Holly Lebowitz Rossi, MTS '99, is a freelance writer and editor who has covered religion, health, yoga, and parenting for more for two decades.
Below, HDS student Emily Farnsworth speaks with Rossi about her new book, The Yoga Effect: A Proven Program for Depression and Anxiety. The book was coauthored by Liz Owen and explores recent research that connects yoga practice with improved mood and decreased anxiety.
Harvard Divinity School: Tell me about your time at HDS and what you have worked on since then.
Holly Lebowitz Rossi: When I came to HDS, I wanted to deepen my knowledge of world religions so that I could become a journalist. It's been 21 years since I graduated, and I have gotten to do just that. There was a small community of journalism-focused students in the MTS program at the time, and with a friend and fellow grad, Michael Kress, we went and became founding employees at beliefnet.com.
Eventually, I became the senior editor for health and healing. I've also always been a freelance writer. Now I write a twice weekly blog for Guideposts called “A Positive Path.” It gives tips and tools for how to live with authentic positivity.
So really, this has been a journey that my time as health editor at beliefnet really set me on, writing about the intersection of faith and spirituality, and health and wellness. And that has led to the two books that I've coauthored about yoga, and health, and mental health.
HDS: How did this book project come about?
HLR: Liz Owen, coauthor of the book, has been my yoga teacher for more than a decade. I started going to her gentle yoga class because of a combination of low back pain and anxiety—two factors that actually ended up being the baseline for the two books that we have written together. After I felt my chronic back pain resolving, and I became more comfortable in my body and started to see the power of being able to be conversant with my body, I worked with Liz on some pieces. Then I convinced her to work with me on a book proposal so that her yoga for low back could be on my shelf and on others' shelves. Our book, Yoga for a Healthy Lower Back: A Practical Guide to Developing Strength and Relieving Pain, was published in 2013 by Shambhala Publications.
For many years, Liz has led workshops for students and teacher training programs for yoga teachers on yoga for a healthy lower back and on yoga for depression and anxiety. And I knew about her connection with Dr. Chris Streeter at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Streeter studies yoga, and neuroscience, and mental health, and she really wants to know how yoga impacts the brain and how that impact on the brain affects emotional and mental health. On Dr. Streeter's published studies about yoga, and depression, and anxiety, Liz Owen is a coauthor because she's the one who developed the protocol and trained the teachers who then, along with Liz, taught the actual classes that were part of the studies.
As the body of research was growing, and as the national conversation about mental health has become more and more open and honest, we decided to get the band back together and work on our second book. So Liz and I wrote the book together, but we were very concerned that we not make claims that aren't supported by the research and that we provide accurate descriptions for the science and the psychology of what we were describing. So Dr. Streeter spent a great deal of time with us, reviewing the chapters where we described the science. She also wrote the foreword for the book, which was published in December 2019 by Da Capo Lifelong Books.
HDS: What was the collaboration process like on this project and how did having multiple authors influence the final product?
HLR: Our collaboration came intuitively, I think partly because, for several years before Liz and I became writing partners, we had that teacher-student relationship. We were able to understand very clearly that we each have our own set of skills and our own particular areas of expertise. I am not a scientist. I'm not a yoga teacher. Liz is not a scientist. Liz is not a writer. We were able to respect and acknowledge each other's strengths, which really made working together a pleasure. To use our own topic as an example, writing is an anxious process, and writing together can be very stressful unless everybody is very clear about what they're doing and very grateful for the strengths of their collaborators. And that's really what our experience was.
I think the book is just immensely improved by having the voices that we have in the book. We had two watchwords as we created the book, and one was accessibility. We wanted to not overwhelm readers with Sanskrit terms, for example, and we certainly did not want to offer yoga poses that were not accessible to beginners because we know that, for people living with depression and anxiety, it can be a big step just to step onto the yoga mat and then to try any sort of movement for healing. So we didn't want to have poses that were too challenging.
Our other watchword was accuracy. I think that the collaboration really allowed us to bring those to fruition. And as I said, Dr. Streeter's input helped us feel confident in how we were presenting complex scientific concepts as well as her own studies. We didn’t want to make claims that weren't supported by the research.
HDS: What personal experience with yoga and mental health did you bring to writing this book?
HLR: There's an aphorism among writers: write the book you need to read. Liz's yoga is the reason that I can now say that I used to have chronic lower back pain. And though the book isn't about either Liz or me, I can say that I have lived with anxiety, including panic attacks, since childhood. Also, my dad was ill with cancer for most of the time that Liz and I were in the active phase of writing the book. He died three months before the book was published, so my emotions were high throughout that time. I feel like I was living the book even as I was writing it.
With that said, it was really important that the book be true to the research—the type of yoga that was studied, and the yoga philosophy that supports the program. So that's my personal story, and it's not really relevant to the book, but I hope that it comes through that the compassionate voice, the empathetic voice that we offer in the book is genuine, and it is true. For my part, it comes from my personal experience of learning how to inhabit my body even in times of anxiety, how to navigate times of strain and sadness, and how to stay present to myself, using a number of tools, including yoga.
HDS: What sets this book apart from other resources for yoga practice?
HLR: There was a conscious effort to offer yoga poses that are helpful to everybody, that have the measurable brain benefit, but also, that are accessible to practitioners at every level, including beginners. Knowing that our readers live with depression and anxiety, which impacts the physical body in so many ways, we wanted to offer poses with maximum impact but minimum risk of injury or opportunity for self-defeating thoughts to come.
There are also aspects of yoga practice that can be emotionally triggering in and of themselves. One of our messages in the book is to meet yourself where you are, and sometimes, that can be a very challenging place.
The yoga practice as an embodied practice can actually deepen intense emotions before or in addition to organizing and calming and balancing them. So, for example, some people feel like their thoughts spiral when they close their eyes. In a number of diagnoses, but especially in people living with PTSD or chronic anxiety, closing eyes can bring up intrusive thoughts or images or memories. So we wanted to be specific that our readers always have a choice to close their eyes during breath or deep relaxation practices or not. We wouldn't insist that people close their eyes.
Another thing I want to mention is that when we were choosing models, it was really important to us to do whatever we could to support the idea that yoga is for everybody and for every body. We wanted to steer clear of what can be a typical “yoga look” in books, which is expensive clothes and, frankly, thin bodies on white women. So we were very intentional about reaching out to yoga teachers and practitioners that Liz has worked with. We have men and women. We have older models and younger. We have East Asian, South Asian, European, Black, and white models. The yoga community has a long way to go in including and lifting up diverse voices, but an important step has to be representation in media, like in our book.
HDS: This book addresses the challenge of understanding yoga in the framework of Western medicine. How did you balance those spheres?
HLR: As a writer and as a student of religion, I felt very acutely aware of the challenges of that balance because capital-‘Y’ Yoga is a religious practice. It has ancient roots that date back to well before the common era. It has a religious purpose within Hinduism, to liberate practitioners from the cycle of death and rebirth. It's a long and complicated line from that point to the way that yoga is practiced in the West, where you have yoga presented in every possible point along the spectrum between spiritual meditation practice and pure fitness.
So we tried to be mindful of and to avoid cultural appropriation—to be careful not to claim ancient ideas with modern words. We were careful to date and cite texts that were our sources for the philosophical ideas we discussed—the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali in particular. We did our best to offer philosophical ideas that provide insight into the emotional attributes that we're exploring—all of which, hopefully, are helpful in building readers' confidence in why yoga can be this meaningful tool for them.
The studies are looking at yoga through a Western medical framework. Iyengar yoga was the basis for the practices because it is alignment-based, as opposed to flow-based or other approaches. It has teacher training protocols that are very rigorous, extensive, and consistent. So it's a form of yoga that could be more easily and reliably studied in a research context than other forms of yoga that might offer teachers more freedom to bring their own perspectives or approach.
HDS: What is it about yoga that makes it an effective mechanism for mental and emotional health?
HLR: I think a lot of people hear, “Oh, yoga is so relaxing. It's so calming.” It's specifically prescribed among friends and even by therapists or doctors for relaxation and mental health. So it's a really good question to ask: well, why is that? And that's the heart of why I think our book is special, because Dr. Streeter's research is very specific about exploring the brain science of why that is.
It focuses on a neurotransmitter called GABA, which is short for gamma aminobutyric acid. When it's low, people experience symptoms of depression. Dr. Streeter's research measured how yoga practice impacted the GABA levels of practitioners and how their mood changed or didn't during a 12-week yoga course. She was able to connect that when people practiced yoga, their GABA levels rose, their depressive symptoms decreased, their mood improved, and their anxiety and a number of other symptoms of depression decreased measurably.
There are also other ways to understand why yoga is helpful for mental health. One is that yoga is an embodied practice, meaning that it's something that you do with your body, as opposed to journaling or even talking with a therapist or with a friend. Yoga is a set of intentional movements. Yoga can help people process, understand how to integrate, and not feel so scared of emotional experiences.
Then there's the breath. Yoga is about physical movement, and it is about mindful, intentional breathing. Another aspect of brain science that's a long-established fact is that the breath is connected with the nervous system in very specific ways. Every time you inhale, your sympathetic nervous system is activated—in its raw form, that’s the fight-or-flight response. Every time you exhale, your parasympathetic nervous system is activated—the relaxation response, the rest and digest, the tend and befriend. So obviously, every time you take a breath, you don't vacillate between those extremes, but those functions of your brain and of your nervous system are stimulated. And so the mindful breathing and the different breathing patterns within yoga help you use your breath to balance, soothe, and manage your emotions.
HDS: This book is organized around five emotional attributes—Centeredness, Empowerment, Energy, Calm, and Balance. How did you go about establishing that structure?
HLR: We had this giant pool of poses used in the studies that were grouped into categories—each one of which is believed, in Iyengar yoga, which is the yoga tradition that was the basis for the poses, to be beneficial for mental health in specific ways. The question was how to present the yoga in the book in that accessible and accurate way.
Depression and anxiety are really different. In a nutshell, depression is a tamping down of energy, a low emotional state, whereas anxiety is up in the ether, spinning—it's too fast. We wanted to enable our readers to meet themselves where they are by having the practices centered around emotional attributes in a way that would offer a practice for somebody who's up in the ceiling or down on the floor. And maybe that's the same person on different days, so they would come back to the book with a different mindset.
If you're really needing to find that inner energy to get up and face your day—Energy. Calm is really the explicit anxiety chapter, to just calm down and come back to yourself.
Centeredness is a big concept in yoga. When you come to your center, you can live and breathe from your center. You can move through the world in a way that is present and focused. Every practice starts with a centering meditation in an easy seated pose. But centering is a goal in and of itself, so we wanted to start the practice chapters with that attribute.
Before we got to the Energy and Calm chapters, we wanted to offer an Empowerment chapter. Empowerment is different from energy, because even if you're not fatigued, it's easy to feel disempowered, to feel like you are not fully inhabiting your body and your life. So we wanted to offer empowerment as that kind of encouraging idea that you can find the inner strength and really explore what that looks like.
For the final practice chapter, Balance is really a goal. You don't want to be too much in your sympathetic nervous system. You don't want to be too much in your parasympathetic nervous system. You want to have that ability to synthesize and balance your emotions in a way that you can take with you off the mat and into your day. Really, mental health is the ability to regulate those two systems, and when they're in balance, people are better served.
HDS: What do you hope readers take away from this book?
HLR: My hope is that readers feel like they're getting information and inspiration from a trustworthy source. This is something that I am sensitive to as both a creator and a consumer of wellness writing. There is a lot of very high quality writing out there in the world in the wellness category, but I am always sensitive to material that's not evidence based. There can be messages that are, I think, ultimately unhelpful because they're anecdotal—not based on claims that are backed by science.
So to me, it was important that this book not just be about what Liz thinks is helpful from her experience teaching. It's not just about what I feel has helped me personally. And it's not even about what we think people should know. It's grounded in the real science that shows yoga practice to have demonstrable benefits in terms of how the brain and body handle depression and anxiety.
Another thing that I hope readers take away is that yoga is not something that they have to do for hours a day for it to have the benefit. The five practices in the book, if you do them fully, beginning to end, should take around 45 minutes. Dr. Streeter's research shows that practicing yoga even twice a week can have measurable mental health benefits. We're all fond of saying that the yoga practice that will help you the most is the one that you can sustainably show up for. So we’re not asking readers to find tremendous changes in their schedule in order to make yoga a part of their routine.
The last thing that I'll say is that I hope that readers find the encouragement to meet themselves where they are, to take this book as an invitation to see themselves clearly and accept whatever feelings they may be experiencing as valid and important parts of their story. Some poses are repeated in every chapter but attached to a different emotional attribute in each practice. I really love that because I think when we come back to the same movements with different mindsets, we learn and reinforce our ability to be flexible emotionally as well as physically. A calming Sun Salutation is very different from an energizing one. But when readers see themselves as able to approach the same movements in these two different ways, that's a bolstering feeling and something that I hope that readers can notice and take with them off the mat as well.
—by Emily Farnsworth, HDS correspondent