Orientation - Neuroscience and Yoga Conference 2025 Encore

All right. Hello everyone. Welcome to the 2025 Neuroscience and Yoga Conference. I'm so excited to welcome you and to host you for this conference. This conference is one of my big passion projects. And so I'm overjoyed at the number of people interested in this and that everyone's here participating. It means so much to me. This is the orientation and kickoff party. So we're going to be going over the story behind the conference, the goal of the conference, how the conference works, how to get the most out of events, how to win prizes, what to expect daily. How to learn and have fun at the same time. It's possible. Frequently asked questions and where to go with further questions. And please, as we go through this orientation, this is really to help everyone get set up so you know where to go, you know what to do. All right. Is everyone ready? All right, here we go. So to start, I should introduce myself, even though I find it awkward every time. But I do this, you know, I introduce myself because I love meeting all of you and it's so fun to hear everyone's stories. So please continue introducing yourself, including in the Facebook group, and it's only fair in return that I introduce myself as well. So I'll tell you about me through some photos. So the first thing to know about me is that I am a yoga student. This is me pictured with my teacher, Sri Dharma Mitra, in about 2013, which was a couple of years after I first started practicing yoga. And then this was just last year with Dharma. I still go to the Dharma Yoga Center. Yoga is a huge part of my life. I kind of consider myself a yogi first and foremost. And then the next thing to know about me is that I'm a physician. So science is really, really important to me. I see science save lives every day. And I'm a neurologist, which means that I'm a medical doctor that specializes in diseases of the brain, spine, and the whole nervous system. So I take care of patients with stroke and epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. And my subspecialty is something called intraoperative monitoring. And then the other thing to know about me is that I'm really, really passionate about neuroscience outreach. And what this means is sharing neuroscience with everyone. So trying to make sure everyone has access to the amazing knowledge about how the brain works and how we can use that knowledge. This picture is from a Brain Awareness Week event in 2018 or '19, I believe, and I'm holding an actual human brain in this photo, and we have that exact same brain here in person with us, and everyone in person will be able to Learn the anatomy from the brain and look at it. Anyway, so I share all of this about me. Think of me as approachable and human. I'm here and I'm available to help. I want you to have an amazing experience during this conference. And I, you know, took a vacation from work just to do this whole conference. I'm really passionate about it. So Neuroscience and Yoga events. This is the 11th year we've had events. I'm wearing our 10-year anniversary shirt and the Events span so many different locations and people, and I just love seeing how this has grown. We have more photos and more photos and more photos, and this is from last year in person during the conference. And so you can see this is a global community with so many people interested in this, and we can all be really excited by that. The other people I want to introduce you to are the amazing speakers and yoga teachers. You'll get to meet each of them more during their sessions. You can also read about them on the speaker page of the website. But I can't emphasize enough how amazing they all are. I look up to all of them. And you don't have to take my word for it. They have been featured in major news outlets like Time, Scientific American, NPR, TED, the New York Times. They've also been published in major journals like the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, Neurology, Annals of Internal Medicine. So a really esteemed group of people. And one more group I want to introduce you to is our sponsor. This year, we're very grateful to our sponsor, the Alzheimer's Research and Prevention Foundation, and their support makes this whole conference possible, honestly. So special thank you to Dr. Dharmaseen Khalsa and Keerti Khalsa. They are amazing people. They developed a program called the Brain Longevity Therapy Training, and it's a yoga-based program to help everyone implement lifestyle changes. To prevent Alzheimer's, and they, you know, anyone who participates in this program learns how to prevent for themselves and also for other people, how to teach other people. I highly recommend you check it out. They're offering a discount code to all conference attendees, and you'll see this image and link everywhere throughout the conference. Other people I have to introduce you to are the amazing everyone else working on this conference. It's a huge effort to pull all this together. And so I especially wanna introduce Charlotte, who is currently busy right now, but she'll come up in a second. And Ashley. So Ashley is here on the Zoom call. Ashley has been on the backend making everything work. She's been setting up all the, the tech stuff, the links, the schedules, just so much stuff. And Ashley's also gonna be responding to support messages with me. So you'll be interacting with both of us quite a bit. Charlotte, if you wanna come up just to say hi, is here running the in-person part of the conference. And Charlotte is my partner, and she's from France, and she is just gonna say a quick hello. Hello, everyone. Nice meeting you all. And then other people involved. So we have Dua, who made the workbooks. We have Natalie, Emily, Sharon, Vidanshi, and Soha, who have been working really hard on the quizzes. And then we have Sisi here in person, and Emmanuel, who helped make a few documents as well. Just one thing to note. So I didn't— there's no one to thank this year because we actually used AI to accomplish this. But all presentations have translations in French, Spanish, and Chinese. So if anyone is joining from a country or a place that speaks Chinese, French, or Spanish, you will have the ability to access the presentations with that. Just make sure to go to captions. All right. So all of this history, all of these people come together into the 2025 Neuroscience and Yoga Conference. Again, the goal is to help you transcend misinformation and learn the actual science of how yoga affects the brain so that you can improve how you practice, teach, and advocate for yoga. The conference has 5 days, each with a different topic. Every year we do different topics. There's so much to cover. We will never run out of topics. But the first day today is an introductory day. And this is really about what are the basics of neuroscience? What are the basics of research? What are the basics of yoga? And just make sure we all have the same foundation as we go into the topic focus phase. The 2nd day is about brain injury and concussion. The 3rd day is about yoga and endocrine health. And the 4th day is about yoga and reproductive health. That concludes the topic focus days. And then we have a final day, which is conclusions. This is a shorter day just to kind of wrap things up. And we also have some special presentations this day that didn't fit with some of the other days. All right. Each day we'll have certain main components. So the bulk component is presentations. These are from the researchers themselves. So we have researchers from all over the world presenting in this conference. We'll also have as a component yoga classes, Q&A sessions, discussion groups. And experiments. And so these are the main things going on throughout the conference. I want to go over— before we go over the schedule, I want to go over the passes just so everyone is familiar with the passes and knows what's available. So basically what you attend on the schedule depends on what pass you get. And there are a few options, as you can see on the screen. The first is the presentation access pass all the way on the left. So attendees with this pass will have access to all of the presentations by the expert researchers for 7 days. We really want this knowledge to be accessible to everyone. So this pass is free from any time zone. You should be able to tune in, and it also includes access to the Facebook group, which I'll talk about shortly. The next pass to go over is the Lifetime Access Pass Online, and this pass is really for lifelong learners, people who want to kind of turn this into a virtual mini teacher training. And this adds ongoing access to all of the presentations, yoga classes with amazing yoga teachers, hands-on neuroscience experiments at the beginning and end of the conference, Q&A sessions with the researchers, and then discussion groups to help you implement this knowledge. We also have extra materials for the Lifetime Access Pass Online, which includes workbooks and quizzes. These are really to help you turn passive listening into active learning and really cement this knowledge as something that you take away firmly. We're able to offer 30 hours of Yoga Alliance and International Association of Yoga Therapists continuing education credit with this pass. We can also write letters and provide certificates for other professional societies, which we've done in the past successfully as well. All right. So one question for the Lifetime Access Pass Online that we always get that I'm just going to say right here is, does it apply to future conferences? Meaning, is it lifetime access to all future conferences? And the answer is it does not. It is a lifetime access pass to this conference. All right. You can change passes at any point during the conference. I highly recommend you ask your questions, figure out what's best for you today. We do have an early bird offer that ends at the end of the day today for the lifetime access pass online. You might be wondering like, where does all this money go? Like what's, why, why do we have to pay for this? So it takes a lot. Everyone who contributes to this conference is paid. So all the speakers, all the people who work on the conference, we really try to value everyone's time. There's a lot of technology on the backend. There's a lot of stuff, and this is basically where the money goes. All right. So, thing to go over is the schedule. So the schedule is linked in every email. You can also find it on the main page, neuroyoganyc.com. It is in the tab menu. You can find schedule. So please just make sure you're getting our emails. About 30% will go to spam. You know, statistics. So check your spam, make sure that if you find one of ours there that you mark it as a, an email you want to receive. All right. If you want to bookmark the schedule page, that's also a good idea. You can just refer back to it whenever. And the other thing to note is you'll get an email every day with the schedule. Okay. All right. And then the way the schedule, this is all of the presentations with the speaker picture. And if you tap on any of them, it will give you a full description. And the reason you might want to really look at the descriptions and figure out which presentations appeal to you the most is everyone has a busy life. And so the conference is designed to fit into your schedule. You know, it should take maybe about 4 to 7 hours a day, depending on how much you do. But if you want to cut some things, knowing what the description is can help you prioritize. I don't want you to ever feel overwhelmed by the volume of content. If you need to skip some stuff, you skip stuff, and you're gonna benefit so much from reading it, so don't worry about it. All right. Next, I want to go over emails. As I mentioned, they're super important. I try to keep the information in emails very concise, very organized. So, but there's still a lot of information. So please read very, very carefully. I'm just going to walk you through some of the main sections so you know. So the first one is the presentation section. So this will have Clearly broken down the prerecorded ones and the live ones. The live ones will be links to the Zoom room. The prerecorded ones will be links to the recording. All right, the next section to be aware of is the upgraded event section. So this is where the yoga classes, the Q&A sessions, and discussion group links are. You can get these by having either a lifetime access pass or a subscription, and those will be linked appropriately based on which pass you have. And then the final section is what to do next. And this one is a very succinct, super clear, what do you do? So it's gonna have a link to the schedule page, a link to the Facebook group so you know where to discuss things. And then it also will have a sharing link. So there are rewards for sharing the conference, which I'll go over. And if you have access to the workbooks, it will give you access to the workbooks as well. Okay. As I mentioned, emails are super important. If you choose to unsubscribe from emails, no hard feelings, but that will deregister you from the conference. You will no longer be getting links from us and all this stuff will stop working. So if you want to unsubscribe, but you want to attend the conference, just do it after or something. All right. The next is going over what presentations look like. It's very self-explanatory. There's a video, there's a picture of the speaker, the title. Everything you need there. The main thing I want to point out is this question form. So the question form is where you submit questions as you're watching presentations, and we use these a lot. So they're not just for question and answer sessions. They help us figure out what things are, what people are thinking about, what should we focus on in next year's conference, how should we do things in discussion groups, presentations we should add, basically We rely on these a lot. They're really, really helpful. So please submit all of your questions. I really encourage you, as you're watching presentations, to write down the aha moments. Feel free to pause as much as you need. Take notes again. You can translate to a language that suits you. And if you have the conference workbooks, I really recommend doing the workbooks as you go through the presentations. Okay, that's everything about the presentations. Please note down your questions for the chat afterwards. Next, I'm gonna go over the upgraded sessions. So these include the yoga classes, the question and answer sessions, the experiments, and the discussion groups. These are available to lifetime access passholders and subscription passholders. We have amazing yoga classes with Eddie Stern, Karen Cornelius, Celeste Pereira, Kyla Pierce, Anne Swanson, Baxter Bell, Deb Flashenberg, Anne Duke, Jake Panasevich, and Sarah Thomas. Some of these are prerecorded. Some of them are live virtual, and some of them are happening here in person. The goal of the yoga classes is really to see the breadth of yoga practice. Many of these teachers specialize in the topics that they are, you know, that they're presenting related to. So it's going to kind of give you an opportunity to see how other people are doing things and learn from that. And then the question and answer sessions. Okay, this is my favorite part of the conference. These are insanely good conversation. I go back to them regularly because hearing the speakers kind of riff off each other and like go back and forth about what they're thinking about based on the questions that are submitted is really valuable, I think. And then the experiments, these are just for fun to show you how science works. And I have, you'll get a link very soon with the link to the experiments if you have an upgraded pass. And we'll talk more about those later. I'm being intentionally vague about the experiments because I don't want to bias the results. So the discussion groups, these are another really special part of the conference. So, you know, you could come to a conference, you could learn a lot, but then the question is, what do you do with that knowledge? What's the point of the knowledge? And so the discussion groups are really about applying the knowledge. Each day the discussion group will focus on something different. So today we'll focus on accessing and understanding scientific literature. Then we're going to focus on how do you apply that to practicing yoga? How do you apply that to teaching yoga? And finally, we'll really focus on how do you apply all this knowledge to advocating for yoga, meaning how do you go into a school, a hospital, a prison, and say, I want to teach yoga, and here's the evidence why. And usually, you know, having scientific evidence can be very convincing. All right. And for people with upgraded passes, again, all of these will be available as recordings. And this is just a picture from an online discussion group, and everyone looks happy. Okay. So next, I want to go over the member portal. So this is where upgraded passes can access everything. So the main thing is you want to look for the menu bar on the website. It's at the top of the website now, so you should be able to find it quite easily. It's on every page. And then when you click that, you're going to see something that says login. And when you click that, you'll be taken to a page where you log in. If you have any trouble, you can reset your password and all of that. And once you get in, you'll see all of the topics we've ever done in any of the neuroscience and yoga conferences. The ones for this year, again, just a reminder, are Introduction 2025, Yoga and Brain Injury and Concussion, Yoga and Endocrine Health, Yoga and Reproductive Health, and Conclusions 2025. You may have some of these boxes grayed out, and that's okay. That's just because you haven't joined for a prior conference. If you're interested, you can just click it and get an offer to sign up for those. And then there's also this Dharma Yoga classes thing, which you don't have to worry about. Those are just classes that I was teaching for my friends in medicine so that they could get the recordings. Okay, so inside the member portal, you'll see everything you need. There are the workbooks, the presentations, the quizzes, all the recordings will go here. So yeah, this should be a very centralized place to find everything. Another thing to note is at the bottom of the member portal, there's this section called Resources. And so I think the most important way you might use this is let's say you want to change your account info, access receipts, change the title of your receipt, maybe change it so that it's your business name so that you can use it as a deduction or something, you can do all of that here. And then if you have a subscription, you can also edit your subscription here. Okay. And then in terms of CE credits, so as I mentioned, we are able to offer CE credits. You must sign up for a lifetime access pass to get CE credits. Subscription passes can be converted to a lifetime access pass. And you need to complete all parts of the conference to get the credits. So basically, once you complete everything, just send a support request and we'll submit on your behalf to the Yoga Alliance and the IAYT. And then we do ask that you submit the quizzes, but your score does not matter. Okay, the quizzes are not summative, meaning they're not meant to be like a final grade and you can fail. They're, they're more formative, meaning that you get feedback and they help you learn the things that you didn't take away the first time. And all of this knowledge takes multiple passes, right? It's not something that you see it once and you remember it. You really have to Keep practicing and seeing it. I also mentioned before, but I'll say again, if you have another certifying body, let's say physical therapy, occupational therapy, SLP body, we can provide a certificate and letter of attestation for that. I mentioned the workbook. So the workbooks turn passive listening into active learning. Everyone learns better when processing the information rather than just listening. And so let's say in a year from now you want to like refer back to the workbooks. You will have all of them there. We had a lot of requests in the past to add an answer key. So there is an answer key this year in the workbooks, and the workbook kind of serves as a mini textbook at the end. So it's a really, really good resource to take away from the conference. There are 2 ways to get the workbook. So the first is to upgrade, as we talked about, but also for people who want to get it another way, there is the option to share the conference. And if you share with 10 people who sign up, you get the workbooks for free. Okay, so that brings me to sharing the conference. In many of your emails, you'll see something like this, or just a little link that says share the conference with your friends. And this is your unique sharing widget. So if you copy your unique referral link and send it to people and they sign up through that, you will get credit for that. And then there are a bunch of prizes that you can win. This is our way of saying thank you for sharing the conference. It's really hard to get the word out about a conference like this. And so we really depend on people like you who are passionate about the conference to spread the word. And, oh, and I should mention, the people who sign up through your link, you can get credit even if they sign up for the free pass, right? We really want this information to be available for everyone. So these are just some of the prizes. I'm not gonna go over them in detail, but there are a lot. Alright, next is the Facebook group. So the goal of the Facebook group is for the online people to have the experience of a community where you can discuss what you're learning, how you're applying that knowledge. Really all of the stuff that you would talk about at an in-person conference. Everyone in person is welcome to participate in the Facebook group too, of course, but we'll also be talking here a lot. And the Facebook group is really about interpersonal connection. It is not about tech questions. So if you have a tech question, please do not put it in the Facebook group. It will get lost. Like, it's really hard to keep up with all the messages in there. So if you have a tech question, please come directly to the support page or reply to any of our emails. So that is a little bit about the Facebook group. It's really fun. I've really, I've personally been very touched by how the Facebook group has worked because many people will post about something they're thinking about doing with their career or a direction they want to move in and people very generously offer advice and I just think it's, it's really beautiful. Even between conferences, the Facebook group has really been a nice community. Okay, next is merchandise from the conference shop. This is all just fun souvenirs, cozy clothing, mugs. You're welcome to buy these on your own. They have the cute little Brain logo that my brother-in-law made, and all of this stuff is made on demand and shipped around the world. So it's, you know, there's no like warehousing or anything to worry about with that. We do have special edition 10th anniversary shirts. Technically the 10th anniversary was last year, but we're doing that thing where we're having 2 10th anniversaries. So, all right, let's say you have questions. Where should you go with questions? So we have the support page. The support page will keep up to date with questions as they come in. And so please check here to see if your question is answered. And then below that, there is a Contact Us form you can submit to contact us at any point. When contacting us, I'm only saying this, I think people who are attending will not do this, but I just think it's important to say, please practice kindness. We're doing our best. We are not purposefully messing anything up. You know, there's a lot of things to keep track of. If you tell us that something is wrong, we will fix it as fast as we can. Okay? So don't stress. Anything that's not working, we will take care of. Just please reach out to us and be kind. And I'm saying that because sometimes people send really mean stuff and that's just, I don't think it's right. Okay. So that's everything that I have to help orient you to the conference. Again, I'm so happy you're here. I'm so thankful for this community. This is my passion. passion project. And I now open it up to questions. Any questions in person? The question was, can, for someone who has a subscription, Claire has a subscription, she wants to know if she can apply conference, apply CE credits to past conferences that she does. And the answer is yes, and we'll work that out with you. So the question is, can you apply CE credits to multiple organizations? So could you do Yoga Alliance and IAYT and something else? The answer is yes. Yeah, 30 hours for all of them. Okay, any other questions in person? Okay. So the question is, before submitting continuing education credits, must all credits be marked completed in the learning management system? The answer is no. Like, if you attended some sessions and you don't mark them, that's fine. We're gonna operate on an honor system that you did everything, but you do need to complete the quizzes. So I will be checking that you're Name and email have been submitted for the quiz. Is there a time crunch for completing the CE credits? Absolutely not. We are still completing CE credits for people who took the conference last year, so there's no deadline. Yep. And then Angie's asking a similar question. Yep, we can still submit that for you. Is there a way to purchase workbooks from previous conferences? Yes. So that would be with— Christina, reach out to us and I'll take care of that for you. But that would basically be with a subscription. Is there an option to buy a lifetime access pass for a studio or a group of instructors? Reach out to me and we can see if we can come up with a customized solution for that. Maybe like a group discount or something. I have a lifetime access pass. Is there a deadline? Same question. So, no deadline to submit CE credits. Will you be talking about Parkinson's at all during this conference? We don't have any presentations scheduled on Parkinson's this year. We did in 2023. The discussion groups, however, are actually really flexible. So, the goal for discussion groups is that everyone's looking up and researching things that they personally are interested in. So, if you have an upgraded pass and you join discussion groups, you will have all the Parkinson's talk you want. Okay, any other questions? If you receive a warning that the site is not secure, You can just say accept certificate. It will direct you to an encrypted page. And yes, you can get a certificate for social work. Is there continuing education credit for the UK Royal Colleges? It's not formalized. However, we can submit a letter and a certificate, and in the letter we describe what the conference is, and some societies accept. And then I want to say is there is an early bird offer. I mentioned it. That ends today. So now that you've learned about the conference, think about what pass you want, and if you choose to upgrade, do so. And then if you have questions, just reach out. Kristen, the Facebook group is automated approval. Most— pretty much everyone who gets denied, it's because they didn't agree to the group rules. So you just have to, when you apply to join the Facebook group, just scroll down and say, I agree to the group rules. That's the only thing. The link to share the conference is gonna be in every email. You can also go to that custom menu bar at the top and hit share the conference. You type in your email address and it'll give you your code to share the conference. And then the One more thing is to really start the conference, we should do a group om if everyone is able to sit up tall. Everyone in person want to join for group om opening the conference? Okay. All right. So sitting up nice and tall, shoulders back, eyes closed, and we'll do one loud, long om. Together. And slowly opening the eyes. All right. So this starts the 2025 Neuroscience and Yoga Conference. Okay. Thank you everyone. See you in a little bit. Bye-bye.