Sunday

Happy Campers are we. I'm quite sure the evaluations for this symposium will be superb. (And I'm quite sure John will let us all know!)

I'm going to cover what Lorenzo Cohen presented this morning in the final keynote. I realize that I skipped much of Saturday, my apologies, but this is a bigger challenge than I'd imagined it would be. Thanks for your patience. My plan is to offer thoughts in a future post about Bessel Van der Kolk's keynote talk yesterday , which was fantastic and really got everyone juiced. The air in the auditorium was palpably energized. When I'm finished in a few days I'll label the title as "final". Thanks for reading and thank you Jean Stojkov, IAYT's webmaster, for setting this up.

Lorenzo Cohen was refreshingly open and off the cuff with his closing presentation this morning. While he didn't find it important to reveal his yoga background until well into the talk, I think it adds to the picture to tell you up front that his grandmother is Vanda Scaravelli. In my mind, that brings a whole other dimension to his view of yoga research. He studied with her growing up, shared images of her in asana, told us about a revised upcoming edition of her book (her revisions, but never published),along with a little background that Krishnamurti was her main teacher, she studied with Mr. Iyengar and Desikachar. Mr. Iyengar on these Italy visits would teach yoga to Krishnamurti. So Dr. Cohen's understanding of yoga is deeper than that of most doctor's who are researching yoga, and certainly of most who are authorizing the use of yoga with patients.

Again, slides will be posted on the DRL for all of the talks.

Dr. Cohen began his presentation by sharing his earliest research on mindbody practices with us. He came to the mindbody research after a colleague successfully determined that chronic stress promotes tumor growth in mice. An entry point!

Dr. Cohen developed studies using Tibetan Yoga for women with breast cancer finding that lower levels of sleep disturbances resulted. But interestingly, another finding was that there was not a reduction in intrusive thoughts. Why?