Q: Your research tends to focus on yoga and the benefits of practice yoga. How did you fall into this line of research?

A: I am from Buffalo New York. At the time, there was no yoga in Buffalo and then I moved to Hawaii, which was lovely because Buffalo is terrible in the winter, as you can imagine, and yoga was everywhere there. I started doing it, getting really into to it, and then I started doing it with clients and kept seeing really good results. I tried to find data on yoga and rehab and there was nothing, so I made the very hard life choice to leave Hawaii and go to the University of Florida for my Ph.D. I said to my mentors that I was going to study yoga and they would say, ‘Don’t you ever say that out loud again,’ so I learned what I needed to learn to be a scientist and researcher and now I am here.

Q: Why is yoga research important given that your mentors told you not to study it?

A: People are already doing it with or without research. Usually, the research comes first, then it changes practice, but it changes practice 15 or 20 years later. So if a big study comes out, it takes years to make into the clinic whereas with yoga, people were just like me. They were doing it, they were loving it, and wanted to share it with their clients.

I want my team to provide the scientific evidence that yoga helps people with disabilities. Now there is a lot of research about yoga for people, but it tends to be healthy people and college students. My team was like, ‘Well what about people with disabilities, can we even do it?’. At the end of the day, my goal is to provide enough data to tell health insurance companies to pay for yoga. I’ll probably be dead by the time that happens, but I’d like to think my science supports that in the future.

Q: Your work specifically focuses on yoga as a tool for people living with disabilities. Why is research in this group of people important and how does it relate to older adults?

A: We don’t really know why yoga works as well as it does, but we know it can really change the physical body quickly. Strength, balance, range of motion — we can see change quickly for folks and we think this has to do with breathwork. Every inhale and exhale is a movement, or we hold through a breath. Sometime people are disconnected from their body, especially older adults.

If you think of a stroke survivor, they might have pancreas or paralysis of their arm or their leg and they can’t feel it or their arm doesn’t do what they want it to do. They kind of start forgetting about it. I’ve even heard people saying, ‘Just chop it off’. That’s a big disconnect if you think it’s better to not have your arm. I think yoga helps people be more okay with where they are, it helps them be more aware, and reconnect with their mind and body…

One cool, important thing is, when we do deep breathing, we are using our diaphragm and the vagus nerve goes right through there. So, what happens is when we take deep breaths, we are actually toning the vagus nerve which is what puts us into the parasympathetic nervous system. When we do that breathwork, it just calms us down.

Q: All of this science is so cool and exciting. You’ve been doing this for several years, can you share an impactful moment from your career in yoga research?

A: Can I pick a group of people? If it’s a group of people I would say folks with stroke. One they tend to be older and two they’ve had a stroke, but the big one that comes to mind is a guy who had aphasia which means you can’t talk. So he could understand, he could follow directions but he couldn’t talk, all he could say was, ‘yup’. He had a stroke when he was young, I think in his 40’s maybe and this was 20 something years later and he was so angry at his stroke and so upset. As you can imagine, if you have a stroke when you are in your 40’s it changes your life trajectory. Your still working, your still have kids, its different than a stroke in your 70’s. He was very angry, very hurt that he had a stroke and so, all he said was ‘yup’ and then, one day in like week three he said, ‘Arlene shut off the light,’ like a full sentence, that was appropriate, he knew my name, right? Like there’s no way that’s neuroplasticity in three weeks of yoga. That has to be to me that he was becoming more in tune, more aware, more okay with his own body. It’s pretty cool and exciting.

Schmid emphasized in our conversation that she is not trying to make everyone do yoga, it might not be the right choice for you. Yoga draws attention to the physical body through movement and breath, calming the nervous system through activating the vagus nerve. It’s not just talk; yoga helps to calm us down and it’s scientifically proven. Despite this, yoga is however often overlooked by researchers as a viable method of treatment when it provides promise of drastically increasing quality of life in suffering populations.