationship with that.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I I think when you're talking about, you know, the behaviors, trying to control behaviors, I spent years going to therapy, trying to work on like controlling behaviors and that, and shaming myself for behaviors that I was struggling with repeatedly. And I I remember that the the day that I remember the day that it shifted. I one of the one of the coping mechanisms that I had was binge watching television. And I'm not talking about like a weekend, you know, watching, you know, I need to relax and I'm gonna watch, you know, eight episodes of a show. I'm talking about days on end binge watching like 18 seasons of Law and Order SVU, like back to back to back, like ignoring all my responsibilities. Like it was intense, very destructive behavior. And and it was very hard for me because I would go through periods of time where I didn't struggle with this, and then all of a sudden it was like this compulsion to do this. And and I felt tremendous shame around it. And I went to a therapist one time when it's when I started struggling with this compulsion again, and I was, you know, crying and frustrated. I'm like, I try all these things and I can't just stop it. And she said, What need are you trying to fill? And it stopped me on my tracks. I'm like, at first I was like, I felt resistance to what she was asking because I'm like, it's I'm not feeling a need. I have, I have a, you know, I believe I looked at it as uh an addiction. And I'm like, I'm addicted to TV, like I can't help it. And she said, No, no, no. What need are you trying to fill? What what and what need are you trying to meet within yourself? And that whole day we talked about like, what could I be trying to fix? Like, this is a coping mechanism that has developed to cope with discomfort and and symptoms that I'm struggling with. And it t it totally shifted. That was one of the first times I started looking at these things with curiosity instead of judgment to look for the source. Like, what is the source here? What's what's happening here? And I loved what you were talking about about seeing clues. That's one of the things that I talk with, you know, in my coaching program. I talk to people all the time, like you're a detective in your life and you're looking for clues. And when we shift, when we shift that, and I think that this is one of the reasons why I love yoga so much. And I I want people to understand the value in yoga, is that we become disconnected from ourselves, not just by the mental health, you know, phrases and those kinds of things, but because we we are a society that focuses on being happy and looking for good things, like we value certain emotions, we value certain states of emotional well-being, you know, being, and we want to avoid or suppress or disc or get rid of, you know, things that we feel like are you know uncomfortable or that we don't like. And I think we do the same things in our bodies. So we start to become disconnected from ourselves because, oh, I don't like that feeling. And so over time, you you push it aside or you suppress it or you avoid it. And so we start to become disconnected. So how does how does emotional, because I think that this is a lack of emotional regulation. I think that we don't know how to regulate our emotions because we're trying to avoid uncomfortable emotions and we're trying to produce, we we're seeking out the emotions that we want. And so we are not able to manage emotions. We're not able to handle emotions that we don't like. So, how what is, you know, I want to talk a little bit about, if you could, about the importance of developing emotional intelligence, emotional, the ability to, you know, emotionally regulate and how yoga can better, you know, help us with that.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you. Yeah. Thank you too for sharing your personal experience. And I'm so glad that that therapist asked you the question about what need this fulfills, because that's that's exactly it. We're so focused on the behaviors and what behaviors are good. And that exists so much in our society. Like when we think of our relationship with food and we say, Oh, I was good today because I ate healthy, but it's like, yeah, but was it what my body needed, or was it just external messaging? Right. And I'll loop back to the food example because I think the food example is a very telling one when you ask that question about emotional regulation. Yeah, it's like we we come in, we have our coping mechanisms, and you know, our bodies are amazingly adaptive. So your system figured out, you know what helps me in this moment. I'm just gonna keep watching and watching and watching, and it creates distraction. That's very creative, right? But we end up having a lot of shame because ultimately it's maladaptive in the sense that it gets in the way of our regular day-to-day. But how can we take that wisdom of our system and now direct it to what we actually need in the moment? So it's like your system was so wise and knowing, you know what, this is what helps me get out of the space right now. How can we guide it to then help develop what fits more in that present moment? The need, what we need is a story. Right? So it might be, I might have a story, nobody loves me, nobody cares about me, because in the past, that's the messaging I've received. Can I shift that to in this present moment? That's a story. Did something happen in this present moment to show me that? Probably not. In this present moment, maybe I'm sitting in front of the TV. Maybe 10 minutes ago, something activated it. But this moment, no. That's how we're connecting with our emotions in this moment. So there's the story, and my mind is full of stories. Our minds are always full of stories, and it's like, okay, got it. Really appreciate the story. And what am what am I experiencing right now? So I use the food example because I think that is such a telling example. Baby, newborn baby cries when hungry. We feed the baby, the baby stops crying unless there's something else that's upsetting. Somewhere along the lines, we shift it and we start building a system where we don't have that connection between I know I'm hungry and I feel it in my body, and I need to eat. Instead, it becomes all this other messaging. I eat because other people are eating. I'm supposed to choose certain foods because somebody decided these are the foods that are good for me. I have a whole narrative about I eat this, I don't eat that, I was good, I was bad. I say, oh, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna cheat this one time, or I'm upset, I deserve to eat this, all of those complexities, and we lose that connection. And it's the same with everything almost that we feel physically. We even feel physical pain and we push through it. We're like, you can push through it, you can do it no matter what. And it's like, no, it's a signal. Your body's trying to send a signal. We ignore it, and so you know what? It gets more amplified. It's like you're not getting it. Here we go again. And it's the same with our emotions. So I feel a little bit sad instead of being like, oh, I feel sad. What am I noticing in my body right now? Not what story my mind is telling me, because it has all sorts of ideas and theories that may or not may or may not be true. But what am I feeling in the in my body? And we know sometimes we don't even have access to the story. Like sometimes we say, I feel so anxious and I don't know why. And it's like, okay, there isn't even a story here. Let me just pause and notice what's happening in my body. What do I notice in my chest? What do I notice in my belly? And a lot of us at the beginning, we don't even have a sense of that. I know I myself, people would say things like, I feel this moving through my leg. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I just have thoughts. I don't know. I'm like, okay, this is like woo-woo stuff, but I have no idea what you're talking about, right? Because it's like we don't have that developed. And so can I pause and wait? And in that moment, when I'm rushing towards the behavior, even if I still carry out the behavior, can I also notice what's happening in my body and build that relationship within myself? That's ultimately what emotional regulation is. We tend to think of emotional regulation as stopping emotions. You're sad, we're like, oh, you know, let's think of something positive. And we have this in mental health too. So somebody is agitated in a therapy session, we're like, okay, let's do some grounding. And it's like, okay, we could if I really, you know, I need to drive home and I actually, my mind is flashing back to 20 years ago and I'm dysregulated, but I have to be at work, then yeah, we have to reground me and bring me to the here and now. But in general, people, we are human beings that have emotions. And so can I feel the emotion and be with the emotion instead of always trying to clamp down on the emotion? So a lot of the time when we talk about regulation, it's about how can we make your difficult emotion go away? And instead, can we think of regulation as how can I have a broader lens with which to see things? So that I notice this feeling in my body. I notice, for example, an antsiness. Like it's like there is I'm buzzing. But what else do I notice? What do I notice in my shoulders? What do I notice in my feet? What do I notice in my pinky toe? How much can we expand the view so that we don't go through life with a tiny view like this? But we can have that broader view. And that's what helps us then regulate that I have the fuller picture. I thought that I was just looking at a thorn. And then as the picture got bigger, I saw that I was looking at an actual rose plant with the stem, with the thorn on it, with also the flower, everything together. It doesn't take away from the fact that there's a thorn, which is the other thing that we do a lot, is like reframe, think positive. It's like, no, it's still there. And there's also so much more there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And I think as you're talking about this, one of the things that came to mind is the importance of us taking. I I saw this one time. This is not my quote, so I'm I I need to make sure it's a disclaimer. I'm not, this is not my own thought. But somebody said that trauma is a story, healing is a choice. And and that when we don't make the choice to heal past wounds, those past experiences try to inform everything we have going forward. Because our brains are designed to protect us. And so if it if it experienced a, you know, a traumatic event or tr or series of traumatic events and it is constantly on the alert for looking for danger, anything that it thinks might be similar or present a similar danger, it is going to go into high alert. And that's why we end up with people having like the first time I had an anxiety attack, I didn't understand what was going on. I didn't understand that I was having a trauma response to something that had happened. I thought I was having a heart attack, ended up in the emergency room for eight hours, and and then labeled with an anxiety disorder on top of my bipolar disorder and given more medication. And it took years for me to start recognizing when I was having a trauma response. And to look with curiosity about, okay, what is my brain sensing as dangerous? There's something that happened. It may not be related to what happened in the past, but for some reason my brain thinks this is dangerous. So I started again looking with curiosity about the experiences that I was having surrounding these trauma responses. And when as I started processing the past trauma and allowing myself to experience the emotions and processing it through so that I could get my brain to stop going onto high alert anytime it's thought there was danger around me, then I was able To sit and stay present with emotions of current situations. Instead of having my brain just like take over and run away with me, I was able to like learn how to stay present with it. And that's one of the reasons why I loved what I learned from you because I, when I first engaged with yoga years ago, I could feel there was value there, but I had no idea what I was experiencing. And so I kept trying to seek it out. And every once in a while I would hit on a practice that worked, right? And it, but it was sometimes I would do practices that didn't feel good and I didn't understand the difference. I didn't know what was going on. I didn't know why sometimes it felt really good, and other times I was like, yeah, I didn't like that. And it wasn't until I engaged with your book and started learning about like what yoga is actually doing and how some of it is activating and some of it is, you know. So, so I think that, sorry, this is a lot. Let me go back a little bit. So let's start first with the value in processing past trauma and how yoga can help with that. Because we become, I feel like we become victims, not by the trauma, but by our inability to move forward in our lives without having everything informed by the trauma, the unhealed trauma. And we can choose to take back. I know that this is probably an overused term, but taking back our power, like taking back, I think maybe a better term would be taking more responsibility for our lives, like accepting responsibility and ownership of our own emotions instead of letting other people control them by choosing, like I said, like that quote said, you know, that trauma is a story, healing is a choice, like choosing to heal, choosing to do the work to heal so that we can begin to take, you know, back our lives and be able to live our lives in the present instead of our past, always trying to inform the present. So that's kind of a loaded question, but thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, you know, one of the main pieces about a yoga practice is what we refer to as witness consciousness, which sometimes can also be equated with some aspects of mindfulness. I can start healing once I'm not fully in the feeling, but maybe can have a part of me that leaves that has a little bit of distance that can say, hmm, what's going on over here? Then now my brain isn't fully in it. I've actually like stepped away a little bit and I'm an observer. That is the key to healing. If I have that curiosity, even if I feel all the emotions and all of it, but there's a little tiny part of me that's like, what's going on here? What's happening here? What am I noticing in my butt? And again, if I if I start going down the road of a story, I'm in trouble because our mind is so fast. Oh, well, you know what it is, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it reaches conclusions because, like you said, that's what we're trained to do. We are the descendants of folks that are like, oh, there's a saber-toothed tiger coming over from over there. And instead of my assessing whether that's really a saber-toothed tiger, the outline looks like one. So I'm gonna run. Because if I stay here and assess, I'm gonna be dinner. And so I'm just gonna generalize and run. And so now we we are the descendants of these folks, and so we do that. I'm like, hmm, this person didn't return my call. Must mean they don't love me because nobody loves. And now I'm like, I've gone down my path. The example that you gave, the the shared, um, the experience that you shared where you were in the ER and then they say it's anxiety. Most of the time in situations like that, the response is it's just anxiety, right? That you're not having it's just anxiety. It's like, okay, but now what? So once it's just anxiety, the implication is you figure it out. Rather than, yeah, how can we build that relationship? So, how can I build a relationship in my body where I'm like, well, there is something like I feel this tightness. I feel, and I don't need to have a story. I if I just notice it, it's like I'm now with someone. It's like any of us where we don't feel good and someone just sits with us, doesn't advise, doesn't fix, but is just here with us. That's what I'm doing with myself. I'm like, oh, I'm feeling this. Okay, I'm just gonna hang out here and notice. And it's it's uncomfortable, but it's not probably more uncomfortable than the actual feeling. But yeah, the minute I notice, I've now stimulated, I'm using a different part of my brain that's here in the present moment, not back in the trauma. A lot of the time we have physical responses and we don't know where they're from, and we theorize, but it's our body is moving so fast for the physical response that our prefrontal cortex and our more conscious thoughts won't be able to figure it out quickly enough for the feeling. The only way we can meet it is to be with that feeling. And then over time, that's where our system starts to absorb. You know what? Who knows what was happening there? But actually, I'm not in that situation right now. It's like sometimes I'm working with folks and they've experienced a lot of trauma. Do they necessarily feel very safe with me? No, because I'm an unpredictable entity, right? Like they're sitting there and I'm talking and I'm guiding through things, and maybe I'll do something that doesn't work for them. However, can we say that in this moment they're not experiencing what they might have experienced in the past that's been unsafe? Yes. Should I now say, well, you know what? This is a safe space. You have nothing to fear. No. Because we don't know that. Maybe we're sitting in my office and there's an earthquake. I don't know that. But what I do know is can we observe what's happening this second? This moment. That's what helps us then say, okay, it helps the brain understand I'm not back there. I'm here right now.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Well, and there's like I didn't understand the tremendous power in just sitting with emotion. It's incredible. And and I, like you said, emotions are not just in our head. You know, I think that it's so important for us to integrate ourselves. And that's why yoga, one of the reasons why yoga is so powerful, is that we we can reintegrate when we've become disconnected, we can reintegrate and start noticing, like, and I love that the notice that notice that, notice that, you know, observe. Like those words are so powerful because as we start to notice what our body actually feels like, everything feels like when we're in an emotion, then we start to become much more self-aware and and and able to actually sit with it so we don't shy away from or get scared of sensations in our body because we're like, that's fear. Like I'm this is fear right now that I'm feeling, or oh, this is that's what my body does when I feel angry, or that's what my body does when I feel, you know, excited, or you know, so we don't we don't start to fear these physical sensations because we become more self-aware and more under, you know, more understanding of ourselves when we have these sensations and we can sit with them more comfortably. And like you mentioned, like I describe it as a toddler. Anyone who's ever worked with a toddler, if you try to shush them when they're trying to tell you something, they will just get louder. The more you try to silence them, the louder they will get because they're like, no, pay attention to me. I need to tell you something. And the second you pay attention to them, especially if you get down on their level and hold them in, you know, like right in front of you and say, tell me what you need, they'll tell you and then it's over. Like if they just go on about their lives, you know? But yeah, and it's the same thing with our emotions. If you try to silence the emotion, it's information that your body needs to get to you. It needs to give you this information. And the more we try to shut it down, the more intense it'll get. And that's when we get, we end up with like I loved in The Body Keeps a Score, how Dr. Vanderkoel helps us understand like a lot of the physical ailments that we have are the result of suppressed trauma, of unhealed, you know, unhealed wounds that have been pushed down, pushed down, pushed down. And our body is like, well, you're not gonna listen to me that way. Maybe you'll listen to me this way, you know? And so it just starts manifesting in other physical ways because it needs to deliver the information. That's how we're designed. And we have to learn how to listen.
SPEAKER_01:That's exactly it. And the toddler example is perfect. It's like if I say to the toddler, you know what, we're not gonna go to the zoo today, but we're going tomorrow. Oh, we had better go tomorrow, right? Because tomorrow will come and we'll be like, when are we going? Are we going? You said we're going. And that's exactly what we do with the pain. Yeah, yeah, I'll rest later. I'll rest later. And then the pain's like, oh, you didn't listen. Okay, we're getting louder, and I'm gonna keep reminding you. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_00:And I want to talk about you, you talk about the difference between the philosophies of psychotherapy, like the approach of psychotherapy versus the goals, or I shouldn't say I don't know if philosophy is the right word, but you talk about like the goal, I guess, the goal of psychotherapy versus the goal of yoga and what the difference is. Could you share that with our audience? I have like, actually, let me read this quote. I think this is really great. I highlighted this for myself, so I'm gonna read it really quick if that's okay. This is from Dr. Osman's book, and I should have set shared the name of it: Mental and Emotional Healing Through Yoga, a guiding framework for therapists and their clients. And it's you don't have to be a therapist to read this. It's so good. Like, I highly recommend it. Thank you. But she says there are core differences between psychotherapy and yoga. The most significant is that yoga has a loftier goal than the mental awareness and insight of psychotherapy. To liberate the human being from the shackles of self-doubt and pain. The goal of yoga is not to obtain something that is lacking, it is the realization of an already present reality from which we are, we have become separate. The aim is to attain a progressively more evolved state of being than that of mental consciousness, thereby attaining a progressively greater force of one's being. So with the goal with yoga isn't just to understand, you know, we when we are when we're going to therapy and we're talking about the problems. I I know lots of people who can articulate all of their trauma and all of their problems, and they're still suffering. They're still struggling with it. There's an awareness, there's some kind of a, you know, a conscious awareness of all the issues, and maybe even sometimes a conscious awareness that they are the source of a lot of the things that they're struggling with. But there has, but it has not helped them to process the emotion. It has not helped them to learn how to handle when when the you know the body takes over and it's like, you weren't you're not safe. I'm taking over now. And your brain goes into the, you know, you go into the lower part of your brain where you're no longer in charge of yourself. So, can you talk a little bit more about why that distinction is different and how yoga can help you, you know, when we're not talking about things necessarily. You're not necessarily talking about things when when you're working with yoga, but if you can learn the tools, you can actually help help yourself process emotion. You can help yourself process past trauma. It's a really powerful tool.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, in psychotherapy, we talk about, and this is a relatively recent distinction, the difference between top-down and bottom-up therapies. So top-down is like my prefrontal cortex, my logical mind is trying to tell my limbic system and my brainstem, so the emotions to shift. Usually what that does is build insight, but not necessarily shift anything, right? That's a little bit like if I'm anxious and someone says calm down. Surprisingly, that's not going to actually do anything, right? If anything, it's just gonna make things more frustrating. Bottom-up therapies are therapies where we're not trying to gain insight, but rather we're trying to shift things emotionally and we may never know why. So therapies like EMDR therapy, brain spotting, somatic therapies do that where it's like you may not get the insight, you may never know why, but the shift has happened. With yoga, that's what we're hoping to do is we're creating that shift. But the difference is that I'm creating it through, as you said, a practice. So I, as the therapist, can be there with my client, but the big shift that happens is that the person practicing builds that. So a little bit like the discomfort of sitting my with my emotions, I'm sitting in a pranayama, a breath practice, or an asana, a posture, a physical shape. And it may not feel that great, but you know what? It's gonna end. And that's an analogy for other difficult physical emotions that I'm sitting with. They're all related to the body. And that's the big piece with yoga, that it's like yoga, so many pieces of the yoga philosophy are about the whole. So, for example, the what we in yoga term the koshas. So there's sort of energy bodies, there's the physical, there's the breath, there's the mental. They're all one. I'm not trying to pull one out, but they're all one. So when my body is in downward facing dog, when I first started my yoga practice, I remember my first class, the teacher said, Yeah, and if you're tired, rest in down dog. And I'm like, Yeah, but I'm tired of being in down dog. Like, I don't have my body isn't there yet. So I'm like, okay. But yeah. So if my body is uncomfortable, but I know that this is going to end at some point, that's training for my mind to generalize and be like, you know what? I'm noticing the discomfort from my emotion, which is exactly the same. My body's uncomfortable. That's what it boils down to. It's not noticing something different. My shoulders were and my legs were uncomfortable and downward dog. And my chest is uncomfortable right now while I'm experiencing anxiety. It's all the same. It's all my body. So then the messaging generalizes in my mind, oh, at some point it's gonna end. If I sit with it like that toddler you mentioned, and maybe the toddler doesn't even know why he's crying. Something happened, and he doesn't even have the words or even the awareness. But I'm just there and I'm like, I'm right here with you. Hold your hand, I'm gonna give you a hug. You can sit on my lap, you can lean your head against my chest, it'll pass. It's like I think of those sobs at the end, right? Where the toddlers are, it's like, okay, it's passing through. And that's exactly what yoga teaches us that I by being in this moment and building my awareness, I get to understand that it's a moment, right? It passes. It's like there's a one of the most well-known passages in the Yoga Sutras, a key text in yoga, is Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. So it's not about my feeling great and my accomplishing this, it's just like that. I sit with it and okay.
SPEAKER_00:It's a little stiller. Yeah, and one of the things that I think is so profound is if we approach therapy or yoga therapy specifically, like I'm talking about that here, if we will approach the process of healing past trauma or past, you know, like if we're if we're learning how to maybe somebody doesn't have trauma, but they have developed unhealthy thought behavior patterns that have gotten them stuck with emotions. As we, if we will look at that experience not as something to get through, but as something to learn from, it actually will help inform our ability to cope and manage and process emotions in the future. And I am actually in that phase now, and it's pretty exciting because I viewed, I used to view my stuck trauma, my processed, you know, the past trauma as something to overcome. And and it was something to get over with and to be done with. And what I have learned since then is that the experience of going through and processing that past trauma has enabled me now, when I experience traumatic experiences now, to process it in real time because I've developed tools from that experience in the past. And so I it has caused me to view that experience totally differently now. I don't look back on that experience and processing the trauma in the past as like something that was done in the past. It was an opportunity to learn and to develop new skills and to develop new tools so that now, because life is hard. Like life is really hard. And it and I don't want to say that to make anybody feel discouraged. It's just reality. This is the reality that we experience. This is the reality we live in as human beings, and we can either allow ourselves passively to become victims to it, or we can choose to actively participate and actively, you know, use our agency, exercise our agency to choose to interact with these things in a way that helps us to navigate them in a healthier way that helps us to move through them more smoothly and move on to the next part of our life. And, you know, and and I shouldn't say move on. That's probably not the right word, but but to navigate them in a way that we're not just suffering through it. Does that make sense to you? Do you understand what I'm saying? It's really quite profound.
SPEAKER_01:It is. And, you know, it doesn't take away from the challenges that folks can have day to day, right? So as opposed to the culture of saying, well, you know, anyone can make it through and just pull yourself up. It's like, no, there are real challenges. And there are real challenges with our health, with our systems of access, with bigger systemic things that we can't control. And noticing what's what's happening for me in this moment takes me, gives me a more immediate real experience than that mind chatter. That it's like this happened in the past, it's gonna happen again. You know what? I have so few choices. I'm scared because this might happen to me. All of that. It's like, yeah, that and that's that both and that's that fuller experience. All of that is true. We're not saying think positive and therefore magically you'll feel great. And there won't be circumstances that are confining. Rather, we're saying notice this moment, this one. This isn't the moment when you're at the hospital in XYZ. This isn't the moment when way back when something happened legally or something happened in your family, or when you were very young, something happened with a caregiver. All of that happened. And this moment is none of those. And that's that building of awareness. And you know, folks may not have experienced trauma in the sense of what we think of as big T trauma, but anything that impacts us is trauma in some shape or form. So even people who say, Oh, yeah, my life has been really smooth, usually there are things that impacted them, right? Otherwise, they wouldn't have been human. And so it's again recognizing that this moment wasn't there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Yeah. And we develop more resilience and the ability to navigate life in a more I don't know what the right word is. I'm trying to think of it. I just, I feel like you experience a richer life when we're able to stay present with all emotions, not just seek out certain emotions. You know, we don't need to constantly be seeking out, you know, the emotions that are more desirable. Learning how to stay present with all emotions and all experiences, and it frees us, it liberates us too, because otherwise we we are choosing to allow ourselves to become victims to other people's choices and to other experiences and that we become victimized by them. But when we choose to develop these tools that help us to learn how to navigate these experiences by staying present and by not trying to avoid or change constantly, it helps our lives to be more full and more rich and more fulfilling. I don't, it's hard to you not use the word enjoyable, but I mean it truly is. It's more, it's a more fulfilling way to experience life because you're not constantly trying to change things and you're not allowing yourself to be victimized by other people.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. And when we're trying to clamp down on certain experiences and certain emotions, our system doesn't work that way. Either I feel emotions or I don't. So if I try to cut out emotions that aren't so socially acceptable and people do that all the time, oh, don't cry, right? Like let's go do this and distract you. I also don't get to experience the other emotions, the more positive ones, because how am I able to clamp down those emotions? I'm clamping down a system. And that's why also, and often say we are a culture of hedonism, right? If I say I've had a bad day, how might someone meet that? Maybe someone will say to me, Tell me about it, absolutely. But after all, maybe they'll say, you know what? What? Let's have a drink, eat something sweet, shop. Something that's distraction and big. It's like, I don't need something so big. I just need relationship. Right? But we are so about something difficult happened. Let's distract ourselves with something that's so big and over the top because it's hard for us to feel even the positive emotions fully because we're trying to clamp down on all the emotions.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Okay. So I want to talk about your three-pronged model. And I I would love for you to share, first of all, what that is. It's in her book, but I want you to talk about it. And how did you develop this model? Because it's the more that I understand it, and as I'm working on learning how to, when you teach somebody else, you learn things way on a way deeper level. So I've learned it so much more deeply as I've learned how to teach it to other people. But could you share like how that how that developed and why it is such an effective way to help people learn how to use yoga in a really proactive, beneficial way to heal?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So when I first started working with yoga in with mental health, and there wasn't that much out there, and there wasn't even that much research out there. I went with what we tend to think is going to be the fit. So if I'm low energy, then maybe we raise my energy. And if I feel like I'm bouncing off the walls, then maybe we bring down my energy. And I would notice this in class teaching general population classes, how people come to their imbalance. In other words, if I am teaching restorative class, most of the folks that would come in would be people who are already feeling pretty low energy, have either illness or an injury, or are older, and they would come to a restorative class. And there'd be this understanding that you come to a more vigorous class when you can manage it, you have the fitness, you have the energy, and then you know, life happens, whether it's the years or an injury, and you come to a restorative class. And I'm like, huh. People come to where they're already at because they can meet it. But the challenge is how is that going to create any shift? So if I feel was feeling low energy and I come to a restorative class, I feel like at the end, but it certainly didn't shift. I might feel emotionally more at ease, more peaceful. But usually when people are coming in and there are mental health concerns that come up, it's that somehow their day-to-day life doesn't feel viable. It doesn't feel like they're functioning in the way they need to. So feeling more of the same isn't going to do it. So what when we try to do something very different, I remember I was working with somebody and I'm like, oh, the breath of joy, that's so much energy. And this was a person experiencing depression. So breath of joy is inhale forward, inhale side, inhale up, exhale down, and you bend forward. And I guided the person, and the person started crying and felt overwhelmed. And I'm like, aha. There's crying that's release, and there's crying that's I feel stuck and I feel overwhelmed. Why? Because ultimately it moved this sadness that this person was feeling. Now she felt it even more. Probably helpful in the long run, but in the short run, doesn't help her meet the demands of her day-to-day. I'm like, okay, so we're not gonna do something that's more inwardly focused, meditation, etc., because if things are feeling kind of blah in here and you make me bend forward, and you can even feel in my body language that I'm now becoming even more immersed in that kind of blah feeling, and something more invigorating shakes things up too much. So, what is it? How do we meet folks in a place that feels accessible, but also helps them feel like they're meeting the day-to-day? And that's where I developed the three-prong model from. So the three-prong model focuses on grounding. Most yoga experiences that are general population yoga classes are very short on grounding. So, what is grounding? Grounding helps me feel more in the present moment, more connected to my surroundings. Physically, how do I do that? My eyes are open. So we love closing eyes in yoga classes. But you know, the minute I close my eyes, I'm in my head, and who knows what's happening in my head, right? Whereas if my eyes are open, I'm now looking around, I'm noticing what's happening around me. I'm here. I'm not back in 2017 where something might have happened that even if I'm not aware, I'm back in 2017. Right. So my eyes are open. I'm using both sides of my body in whatever way I can access. So whether I when I use both of them, things look from the outside like they're symmetrical, or they don't look from the outside like they're symmetrical. But in me, I'm exerting effort on both sides, however, that is for me. So either I'm doing something that looks symmetrical or feels symmetrical internally, or I'm doing something that's one-sided on one side, one-sided on the other, but engaging both sides of the body. My breath is even. So all these lovely breaths we have in yoga, it's like, oh, you're feeling low energy. Okay, let's do an energizing breath. It's too much. It's a little bit like if I had the brake on and then suddenly I slam on the gas. Not good. Not good for my car, not good for me as the driver, not good for anybody around me. Same here. So all my practices are grounded, help connect with what's around me, help connect with my body evenly. There's always something touching the floor. So grounding practices are not ones where I'm maybe hanging forward and just hanging with the arms dangling. They're on something if I'm doing a forward bend, but I'm mindful that the spine is also always straight. I might bend forward a little bit, so like kind of 90 degrees, but I'm not bending forward all the way. So straight spine, both sides of the body, eyes open, even breath. And then I want to check in. What's one word that describes how I'm feeling, if it's me, or if I'm guiding somebody, how they're feeling? And any word is fine. Someone might feel tired, someone might feel stiff, someone might feel whatever it is, it's all fine. When we're working with someone, we want to hear positive things. So when they say good, we're like, great, but I have no idea what that means. If I say to someone, what's one word that describes how your body feels, and they say good, is that just that they're telling me they're not in pain? Is that they're telling me it's not unbearable? I don't know what that means. I'm like, tell me what's what's one word in your body, right? First word that comes to mind. Tight, peaceful, at ease, which is two words, totally fine, but we always do the check-in. Once I'm doing grounding and the check-in that's coming is consistently grounded, and that may take a long time, and it may be always. Some of us have emotional experiences, most of us really, where they're up and down, and sometimes the ups and downs are big, right? So grounding is excellent. And that can be my practice. And there are many periods of time where I'm just grounding, or I really feel like I need to ground. Okay, I feel more grounded. Great. If I feel grounded consistently, then maybe now we can switch to one of the other prongs, depending on what I'm moving towards. If I feel grounded consistently, but I need a little bit of energy to meet my the demands of my day-to-day life, then after a lot of grounding, maybe now we do an energizing practice, but brief energizing practice. Maybe we do a pranayama, a breath. So it's energizing, lifts the energy. Or I need a little bit of calming, then after the grounding, maybe now we do some calming breaths. Okay, maybe now the exhale is a little bit longer, which helps calm. Maybe now I do one forward fold or forward bend that's more calming. But the root is always the grounding. And that's where my model is very different from a lot of what's out there. It enables us, and I, you know, I think a lot of that connects to kind of psychotherapy work around being in the present moment, but also the core of yoga around that witness consciousness and that mindfulness. That grounding helps return me to the witness consciousness and the observation. And then I can work a little bit with that, with the raising the energy and a little bit with the lowering the energy.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's incredible because one of the things that I love about going through your book and learning how to understand these different the way that these different poses and practices affect your body, affect my body, helped me understand how to use the tool. It helped me understand, you know, okay, I I this is supportive of me. And the word that I use all the time is supportive. Is it supportive of what you need right now? Because a lot of times I I've found, I've started asking people when they say, Oh, yeah, I tried yoga and I didn't like it. I will say, I will start to ask them questions. Tell me about your dear your experience with yoga. Like, where did you because I I truly believe that when people have an aversion to yoga, that they engaged in a practice that was not supportive of their needs at the time and and it it turned them off to it because it felt discordant. It it felt like it didn't, it didn't work for them, it didn't help them, it maybe made them feel worse. And one of the challenges is if you're if your experience is it going into a class, you know, there's there can be social pressure around you to be, you know, to look a certain way, to be able to do a certain thing. I've been in I've I have been practicing yoga off and on for years now, and I've always been quite flexible. I was an athlete when I was younger, and I was quite flexible. So I was able to get, you know, I even had a yoga instructor one time, she's like, you're like Gumby, you know. So, but I don't, I try to, I've started trying to put myself in the back of the classes because I thought I don't want somebody else's experience here to be challenged because they're looking at me and comparing themselves to the way that I am that I am experiencing the yoga practice. And I found myself doing the same thing. I found myself, we have a tendency to judge, just a natural human tendency to judge, you know, judge people, judge situations in that, but we judge ourselves with reference to people around us, and it can affect the way that we experience something like this, because our brain, we're up inside our brain telling ourselves a story rather than allowing ourselves to feel what's happening. And and when I when I started practicing it, I think I I can't remember if I told you this story last time, but the very first I don't think it was a verse day that I went, I think it was the second time that I went. I had a friend of mine who invited me to a yoga class. And I went a few times. It was I see there was like a free trial membership kind of thing. And I didn't go after that because I couldn't afford the membership. But this, I think it was the second class we were in there, and when I was in downward facing dog, and it was funny, she said the same thing. If you're tired, go into this one. I'm like, this does not feel real unrestful to me at all. Like, I don't know what you're talking about. But I had an emo I experienced an emotional release in that position. You know, I was trying, I was at the first time I went, I was very kind of judgmental. You know, I was looking at people around me, trying to be, you know, I wanted to do it right, you know, and I was my I was really in my head the first time. The second time, she was very focused on pranayama and she was focused on breathing. Stay present with your breath, you know, this breath in, this breath out. She kept saying that over and over again. Just focus on this breath in, focus on this breath out. And as I started to try and allow myself to be present with what she was saying, telling us to do, and I was in downward-facing dog, all of a sudden I felt these emotions like rising up. I it was like a physical sensation of emotions coming up through my body, almost like a water rising. And all of a sudden, it was like pouring out of me, and I was crying onto the mat, like a pool of water was forming under my head. And at first I was like, oh my gosh, what's happening to me? And and then I just and I kept hearing her, you know, prompting, which is why it's beneficial, so I think sometimes to work with somebody if you can, because you can have somebody kind of observing and prompting according to what your needs are. But she kept, as I kept focusing, trying to, you know, I was like trying not to resist what was happening. It was the most cathartic experience I'd had up to that point in my life. And I left there and I'm like, what just happened? Like I felt so calm leaving that that practice. And it was like you had described with your experience. You're like, I don't want anything to interrupt this. I just want to like stay present in this peace and this calm. But it took me years to understand what I'd experienced. And and there were times when I would do yoga practices and I would find myself being guided through this guided practice, and I would want to go into child's pose. Like I'm I'm doing an activating practice, and I just kept thinking, I just want to go into child's pose right now. And it was a long time before I learned how to honor that desire because I didn't understand, like my brain, my upper part of my brain telling me a story is like, you're a dot a quitter, don't quit, you know? Right. Like trying to stay present with this challenging practice when my body's just asking to be grounded. Like I just need to be grounded right now, you know. And so that's one of the reasons why I found your three-pronged model so powerful. Because when you start to understand what the different poses are doing, and then you become more observant when you do practices, you can start to understand and recognize what your body needs and what is supportive of the state that you are in or of the goal that you have. You know, if you are if you're working on processing trauma and you need to learn, you need to allow yourself to like experience emotions, but then you need to create safety for yourself so that you don't, so that your brain doesn't take over and think danger, danger, and like shut everything down. It's truly a powerful thing to learn how to how to use this tool in an effective way to support what it is your your your goal is, whatever that it is that you're working on.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. And it's honoring what your body needs and that it's not less or more, which is one of the tough things for us. That it's like somehow child's pose is like less vigorous, and so it's less. It's like, no, they're all practices and at the origins of yoga, they're all practices that fit together. This is a very Western concept that we have that it's like this is easy. So, you know, you go to a class and someone's like, level one, your foot is on the floor, level two, you lift up it, lift it up, and level three, you bring it up here. And it's like these these are different asanas. They're not levels of things. And so, yeah, it is really difficult to honor and be like, okay, what is it that I need right now? It's not less than, it's meeting myself where I'm at. And not meeting myself where I'm at again because it's less than. So sometimes people say, Oh, yeah, it's good that you took care of yourself, which it is, but implied in that is like that you downshifted to take care of yourself. But it's not a downshift, right? It's actually an upshift because you're relating to yourself more.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and and learning how to observe, you know, experience things without judgment. Like, don't judge where you are right now. That does not do any good. It doesn't do any good to to and and I think when I say judgment, I'm talking about like it's not even always just comparing ourselves to other people. It can be comparing ourselves to ourselves. You know, I was feeling so good yesterday, and now I'm feeling terrible today, and and you know, what's the matter with me and what I do wrong? And, you know, and sometimes you're just sometimes it's just a bad day. Like sometimes, and I don't even like the word bad day. It just it's it's a down day, or it's a you know, it's a day where there's lower energy, or you know, maybe maybe something that you have that happened in the morning you without even being aware of it just kind of lowered the mood. And and so what and maybe that's sorry, go Alex. No, I was just gonna say just learning how to stay present with it rather than rather than judging it and trying to fix it, just stay present with it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. This is it, it's the contrast. So it's like we need the night to experience the day. It's like this is it. Like we have, you know, like right now, here we are in January. It's colder, it's more hours of darkness. How can that not impact our system somehow, right? That maybe this is a season of contraction, maybe it's a day of contraction where I feel like being more internally focused and tomorrow I'm back. And so that's that's a piece too, that it's it's a it's a moment that's part of that bigger picture. And so, how do I meet myself in that moment where I'm truly meeting myself rather than the expectations that are around me, including the ones that I've created because of how we're encouraged and how we're encouraged to not meet ourselves, but rather meet expectations around us of perfection that lead to struggle in pretty much all of us.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and I it's interesting. I my mom said something uh to me years ago. She said, bloom where you're planted. And she was talking about it. We had grown up in California, and my parents, while I was in college, moved up to Washington State. A massive difference in in the weather, right? So they went from a very, very sunny environment to a place that has the majority of the days of the year. It's gray and the sun does not penetrate the sky. And, you know, and so my mom, I loved that, you know, that she they found joy in where they were living. They they found a way to, and I think the same thing for seasons. You know, I used to be like, I hate winter, I love summer, and then I moved to the Midwest where it was like the winters were really hard. We had, you know, we would get snow drifts up to our waist and you know, sub-zero temperatures on a regular basis in the sub in the winter time. And the first couple of years, I was super depressed in the wintertime because it was such I I hated it. You know, I hated, I'm like, I hate the snow, I hate the cold, I hate, you know, and and I then my mom was talking to me one day and said this, you know, same thing, bloom or your planet. And I thought, okay, how do you bloom in the winter? Like nothing blooms in the wintertime, nothing blooms in the snow, right? But I I learned how to find ways to embrace each part of each season of the year. And, you know, and learning how to like made sure we got nice warm snow clothes so we could go out and play in the snow, you know, and and I I even had a paper out at one point. I I did it to try and help my stepson, and he has zero interest in doing it. So I did it for a year and a half by myself. But I found ways, you know, I'm I'm out in like negative 20 degrees with a windshield factor of negative 30 and you know, car hearts and you know, all wrapped up and you know, walking through snow drifts. But I had like come up with games to play with myself to like pass the time, and I actually started to really love it. You know, I loved getting up early, I loved to vigorous, you know, exercise, you know, if there was a feeling of accomplishment when I, you know, was done with the parade, you know, with the with the paper route. And so I think that the same thing can be true for our emotional states. Instead of, and that's why yoga is so powerful, bringing this back to yoga. If we will learn how to honor all of our emotional states and recognize that all of the emotional states have value, instead of judging them and trying to escape them, learning how to be present with them. Number one, when you do that, it lessens the intensity a lot of times of the emotional experiences, because often the intensity of the emotional experience, anger or sadness or whatever, is intensified, like we talked about before, like the toddler, by the resistance to them. When we try to resist them, they become more intense because they're just trying to deliver information. And and when we learn how to just recognize like there's value in each of these emotional states, and how can I? How can I stay present with it and experience the value of it rather than trying to avoid it or trying to escape it or pathologizing it? It's you know, it's incredible how beneficial yoga can be in helping us to learn how to do that, learn how to honor what our you know our bodies and our our exist our souls need and and learning how to use it in a way that helps us to live a more satisfying, fulfilling, present life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. So if somebody wants to learn more about what you do, or if they want to connect with you in some way, how can they do that?
SPEAKER_01:So my website, gataosman.com, is the perfect way to learn a little bit more, learn about the book, learn about videos I have, learn about my work in general. And I am very responsive to email. My email is on there, but just in case, it's my first name, Gata, at gataosman all one word.com.
SPEAKER_00:Wonderful. I'm gonna make sure all of that's linked in the show notes. If you if you want to connect with her, please go to the show notes and you'll you'll find all of that there. Thank you so much. This has been an incredible conversation, and I know that is gonna benefit my audience tremendously. So thank you so much for your time today.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me. Really appreciated the opportunity and really enjoyed chatting with you. So thank you.
SPEAKER_00:Wonderful. All right, until next time, upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders.