The transformative power of yoga should be shared with everyone.

That’s our mission at Yoga For Good, and it’s why we award yearly grants to those trying to do good with yoga.

While our 2024 program is now closed, we were overwhelmed by the high standards and creativity of each entry.

For now, we’d like to highlight a previous grantee, Adele Vincent, who has written this article to share how neuroscience and meridian yoga therapy are transforming anxiety through her storybook, ‘Butterflies Be Gone!’

Let’s fly before we walk — a quick peak into our storybook

Children and adults don’t have to live with anxiety. I overcame lifelong anxiety through yoga and meditation. Wishing to share the transformative nature of yoga with anxious children, I teamed up with Loraine Rushton of Zenergy Yoga to publish a children’s yoga book called ‘Butterflies Be Gone! Yoga Therapy for Fear & Anxiety’.

The book gives children, their families and teachers a toolkit for overcoming fear and anxiety. The character, Jesse, models yoga poses that specifically calm down the sympathetic nervous system — the ‘fight or flight’ response.

He role models the feelings and emotions of anxiety and demonstrates specific yoga poses to overcome fear and stress. He discovers the power of a positive mindset. And he finds an inner source of calm that’s effective as a circuit breaker for anxious thoughts.

The storybook contains 4 major tools for teachers and families to help children with anxiety, overwhelm, stress and other nervous dispositions: (i) yoga therapy poses to balance the nervous system, (ii) a give-it-a-go mindset, (iii) starfish sensory mindfulness breathing, and (iv) a guided relaxation to listen to the heart.

Let’s fly back in time to find out why we wrote it, a little about the butterfly effect it’s creating, how science and meridian yoga can help anxiety, and a sneak peek into our next children’s yoga book. If you’re super keen to check out ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ and get your copy now, go to www.moveyogatherapy.com

An egg is laid — our storybook’s inception

Once upon a time, I was a child fascinated with the natural world. Eventually, I became a neuroscientist and researched Alzheimer’s disease, neuroregeneration, and neuroimmunology.

My work, and science in general, was intellectually stimulating, yet it could not answer the big questions from my childhood, such as ‘How do the body and mind really work?’ Intuitively, I knew that the scientific explanation of body systems controlled by the brain was lacking something fundamental.

So when we moved to Sydney with 2 small children, I left science and sought answers in the ancient teachings of the masters who’ve maximised human mental and physical functioning. In other words, I retrained as a yoga teacher and absorbed yogic philosophy and Eastern medicine like a parched desert in the first rains.

By the end of my diploma in hatha yoga teaching, having experienced a personal transformation I knew to be backed up by 5000 years of yogic research into the mind and consciousness, I wanted to bring the tools and concepts of yoga to as many children as I could, especially those with big questions or suffering with anxiety as I long had.

Enter the amazing Loraine Rushton, co-author of ‘Butterflies Be Gone’. Loraine is Australia’s leading yoga educator for children and teens and trains children’s yoga teachers. Her Zenergy Yoga children’s teacher training curriculum is transformational. The meridian yoga therapy she teaches is extremely effective for correcting children’s physical and mental health issues — and works just as well on adults. So it was that I became a children’s yoga teacher and have practised meridian yoga therapy every day since. But it wasn’t long before I felt pulled to bring yoga to more children than I could personally teach in a week, especially with a young family of my own. Hence, the tiny egg of a butterfly storybook was laid.

Loraine and I worked together over several years — and quite a few larval book transformations — to publish our beautiful children’s book, ‘Butterflies Be Gone! Yoga Therapy for Fear & Anxiety.’ Little Steps Publishing published the book with the help of a generous Yoga For Good grant. We are enormously grateful to YFG for all their support. Thank you, YFG!

‘Butterflies Be Gone’ is illustrated by the wonderful Melbourne-based illustrator Andrew McIntosh. I worked closely with Andrew over many months to incorporate the yoga therapy movements accurately and subtly into his gorgeous illustrations.

We used transparency to produce the effect of movement so that young children (and adults) could follow the moves intuitively. The yoga sequence is also included in the back of the book and on a poster to help parents and teachers instruct children accurately in the poses.

Yet the yoga sequence itself offers so much more — it facilitates adults and teens to do the yoga too, especially those who suffer from anxiety, stress, overwhelm, adrenal fatigue, sensory overload, breathing issues, poor memory, insomnia, restless mind, lack of focus and concentration, and an inability to rest and relax properly.

The benefits are enormous. The yoga is designed to tone the vagus nerve and rebalance the autonomic nervous system to reduce or eliminate this multitude of unpleasant and unnecessary symptoms. Many of us need to learn how to thrive in the world — not just survive, stuck in sympathetic dominance. I’ve done it, and I know others can, too. Switching from surviving to thriving by undercutting fear, stress and anxiety is exactly what the yoga therapy in ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ is specifically designed to do. But more on that in a moment.

The chrysalis transforms — how the storybook works

The yoga in ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ is Japanese yoga therapy and moves life force energy along the meridians. Life force is called chi in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The meridians are lines of energy in the body that animate and connect all the organs and body systems.

For me, discovering energy/lifeforce/chi was the missing piece of the puzzle in our scientific understanding of how the body works. Chi wasn’t accepted by science because it couldn’t be seen or measured (with existing instruments), and there was no anatomical basis for the meridians.

That is, until recently. Scientists have finally discovered that fine tubes exist along the meridian lines with nodes and junctions that correspond to acupuncture points and intersections. Meridians are now recognised in science as the ‘primovascular system’.

The yoga therapy in ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ is specifically chosen to stimulate the Kidney (KI) meridian and the Bladder (BL) meridian. We need to talk in the language of TCM for a moment to explain how the KI and BL meridians relate to anxiety. Five element theory from TCM is the foundational theory of Japanese yoga therapy (along with Taoism).

In essence, it states that there are five types of energy in the world that are changing and transforming continuously into one another in a cycle. The five elements are represented by the concepts of Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal, and relate to the seasons and emotions. The Water element relates to the KI and BL meridians and the season of winter. When the Water element is balanced, there’s inner peace, but when it’s imbalanced, there is fear.

The KI and BL meridians regulate the nervous system and the skeletal system. When the KI or BL meridians are not functioning well, there will be fear, nervous problems, bone problems and postural problems (especially hunching). Fear reveals itself most commonly as stress and anxiety in the modern world where we are mostly safe from dangerous animals and life-threatening situations but can be stressed simply by our modern lifestyle and separation from nature (and from our own true nature).

The correlation between the KI / BL meridians and the stress response matches well with the science of stress and anxiety. Science tells us that fear triggers the emotional centre in the brain — the amygdala and the limbic system — to activate the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis. The HPA axis activates the adrenal glands to produce the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol, and the sympathetic nervous system.

An activated sympathetic nervous system is more commonly known as ‘fight or flight mode’ and can get ‘stuck’ in sympathetic dominance. We now recognise 5 states of sympathetic overactivation in response to trauma, including fight, flight, freeze, flop and fawn.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the other half of the autonomic nervous system and must be activated to enable ‘rest and digest mode’. The vagus nerve is the largest parasympathetic nerve and directly connects the brain with most of the organs in the gut, the lungs, throat, voice box and heart.

Therefore, vagal activation, or toning the vagus nerve, is the focus of many therapeutic strategies for rebalancing the autonomic nervous system to calm down anxiety, stress and restore mental health. It also helps to explain why we get ‘butterflies in the tummy’, heart palpitations and a constricted voice when we’re stressed or anxious. It’s because the vagus nerve is inactivated when we’re in fight or flight mode.

In ‘Butterflies Be Gone’, there are specific yoga poses that stimulate the whole Kidney meridian and the kidney organs themselves, including the adrenal glands (in TCM the adrenals are part of the kidneys). These special yoga movements restore proper function to the kidney organs and smooth energy flow along the KI meridian. The Bladder meridian regulates our skeleton and controls our structure, which gives us physical and mental stability. When functioning well, the BL meridian gives us a sense of inner peace because our mind is still and we feel safe and secure in our body and, therefore, in the world.

So, BL energy gives us stillness and stability, while KI energy gives us the choice between action and inaction. It’s when KI energy is stuck in action that we get locked in fight or flight mode and live with an underlying sense of fear that can show up as dread, phobias, overwhelm, stress or anxiety.

To sum up the yoga therapy in ‘Butterflies Be Gone’, it rebalances and tones the autonomic nervous system so it can switch rapidly and appropriately between action and inaction according to need with the support of structural integrity and mental stability. It’s highly effective and works on all people regardless of age. In fact, if you’re a parent with anxiety, one of the best things you can do to help your child with anxiety is to learn to overcome it yourself.

It should be noted that anxiety and stress both have an important role to play in our lives, but if it’s near-constant, not under your control and not useful, it’s important to do the yoga and meditation in the book daily until you’re clear of stress and anxiety (and seek professional help if needed). This is because young children absorb their parents’ energy, emotions, thoughts and attitudes like a sponge with no filter. If you do the yoga poses daily, especially the harder ones (with your anxious child, too!) you’ll make rapid improvements in the function of your whole autonomic nervous system. You’ll feel calm and secure, happy and content, free and amazing (I know because I’ve done it). Gift that to yourself, and you can truly help your child get there, too (yes, I’ve done that as well).

A beautiful butterfly takes flight — the storybook is released

We excitedly launched ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ in February 2023 and conducted book readings in schools, childcare centres, and libraries across three states.

Children and adults alike loved the book readings, which included yoga, breathing, guided visualisation, and fun craft activities. We’ve had great feedback from teachers, parents, grandparents, children’s counsellors, paediatricians, dentists (for the waiting room), and paediatric chiropractors.

There are children who want the book read to them repeatedly at bedtime. Others do the yoga themselves with the help of the book or poster at home, childcare, or primary school. Some have learned a new language of the body and talk about feeling ‘tingles in their toes’ in an eyes-closed pose (savasana) long after reading the book. To our surprise and delight, neurodiverse people up to 18 years old and their parents are finding great benefits in the book and yoga.

It’s clear from the feedback we’re getting that ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ is transforming lives. What we hear is likely to be only a tiny part of the real impact our book is having — a true butterfly effect. When it first came out, I said, ‘If this book seeds the idea, “There’s something I can do about feelings I don’t like”, even for just one child, it will be a roaring success’. And so it is. But we want to make a tsunami of transformational change in children’s lives, not just ripple the surface.

We have a new book coming out soon to add to the yoga toolbox for helping transform children’s lives. Use our new book for emotional resilience and you’ll be amazed how much you can regulate your limbic fear response and emotional outbursts to transform how everyone in the family feels and behaves.

More butterflies emerge — a new storybook is ready for release

Our new book is a quasi-sequel to ‘Butterflies Be Gone’ and is called ‘Shout it Out! Yoga Therapy for Emotional Resilience.’ The character, Jasmine, role models how to recognise and release emotions, become self-aware and empowered, and learn how to grow an emotional ‘garden’ of one’s own choosing.

‘Shout It Out’ will be available in bookshops, online bookstores and my website www.moveyogatherapy.com from November 2024. Buy it direct, along with ‘Butterflies Be Gone’, to help support our good work and to get exclusive products, including illustrator-designed posters and t-shirts.

Check out our book blog to read more about our book publishing journey. There’s even a video of the full 30-minute presentation I delivered to the Australian College of Chiropractic Paediatrics in November 2022 (www.moveyogatherapy.com/bookblog).

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of the Yoga For Good Foundation. Without YFG grants for both our books, neither would have made it out into the world. My deepest gratitude and thanks to Yoga For Good Foundation, illustrator Andrew McIntosh, publisher Little Steps, commissioning editor Andrej Trbojevic, our late yoga master Andzej Gospodarczyk and, especially, my co-author Loraine Rushton. Collectively, we have hatched a beautiful butterfly that’s taken flight in the world and planted a wonderful garden that’s sprouting up at this very moment.

Connect with your true self through the transformative power of yoga

It is an honour to be part of yoga stories like Adele’s.

Yoga For Good is here to help you connect with your true self through yoga. Read more inspiring grant stories, explore our latest articles, or book now to join our next free community yoga class.