I recently attended the Yoga & Neuroscience Conference in Jersey City. I’m walking away with so many ideas. Behind my eyes and inside my brain, neurons are firing, creating explosions of thought, feeling, and sensation.

I’m a yoga teacher on a part-time basis and my main job is working in Human Resources, specializing in Compensation, Benefits, and HRIS. Many of the people attending the conference are yoga teachers, health coaches, scientists, and medical researchers. Then you have me, a HR professional with degrees in Spanish, Change Management, and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. I consider myself more practitioner than scientist and that’s okay. The amazing thing about this conference is that it’s entirely accessible to the average person. So long as you are curious and want to go down the many rabbit holes you’ll come across, this is the conference for you.

I’m coming at the topics we cover from a Human Resources and I/O Psychologist perspective. The topics covered have a direct application to the modern workplace.

• Yoga & Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI)
• Yoga & Endocrine Health
• Yoga & Reproductive Health

How can these topics even fit into the HR or I/O worldview? Well, consider managing benefits for an organization; or managing Leaves of Absence, or the Americans With Disabilities accommodations, or even the interactive process! Understanding the research behind topics like Cancer, Addiction, Mental Health, Empathy, Sleep & Insomnia, Stress Management, etc. is key to finding the right solutions for the workplace. How do you select the right vendor to manage LOAs? Or how do you manage the FMLA or ADA process?

Do the processes add trauma to the employee already experiencing a difficult time? What supports can be offered to employees? How can an organization’s processes be designed with a human-centered and evidence informed approach?

This is why I have attended this conference for the past three years. I attended this conference virtually in 2023 and 2024, and this year I attended in person. I am informing not only my yoga practice and teaching, but also my approach to handling scenarios in the workplace.