Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 73
Resisting Integration
“So, what is the stubborn root of this mind-body split? The
first port of call is, of course, cartesian duality, which divides
the notion of mind as a separate entity to body.”
This clearly shows the government understands yoga to
be a sport, and not a tool with great capacity to improve
mental health.
In the absence of finding anything within the area of child
and adolescent mental health that includes advocating mindbody or even physical activity-based approaches, the NICE
guidance on ‘Resilience, Coping and Salutogenic Approaches
to Maintaining and Generating Health’ looked promising. This
considers factors that support wellbeing with “a focus on
health maintenance processes rather than disease processes”
and yet bizarrely neither the body nor physical movement is
mentioned once in the whole document.
It is clear from the overall thread of these policies and
guidelines that there is still an English and UK wide bias towards the splitting off of physical approaches to mental
health, and therefore a resistance to even considering yoga-based interventions. While government initiatives such
as Healthy Lives (Dept. of Health, 2010) and other sport
-based promotions will nearly always refer to the mental
health benefits of physical movement, the notion is not reciprocated in mental health policy and programs and is entirely ignored.
So, what is the stubborn root of this mind-body split? The
first port of call is, of course, cartesian duality, which divides
the notion of mind as a separate entity to body. Undoubt-
www.yogaallianceprofessionals.org
ably this viewpoint supports the promotion of talking as the
focus when addressing mental health issues. The prevalence
of this dualistic approach on our perceptions is well documented, and cannot be over-estimated in importance as a
cultural influence of our medical model, particularly when
viewed in contrast with other cultural perspectives; for example in both Hindi and Nepali languages the commonly
used word ‘maan’ describes a concept of the emotional
heart and mind together, unifying thought and feeling.
But there is also something far more specific in the British
experience; a deep, historical influence, of a more sinister
disconnection of mind from body. The British Empire was
run by men schooled in the English boarding school system;
a system designed to detach them. In a paper on contemporary boys boarding schools in an ex-colony as recent as
2005, they are described as “an environment where brutalising, humiliation, and sexual violence are normalised”. To
maintain our ruling position, these institutions produced administrators and officers for the colonies, that were desensitised to enable them to dominate. A detachment from your
own emotions is a necessary pre-cursor to being able to
rule inhumanely over others; to dismiss the needs and feelings of others, it is necessary to detach from your own. In
this school environment, boys who did talk about their feelings were under suspicion, for to be unreservedly masculine
AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021 71
