Julian has been teaching yoga since 1994 and practicing Mind-Body
Healing since 1997. His approach to yoga combines a 20 year fascination
with spirituality, science, psychology, music and poetry. He maintains a
busy bodywork practice and teaches ongoing classes, chakra-based
workshops and transformational retreats. He also writes and blogs on the
intersection of spiritually, science and psychology.
In this
discussion, we explored how yoga can foster empathy. Yoga can foster
self-empathy by making us more aware of our inner sensations.
"In this video Julian Walker talks about an overlap
between
science and spirituality with Mirror Neurons.
They were recently discovered in last 10 or 15 years and show that we
have brain cells that simulate the experience of other people as we're
observing them. They simulate both activity and emotion... could be
the basis of empathy and compassion"
Science and The Sacred: Mirrors Of Compassion "It turns out that some theorists (amongst them Stephanie Preston and
Frans de Waal) believe the mirror neuron system may be involved in how
we feel empathy, which is the capacity to intuit someone else’s
feelings and imagine them as our own. It is the case that there are
mirror neurons for emotions as well as for movement. Studies by
Christian Keysers at the Social Brain Lab in the Netherlands show a
correlation between experiencing more emotional empathy and having a
high degree of activity in the movement mirror neurons. This suggests
that the two systems may be linked."
