Courtesy of Love Your Brain.

By Eliza Marie Somers

Practicing yoga after a traumatic brain injury might be the last thing on the minds of many TBI survivors, although research reveals it just might be a key missing ingredient in the recovery process.

An adaptive, gentle yoga practice that combines breath work, meditation and mindfulness has been shown to be effective in improving balance, posture, cognition, sleep, memory and muscle development, along with increasing a positive mindset.

“The greatest way that yoga is different from many other forms of exercise is that it is integrated -- yoga connects the mind and the body,” said Bridget Hearne, program manager for the nonprofit Love Your Brain. “This mind, body integration is your relationship with your thoughts, your emotions and physical sensations.”

Hearne gave an interactive and enlightening presentation on the benefits of yoga, meditation and mindfulness for TBI survivors and care partners during the Brain Injury Hope Foundation’s June 13, 2025, Survivor Series: Rewiring Your Brain Through Mindfulness, Yoga, Meditation, and Community.

What is Yoga?

Many people think of yoga as just a physical practice with people holding upside-down poses or students contorting their bodies into pretzel-like poses. However, yoga also incorporates breathing exercises, mindfulness and meditations, which can include visualizations, and yoga comes in many forms, such as restorative yoga and yoga nidra.

“At Love Your Brain we really emphasize yoga’s whole practice,” Hearne said. “And the beautiful thing is anyone can practice yoga.”

Program Manager for Love Your Brain Mindset and Trainings Bridget Hearne says finding a yoga practice and teacher that meets your needs is key to recovery.

However, it is the “right” yoga practice that can be beneficial to TBI survivors.

“I like to emphasize that it's really important to find yoga practices that are adapted to your needs,” Hearne said. “If you go to a yoga class, and it is one of the more upside-down yoga classes it could cause symptoms to really be exacerbated.”

Benefits of an Integrated Yoga Practice

Yoga and mindfulness have been practiced for thousands of years because of the numerous health benefits associated with the disciplines. Now research over the past 10-20 years backs those claims.

“Yoga, meditation and mindfulness practices -- when it comes to brain injuries -- have been shown to improve cognitive fatigue and depression,” Hearne said.
She went on to list more research-backed benefits, including:

  • Lessens pain
  • Improves sleep and emotional regulation
  • Augments memory and attention
  • Boosts balance and mobility
  • Increases muscle mass
  • Increases relaxation and awareness
  • Increases physical and emotional well-being
  • Enhances resilience and quality of life

“We could spend the next three hours reading through all the research … but I would like cover just a few of the benefits, especially for a lot of the common challenges we hear in our line of work,” Hearne said.

“The first one we always hear is a decrease in anxiety and stress. … Physical relaxation is going to help decrease anxiety and stress, but yoga and mindfulness can actually directly influence our bodies’ chemistry or neurochemistry,” she said. “It promotes the release of calming hormones like gaba, melatonin and serotonin while also reducing muscular tension

“And, when it comes to depression, same thing, it directly can influence the body's neurochemistry by reducing cortisol, our stress hormone. And then releasing those things that promote relaxation and happiness and rest -- serotonin, dopamine, melatonin.”

Studies and Articles on Yoga and TBI

Rewiring the Brain through Mindfulness

Mindfulness can be described as “living in the moment without judgment,” but how can it help brain injury survivors?

“Mindfulness can interrupt negative and ruminating thought patterns,” Hearne explained. “For folks who've experienced a brain injury these negative thought patterns can become really deep and unconscious. … So, (survivors) get stuck in this sort of loop of these negative thought patterns, and this only exacerbates all those symptoms of anxiety, stress and depression.”

Courtesy of Love Your Brain

Being mindful and focusing on the present moment can stop a survivor from thinking about the past and what they have lost because of the brain injury or from thinking about the future in a negative frame. By using mindfulness, the brain can create new neuro pathways through neuroplasticity by reinforcing positive emotions and thoughts.

“Essentially your brain has a really remarkable ability to adapt and reorganize, and form new connections. You can think about it this way: each time we have a thought pattern, or each time we perform an action, and then we do it again. It only reinforces the corresponding pathways of the brain,” Hearne said.

“When we're talking about these negative thought patterns that often accompany any kind of injury, especially a brain injury, those habitual and recurring thoughts are really only being strengthened and reinforced each time you return to them. So, the power of yoga, meditation, any form of mindfulness, really, is that we can interrupt these negative thought patterns and actually rewire the brain.”

So, how do you practice mindfulness in every day activities?

“By noticing your thoughts, and not classifying them as good or bad. You're just paying attention, and you're noticing things without judgment,” Hearne said.
“Mindfulness is a skill. It's an ability that all humans have. And it's a skill that needs to be trained and deepened.”
Hearne gave an example of washing dishes – one of her least favorite chores.

“Rather than thinking about how much I don't really enjoy the task, I think about how the water is warm. It’s a neutral observation, rather than thinking about the task or planning on what I might do later. I’m just paying attention to washing dishes. … Knowing what’s present – here and now.”

Sign Up for Free Love Your Brain Resources

Courtesy of Love Your Brain

Developing A Supportive Community

Love Your Brain is the outcome of a life-changing brain injury to competitive snowboarder Kevin Pearce. Pearce was training for the Vancouver Olympics in Park City, Utah, when he crashed in the halfpipe and suffered a near fatal head injury.

“I was at the very, very top of competitive snowboarding, and then in a split second, everything was taken away from me. I'd lost my abilities. I couldn't even stand up by myself. I couldn't even eat food by myself, much less was I going to go try and snowboard. Only your brain can do that to you, only injuring your brain can change the person who you once were,” said Kevin in this short video

Kevin and Adam Pearce about Love Your Brain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCqlO5cwFc

Kevin’s brother, Adam, quit his full-time job to help Kevin recover, and during this time Kevin discovered yoga, meditation and mindfulness were key missing therapies in his recovery. The brothers also realized that a supportive community was transformational in Kevin’s road to recovery. Thus, the formation of Love Your Brain, a nonprofit designed to improve the lives of TBI survivors by offering FREE resources, retreats and a supportive community.

Hearne said one of the most important lessons she has learned in the past several years is that yoga, meditation and mindfulness are great tools, but community is vital to recovery.

Another aspect of mindfulness is kindness or openness to not judging the situation critically.

“This is often in contrast to how we commonly approach life, where we're distracted or either hyper-focused on something that's already happened in the past or something that's coming up in the future instead of focusing on what's happening right now,” Hearne said.

Hearne also stressed that mindfulness isn’t a “quick fix to take away all your stress and difficulties, instead, it really is a form of mental training. And it teaches us how to more skillfully work” through challenges

Courtesy of Love Your Brain.

“What people are really craving is the community, and that is the special sauce of (Love Your Brain), and that is a crucial,” Hearne said. “Community is the crucial element of brain injury healing and navigating that space.

“Many people that are impacted by a brain injury lack the community. One of the common things I hear from participants who enroll in our programs is that they've never been able to even really meet anyone else with a brain injury. So, they just feel really isolated.”

How Love Your Brain Benefits One Survivor

And this is where Love Your Brain steps in, by providing several pathways to community with FREE retreats and mindset programs.

For more information and to register for any of Love Your Brain programs, visit www.LoveYourBrain.com