Is Your Yoga Practice Fighting Your Nervous System? - Interview with Görkem Dizdar, co-founder of Neurodevelopmental Yoga
In this episode, I sit down with Gorkem Dizdar, physical therapist and co-founder of Neurodevelopmental Yoga, a training approach that grew out of his clinical work with a baby born with cerebral palsy. What began as questions from the child's mother, Ela Seker – a seasoned yoga instructor trying to relate his therapy work to her own training – turned into a years-long project of rebuilding yoga practice from the ground up, using developmental kinesiology, sensory integration, and neuroscience instead of static anatomy.
Gorkem makes the case that most yoga instruction is built on anatomical studies, not on kinesiological studies of how a living, moving body actually organises itself – and that many common instructions in yoga classes (grounding evenly through the hands, fixing your gaze to hold a balance pose) are inadvertently triggering the same primitive stabilisation strategies the body uses to deal with threat and danger.
In our conversation, we explore:
The developmental sequence every body already knows – Why extension, flexion, lateral flexion, and rotation must be learned in that exact order in infancy, and why skipping straight to twists or side bends in a yoga class creates compensation instead of strength and capacity
Polyvagal theory and the nervous system in the room – How safety, threat, and freeze states show up as posture, breath, and muscle tone, and why modern "threats" like a difficult boss or school bullying can leave the body stuck in fight-flight for years
The body as evidence – Why constipation, cold hands, brittle nails, and autoimmune flare-ups can all be signs of a nervous system locked in chronic stress, long before anyone calls it that
The "fantastic four" for down-regulating the nervous system – Proprioception, vibration, deep pressure, and vestibular input, and how each shows up in a well-designed yoga sequence
Reading the red flags in a pose – What clenched jaws, curled toes, and raised shoulders are really telling an instructor, and why the fix is not to merely"push through it"
Why the hand should never bear weight evenly – A small, very concrete example of how a widely taught practice works against the body's own design
Gorkem's approach asks a provocative question: if yoga's alignment instructions were built on an incomplete model of the body, what would it look like to rebuild them on the model of how humans actually develop movement? This is a rich episode for yoga teachers, therapists, and anyone who has ever struggled with their yoga practice.
Learn more
📌 Neurodevelopmental Yoga: 🔗 https://norogelisimselyoga.com/
📌 Follow Gorkem Dizdar on Instagram: 🔗 https://www.instagram.com/gorkemdizdar/
💬 If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to like, subscribe, and share on your preferred podcast platform!
#NeurodevelopmentalYoga #GorkemDizdar #YogaScience #Kinesiology #PolyvagalTheory #NervousSystem #SomaticTherapy #Embodiment #SensingMindPodcast #ClausSpringborg #YogaTeacherTraining #DevelopmentalKinesiology #TraumaInformedYoga #BodyMindConnection #PosturalControl
