We need to address the pain medics are in. So much more needs to - and can - be done.
The chronic, unrelenting pressure placed on junior doctors that we see being played out in This is Going to Hurt (now airing on BBC1) is a shocking reminder of how lives are sacrificed to the NHS by aspiring medics hoping to make a difference.
I felt a deep affinity with Junior Doctor Shruti (played with impeccable finesse by Ambika Mod) because she’s so strikingly similar to the hundreds of medical undergraduates I work with every year.
Similar in age, cultural background, race, faith and education. Similar too, in that her inability to speak out about the intolerable pressure she works under owing both to the broken system and the fact of her parents’ suffocating pride in her.
What worries me profoundly is that there are hundreds of thousands more Shrutis. I’ve met over 500 of them in my work alone.
The work I do with medical undergraduates is to teach them the fundamentals of yoga practice, history, philosophy and tradition - and to connect the dots between self care, presence, somatics, neuroscience, mental health, compassion and self awareness.
Because if they can’t relate to and take care of themselves, how are they expected to do the same with future patients?
If you’re unfamiliar with yoga, you’re probably thinking “Pah, what’s yoga got to do with all that?”
And if you know, well, you know.
Yoga is a mind-body discipline that reconnects disjointed, anxious, overwhelmed minds with out-of-touch, dissociated, traumatised bodies and heals, elevates and mobilises the human spirit. In the process, it fosters self love, self understanding and personal development on a massive scale.
I see it as the life force all humans need in order to thrive.
When I read my students’ essays - they submit one reflective piece, tracing the journey they’ve undertaken in 2 weeks of yoga study, and one academic paper on the effects of yoga on a medical issue of their interest - I see a whole generation of medics learning how to cultivate the skills necessary to enter their profession.
Skills like patience, calm, intuition, intellectual clarity, resilience, determination, humanness, compassion and fortitude.
I’m not exaggerating when I say the overwhelming majority of these kids hadn’t known silence before coming to this course.
They are the Internet Generation and they’ve been raised on a vicious cocktail of constant digital stimulation and unsteadying, unsustainable expectations about how high they have to climb in order to succeed in Medicine. Trust me, a medical degree is INTENSE.
Most of them write of major sleep problems, digestive issues, eczema, headaches, chronic anxiety, depressive bouts, self doubt and a constant, ineluctable experience of doom, fear and exhaustion that trails them wherever they go.
When I read their essays, I honestly often think of these overworked and overwhelmed kids like stressed out lab rats, unable to find the off button.
And yet.
What is overwhelmingly clear is that yoga works for them.
2 weeks in which all other studies are paused and we get to the core of what yoga is, where it comes from, what it’s not (hello, Lululemon and all that BS), how it works, why it works, how to bring it sustainably to your life and the lives of your future patients, and really, how there IS another way to live, free from the haunting notion that life is an anxious hamster wheel, spinning relentlessly out from your grasp.
Want to know the results?
Most of all, my medics find agency. In their thoughts, their feelings, their voice, their confidence and their lives.
They come to understand they are not the sum of their looping thoughts - and that they can create space and silence between them.
They get that the body holds onto their experiences - and as such, they must use it to relieve themselves of psychic, mental and emotional pain.
And they are given an outlet, a set of tools and a feeling of deep relief, knowing that what at times has felt unmanageable is, in fact, less threatening than their nervous system has told them it is.
I love doing this work because the impact is enormous.
Having developed the program out of a similar one I offered in the US in 2017, the numbers of students wanting to take it each cohort just grows and grows. We’ve gone from hosting 25 students per cohort to 70 and to date, over 500 students have taken part.
I now want to expand it into other universities, training yoga teachers to deliver it nationwide to a host of medicine, psychology, neuroscience and liberal arts students.
If you’re interested in becoming one of those teachers or making introductions to heads of departments, deans and course administrators round the UK, please do get in touch.