Introduction Scholars are practitioners of academia. Many people, initially in the West and eventually globally, have had a millennium to…

From my perspective a scholar-practitioner is someone who consciously integrates into his or her scholarship the insights culled from engaging in the practices prescribed by the tradition he or she researches, publishes about and teaches.

My practice deeply informs my scholarship because I’ve become aware of the contemplative hermeneutics underlying the visual material and textual cultures of the traditions that I teach.

In this article, I’ll use somatics, radical embodied cognition, ecological psychology, and my personal practice of nondual animism to root out the unexamined use of dualistic philosophical paradigms including Cartesian dualism, traditional cognitive science, and the ideas that underpin popular interpretations of the simulation argument.

In this article we build on these frameworks, and propose a model of yoga therapy that converges with Polyvagal Theory (PVT). PVT links the evolution of the autonomic nervous system to the emergence of prosocial behaviors and posits that the neural platforms supporting social behavior are involved in maintaining health, growth and restoration.

The latest research showed that changes in gut microbiota could affect the brain’s physiological, behavioral, and cognitive functions.