Yoga Therapy for IBD: Why Acceptance is the Best Teacher With Bari Gratton — About IBD Podcast Episode 201

Yoga Therapy for IBD: Why Acceptance is the Best Teacher

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After a devastating Crohn’s disease flare, marketing executive Bari Gratton traded a high-stress career for the healing path of yoga therapy in California. Bari joins Amber Tresca to discuss the “Five Layers of Being,” the toxicity of “pushing through,” and how she is building community for the next generation of IBD patients.

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Key Chapters & Timestamps:

  • [00:00:00] – Welcome to About IBD with Amber Tresca
  • [00:04:40] – Diagnosis in the late 90s: Life as a teen with Crohn’s
  • [00:12:35] – The 2017 Crisis: Three surgeries and a temporary ostomy
  • [00:19:40] – The Barn Door Moment: Finding safety in a yoga studio
  • [00:23:00] – Healing the Next Generation: Camp Oasis and teen advocacy
  • [00:30:30] – Intro to the Pancha Maya Kosha (The 5 Layers of Being)
  • [00:32:15] – Layer 1: Annamaya Kosha (The Physical Body)
  • [00:34:10] – Layer 2: Pranamaya Kosha (The Energy/Breath Body)
  • [00:36:45] – Layer 3: Manomaya Kosha (The Mental/Emotional Body)
  • [00:39:50] – Layer 4: Vijnanamaya Kosha (The Wisdom/Witness Body)
  • [00:42:30] – Layer 5: Anandamaya Kosha (The Bliss/True Nature Body)
  • [00:52:00] – Why “Pushing Through” is a toxic practice for chronic illness
  • [01:03:00] – Girls with Guts and the “Om My Guts” community

What you’ll learn:

  • Why the “pushing through” mentality can exacerbate IBD and how to shift toward acceptance.
  • Bari’s journey from a high-stress NYC marketing career to becoming a yoga instructor.
  • The profound impact of the Pancha Maya Kosha (Five Layers of Being) on managing chronic pain and anxiety.
  • How a devastating flare led Bari to overhaul her life and work towards remission.
  • The unique benefits of clinical yoga therapy for those with IBD.
  • The importance of community through organizations like Girls with Guts and the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Find Girls With Guts at:

Find the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation Los Angeles/Orange County Chapter at:

Find Amber J Tresca at:

Find Mac Cooney (mix, sound design, and theme music) at:

These show notes may contain affiliate links. If you choose to purchase after clicking a link, Mal and Tal Enterprises, LLC may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

[Music: IBD Dance Party]

Amber Tresca: I’m Amber Tresca and this is About IBD. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis as a teen and had J-pouch surgery ten years later. Now, I help people with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis understand their disease and feel seen. On About IBD, you’ll get real talk on symptoms, treatment, and life with IBD, straight from patients, caregivers, and experts. You’ll learn, feel less alone, and even have a laugh along the way. My guest today is Bari Gratton. After a devastating Crohn’s disease flare-up, Bari left a long career in the marketing world of New York City. Today, she holds a Master’s degree in Yoga Studies and Yoga Therapy. She serves as the Brand and Marketing Chair for Girls with Guts, volunteers as a counselor at Camp Oasis, and is currently the chair of the Take Steps committee for the Greater Los Angeles and Orange County chapter of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation. Bari is focused on taking her experiences with Crohn’s disease and turning them into a roadmap for community-led healing. Bari, welcome to About IBD.

Bari Gratton: Thanks so much. I’m so glad to be here. I love to talk about IBD and yoga, so I’m really excited for today. Thanks.

Amber Tresca: I’m super interested in what you have to say because I am a casual yoga practitioner, and I know that I’m going to learn so much from you today as well as our listeners. So, first I want to get started by learning more about your journey with IBD. So, would you take a few minutes and tell us about how you were diagnosed?

Bari Gratton: Sure. Um, I was diagnosed when I was 16 years old, and at the risk of dating myself, that was in the late 90s. Um, and now I know that the landscape for treatments and for community are much more robust than they were at the time. So I was a junior in high school, I went to the doctors after a million scans, and I had been sick for so many years before actually getting diagnosed that when I finally got the films up in front of me and a doctor said, “You have Crohn’s disease, now take these pills, don’t eat Chinese vegetables, popcorn, or nuts, now go into the world, you’ve got this thing.” At the time, I’m 16, I’m thinking, “Oh, but this is amazing, I have an answer, I have an answer to all of these problems.” But in the end, it wasn’t so much that it was helpful information for me. And I struggled with it. I went through college and I wasn’t great about taking my medication. I tried to live what seemed like a normal life with my symptoms, just sort of pushing through. And by the time I got to my senior year of college, I had lost a ton of weight. I was in a very active and aggressive flare. Um, I was threatened to not be able to walk in graduation because I had to go and have an immediate surgery. And I persisted, as I always do, and said I will walk in graduation, which I did, and I came home and that June I went straight from my parents’ house to New York Hospital where I had my first intestinal resection.

Bari Gratton: So I’m at 21 years old about this time and have just left college and all of my friends are moving into their big jobs and their big lives in New York City, and I’m living on my parents’ couch because I just had abdominal surgery and can’t walk up the stairs. So it was a really intense period for me, but persisting, I made a recovery. I had lovely parents who were so supportive and so helpful. They made sure I had everything I needed in terms of nursing care and all sorts of all of the medications, everything was handled really well. I was fortunate and had incredible health insurance, so these weren’t financial burdens at the time. Um, and then I eventually recovered, I moved into the world, and I got an amazing job at a marketing and event agency and started my adult life, but still didn’t manage my Crohn’s disease.

Bari Gratton: And I eventually got another doctor, and I went through the gamut of trying 6-MP, which is one of the medications. Um, I was prescribed Humira. Again, this is the early 2000s now, and Humira was only just being introduced to be used for IBD. So I had a lot of—a lot of difficulty getting it regularly from my insurance company. There were a lot of hoops to go through. Being a young person, I wasn’t familiar, and I didn’t really have any resources. So I go through this whole period of my life without sort of a support or even a reference to things like the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation, or now I know Girls with Guts is a great community that exists out there. I think that my parents thought they were helping me by not making this disease the center of my life. But what ended up happening was I didn’t have the resources that I needed to learn about it, to learn how to take care of my body, to understand what was going on and how to—how to get ahead and reduce flare activity, all of that stuff. So I just—I just led a life where I had Crohn’s disease sort of like in this backpack that came with me everywhere and shaped every decision I made, and I just pretended like I—I was going to overcome it. I will beat this thing. Needless to say, that didn’t work.

Bari Gratton: I ended up in the hospital in my mid-20s and I spent, I guess, three weeks there and my job was on hold. I continued to be stressed out and worried and pretend I could manage things. And then eventually when I got healthy from that particular flare, I reshaped the way I approached work, and I needed to reduce my stress. So I went out on my own and I was doing my own work, which was amazing and fulfilling in its own way, but I was still sick and still not really managing my disease. Um, and you know, taking medication where I could, but I wasn’t doing anything in particular but pretending like this was a big albatross around my neck. And eventually, I, after doing that for a period of time, I was fortunate enough to meet my husband at South by Southwest, and I um—decided to move to California and pursue yoga teaching full-time. And changing my lifestyle in that way was so critical to getting myself to a point of health.

Bari Gratton: And it didn’t end there, because the first year that we got married, I had this devastating flare you mentioned earlier, um, that ended up in three surgeries, months in the hospital, an ostomy bag that was temporary. Um, my husband had to drop off of work and take care of me full-time, administer medication. I was on TPN, which is a nutritional supplement. Um, my entire body had basically said, “Okay, we’re done. It is over. We win. Make—make a choice. Make a choice.” So it is that—that had continued, and that—that episode in ’17 is really, really um—changed my entire experience. So in that time, in recovering, I tried to go back to work too soon and too fast, and my body took much longer to heal. I had something called a [fistula] that persisted for—for years. Um, eventually once my body recalibrated, I was put on Remicade. And Remicade has been the only medication that has helped me get to a baseline stable point. And um—now I am in remission, and it is 28 years of active flares and of ignoring and trying to overcome to lead me to today where I am happy to say I am in remission.

Amber Tresca: Yeah, I’m so glad to hear. I mean, it took far too long, um, but I’m so glad that you are there now and that you have found community and that you’ve—you’ve—I find it interesting because you have moved into the yoga space, but all of the other experiences of your life you’re bringing those with you in how you’re practicing and how you’re engaging with um—community. But that’s—that’s not a natural shift that I think a lot of people would see for somebody who is in marketing in New York City. As you said, very stressful. Um, I would want to not do that work for any amount of money. Um, so how did you make that leap? How did you go from marketing to yoga?

Bari Gratton: It’s so funny because now that I look backwards at it, um, I’ve always been this person who has been interested in spirituality. I’ve really enjoyed my interior life. My dad has always sort of given us these ideas about reading and imagination and about being—being comfortable being alone and being with yourself. Um, so as a sick child, that was a world for me. It was a whole universe that I didn’t—I wouldn’t have known was available otherwise. So I’ve always kind of been the yoga, spiritual person even though I wasn’t directly doing it. But funnily enough, my dad was running a catering company, and one of his head waiters had a wife who was teaching yoga in this small studio down in the Lower East Side, and it was before the Lower East Side was super cool and hip as it is now. Um, and he said, “Hey, I just—you just recovered from surgery,” and my dad said, “I think you might be really interested in this. So-and-so’s wife has this place, go try out a class at this studio.” So I—I’m like, “Okay, I’ll—I’m open to it.” And let me be clear, my dad does not do yoga. I love him so much, but he does not—and—and that’s okay, he has his own version. But um—it was unusual advice to get from somebody who didn’t have experience in that place.

Bari Gratton: Um, and I remember getting to the street and opening up this really filthy door in a cement stairwell that kind of stunk and climbing those stairs. And when I got to the top of the stairs, in addition to that beautiful polished concrete floor, I saw um—these barn doors. And I slid open the barn door and everything changed. Everything changed. I knew immediately. And just like that sigh, that’s exactly what I felt. So that’s how I started practicing yoga, that’s going on over 20 years ago now. Um, and yoga has been and continues to be a life raft for me in throughout periods of change and transformation, stages of life, and really for this disease. It has—it has truly sustained me and it managed a lot of the stress that I was enduring at my job. So 10 years into practicing and trying all these different formats and different lineages, um, I was really on the burnout train, and having met my husband sort of gave me an opportunity to use it as a pivot point.

Bari Gratton: So I think that yoga and teaching yoga and sharing yoga and practicing it and modeling it in my life has always been something even before formal training started. And then once I was really in my own practice, I could experience and feel what it was doing for me. How it was changing me, how I was more myself than I had ever been before and I was able to cope in a different way. So it became kind of a no-brainer. It was like I’m going to either stay in this lane where I’m going to be what is—what is seen as successful, productive, financially well off, getting a chance to travel the world, all of these things from the outside world people must have looked at me and were like, “You’re living the dream,” and I was thinking about how I was slowly killing myself. California has been another like incredible salve for me, and the lifestyle and the weather and the environment, they all affect and contribute to my overall health. And it was the best decision I ever made. I mean, it was scary for a period of time, and I—anybody who teaches yoga will tell you don’t go into it to get rich, but it will—it will change your life. You’ll become rich in a totally different way that you never knew possible. So it felt very natural.

Amber Tresca: Yeah, yeah. Your description of opening the barn doors and that feeling coming over you, like you gave me goosebumps. Um, that’s really just such an incredible story. And I love hearing when people walk into a space and then they just know, they just know that this is where they—they belong. I, you know, I wish it were more common than it is, but um—gosh, what a story.

Bari Gratton: Thanks. Yeah, this—this is a powerful practice and we don’t realize that it’s touching us even when it is sometimes. So.

Amber Tresca: Yes, agree. And so on your journey here, uh, one of the things that you developed, uh, I think you told me it was in—in conjunction with your schooling, but I don’t—I don’t know if I misremembering, that you developed a four-week camp program for teen girls with IBD, which—amazing, uh, as the mother of a teen girl. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Bari Gratton: Um, it would be my pleasure. You are remembering correctly. It was an assignment in grad school. So the way that my grad school degree and program worked is there was the overall Master’s in Yoga Studies, which was an emphasis on the yoga philosophy, and there was a secondary concentration called Clinical Yoga Therapy. I had entered the program convinced that I was going to me—to focus on philosophy. I adore, adore yoga philosophy and stories. I have learned to read and write Sanskrit, which has been such a transformative experience also. And um—it wasn’t until I was in the program that I started to realize that yoga therapy had some real legs and had an op—had the ability to support me. I was intimidated because I was a little resistant to the clinical aspect. My experience with Crohn’s disease has made—has made me really evaluate how effective our clinical medical system is, and I felt like it didn’t serve me, so I was resistant to this idea. Um, that was a mistake. I ended up taking on the yoga therapy program as well. So I have a dual degree in that sense.

Bari Gratton: And in that program, my wonderful teacher Dr. Lori [Fazio], if you’re hearing this, I—I owe it all to you. Um, the assignment in the—in the class was to create a therapeutic program that was research and evidence-based for a targeted population. So a lot of people chose personal—personal causes and populations. Um, somebody worked with grief and Alzheimer’s disease, all sorts of interesting and unusual applications, but I knew immediately. I loved camp, I loved camp as a kid, I loved being a camp counselor. Um, I was a camp counselor for many summers when I was younger. So I was like, what better place than a retreat for female patients with this disease? I was thinking about what I needed when I was 15, 16, 17 specifically. And I remember the humiliation of—of going into the bunk and looking at these four little stalls with bathrooms, and then there were sinks right next to it, it was all open air, and I was like, “And now for the next four weeks, I have to go to the bathroom in front of these 11 strangers who are all having their own identity crises and all of us have the hormones raging,” all those things were happening. And I—I wanted—I wanted to change that experience. And because I practice so much yoga and I do a lot of retreat work, I know how you can enter a retreat even if it’s two days and come out different.

Bari Gratton: So I—I endeavored on setting up a complete program. It was every activity, whether it be breathwork and digestion, or there’s research that says chanting before a meal helps prep the digestive system. So you’re opening up the vocal cords, you’re vibrating through it, and you’re calming your nervous system because the vibration of that sound moves down and—and increases your parasympathetic dominance, which is helpful in the rest and digest phase. So when we’re talking about eating, we’re looking at ways to enhance the—the practice and the process of digestion by working along the systems of intelligence with the body. So this camp program that I designed was four weeks, and it was yoga classes and movement and story and journaling and education. But really what I knew was going to happen in this program would be socialization. Because the psychosocial experience and symptoms of patients are not directly treated. And again, I knew from my own experience, if somebody had said to me, “Hey, do you think you’d like to see a mental health therapist?” or “Hey, would a nutritionist be able to help you maybe so you can figure out how to work with your eating better?” or “I don’t know, just like I see you have a lot of anxiety and stress,” or “I see you have a lot of medical trauma,” these are—these are areas that aren’t treated with biologics or any of these medical interventions. Um, so I knew that just the essence of putting people in the same place with this condition could be a healing salve.

Bari Gratton: So our teacher really challenged us not only to develop the program, but then to think of a place to pitch it. A real place, a real organization to pitch it. And in the process of meeting with her and developing this program, she had said to me, “Hey, have you ever gone to any of these disease-related camps before?” And I looked at her and I was like, “No,” it was like I had this idea that I was beyond needing a community and like I could figure it all out myself. I had been doing it for so many years up until this point, why not keep on going? True. So I—she said to me, “I think you would really benefit from just doing—just being a counselor at one of these camps.” So I took her advice and I applied to Camp Oasis that year and I went as an activity counselor and I came back self-realized, I swear. It is—it is not—there aren’t even words to describe what the experience is for patients with IBD. Like your baseline is everyone has the same thing as you and you can talk about poop and farting and going to the bathroom and constipation, all things that no teenager wants to really talk about with their friends. And then you talk about the things you hear stories from one another about, and then those kids coming to camp and being normal, normalizing this condition. That is—that is like—there aren’t even words to explain what it—what it does, how it changes your perception, it changes your experience, it reduces your suffering in all of these ways. And also, like you’re surrounded by people who are like you. Like my husband joked around, he said, “This would be perfect for you, this is great, go be an adult at camp, you’re going to be with all your people.” And I was like, “I am with all my people! These are my people!” And by the way, I don’t know if you all know this, but IBD people are special! They’re amazing! They’re stronger than anybody else I know and they’re interesting and curious and God, could you imagine what it would feel like for a teenager who’s already struggling to develop their independence and their identity to know they’re not alone? So I return to Camp Oasis every year and I look forward to it. We’re under 80 days from next—from this year’s camp, and I teach yoga and meditation and really I try to bring relaxation techniques into this camp because that is something that we do not teach young people about, and it is a critical element in the healing process.

Amber Tresca: So I want to know more about something that we talked about briefly when we connected, um, and it’s called the Five Layers of Being. And so this—I’ve not encountered it in—in any of my touchpoints with yoga over the past few decades. So I wonder if you could tell me more about that.

Bari Gratton: I would love to, because it’s one of the most special things that we have in yoga philosophy. Basically, it’s called in Sanskrit the Pancha Maya Kosha model, and what that is is simply the Five Layers of Being. Pancha means the number five, Maya is the “made of” or “consisting of,” and then Kosha is a sheath or layer. So it’s roughly the layers of the human—the human being. They’re made up of five layers. So these layers aren’t typical, they’re interwoven, they affect one another, and they basically help us identify awareness and make sense of what our experience is. So we turn our experience into knowledge, and then that knowledge is potentially the access point to, in yoga, what we call liberation, but it’s really self-realization, and that’s the capital S self.

Bari Gratton: So it moves from the outermost layer which is really gross in nature, so it’s dense, it’s what we can see and point to. Um, that’s called the Food Body, and that’s the Annamaya Kosha. So when you’re in a yoga class, no matter how casual, give yourself a little more credit, it is the moment when your teacher says to you, “Okay, come down to your mat and feel your body on the mat,” or “Notice where your body is connecting to the ground.” So that is the first moment, and whether a teacher says it or not, they are going to take you through this system of these layers of being. So that’s the first layer, and in an outer sense it is the physical body and it is the environment. The environment—we are made up of the same materials in which we see outside of us, specifically earth, water, wind, fire, air. All of those things are part of our physical composition.

Bari Gratton: Now the second layer is called the Pranamaya Kosha, and this is the body of—of vitality, our energetic body. So I am sure you have walked into a room, maybe even a yoga class, where you can immediately sense the energy in the space. Or you’ve heard somebody say, “When you come into a room, Amber, you light it up.” Well, that is your energetic body that you are leading with and all of us have this material. Um, capital P Prana means life force. Lowercase p prana is the breath, and prana, the breath, is the vehicle that moves the life force. So in this yoga class, when you’re sitting down and you finally felt your body in space, your yoga teacher is probably going to ask you to look at the breath. To start to pay attention to the quality of the breath. Listening to the inhale and to the exhale. Releasing the effort of trying to shape that and experiencing the breath in that way. That is what takes us into this energetic layer of being. It changes the patterning and it changes the activity that’s happening inside of our mind. Then the—and if you think about it from an outer-inner perspective, um, prana, breath, is an exhale and an inhale. So immediately the Pranamaya Kosha is a bridge into a more subtle aspect of matter.

Bari Gratton: Then the next layer, the third layer, is the Manomaya Kosha, and this is—we all have them—thoughts, feelings, and emotions. This is a tricky—a tricky space for all of us to understand. But it actually informs the way we show up in the world, the way we act. Our thoughts inform our energetic body. We are—we are creatures of perception. We’re sentient beings who are constantly processing sensory information. And our brain—our mind, I should say rather—is trying to help us. It’s trying to speed us up and make sure that we can get from point A to point B without doing too much thinking. Sort of mindlessly. So a great example of this is when you get into your car and you drive to work. Do you remember that drive? Are you actually present during that drive? Probably not. And that sounds scary on some level, but our mind is so powerful that it has done all of the thinking that you actually need to do because you have done this drive so many times that it supports you in the process of efficiently completing the task. The problem is, we stop paying attention to our thoughts and our emotions because we become so reliant on living at this level where we’re letting our—letting the automatic or our default network sort of guide the way.

Bari Gratton: So the next thing your yoga teacher asks you after they checked in on your body, after they asked you where your breath was, is “Notice how you’re feeling. Notice if there’s thoughts coming into your mind.” Most—most yoga teachers at this point will say, “Recognize that thoughts are arising and allow them to release. Accept them and welcome them in without the effort, without attaching an idea or a narrative or trying to shape the thought or trying to remember your to-do list for after yoga class.” If by doing that, we are interrupting the process, the natural process in which our bodies learn to relax and to digest information. We do not just digest food. We digest experiences. We digest other people’s energy. So this—these layers provide us with a roadmap to self-inquiry and to understand who we are, what we are, how we function.

Bari Gratton: And then our fourth body is called the Vijnanamaya Kosha, the Wisdom Body. So this is our intuition. This is our inner knowing. This is that essence of all of us. And from a bigger picture, yoga sees everything as the pursuit of knowledge. And that knowledge, it can be arrived at in many different ways. But that knowledge is truly integrated with the experience of that knowledge. You cannot just in your mind say, “I am free.” You actually have to know what it feels like in your body to be free. And that process, in that integration, is truly the practice of yoga. So after your—after you take a look at your mind and your thoughts and you start to allow them to come in, you start to notice that you become a witness. And your wisdom is that more witnessing version of yourself. The understanding of the knowledge, the understanding of all of these intelligence systems in your body. You didn’t tell your heart to beat, but it’s beating. And all of that is—all of that is all part of this wisdom. We aren’t in control—I mean, yes we are and we aren’t in certain ways.

Bari Gratton: So beyond this mental body that a lot of us get really, really trapped in, um, there is the Wisdom Body, which is the bridge into Bliss. Our final, fifth layer, our Causal Body, meaning the place where we originated from, is an essence of bliss. Anandamaya Kosha. It means the body of bliss. And what that bliss is, actually, is the expression of full self-awareness and the experience of kind of nothingness. And that sounds like such a crazy thing to say. It’s difficult to define these things because they don’t necessarily have words because they aren’t of this world. So we try to develop language, and yoga has tried to develop a whole practice so that we can learn and experience these things. Now, the good news is that our bodies are this Anandamaya bliss. We are a bliss body, period. That’s—that’s the essence of our true nature. The problem with that is that we don’t know it. We are in constant denial of it. And it is a hard thing to understand. But through regular practice of yoga, through down-regulation of our nervous system, through getting still and being quiet and listening, we can actually touch this place. And just for an instant, you can experience that sensation of “everything is okay.”

Bari Gratton: And that’s, you know, we think of these transcendent experiences, this idea of moving towards liberation or being freed spiritually as being really complex and really dramatic and very ecstatic, so to speak. It’s not that. There is an absence of good, bad, or indifferent. There is this—it’s the knowing and the experiencing that everything is connected and that you are it. You are everything and nothing at the same time, and it’s all temporary. So I love this system because it gives us this roadmap to self-discover. And I want to make a really big distinction here, which is: we often separate our mind and our body. It’s a very common—common approach in the specifically in the Western world. But our body is just the densest expression of our mind. Our mind is—our mind is everywhere in our body. And if you even think from a biological standpoint, although the nervous system and the mind aren’t the same thing, the nervous system starts at the brain, you’ve got that central nervous system, and then imagine all of these neurons moving through your body and all of these little branches and branching off here and there for sensory information to receive information and to distribute and disseminate and digest information. Your nervous system pervades through the whole body, and that’s—that’s one of the big conveyors of the mind. So the mind and the body aren’t separate. These layers aren’t separate. They are inner and they are outer. And whether or not we are conscious of them, we are carrying them and we are bumping into other people’s same experience. So I just love that there is—there’s more to us than just this biological body. This isn’t it. This is a temporary earth suit that we’re in for as long as we choose. So that’s the Five Layers.

Amber Tresca: I—thank you for taking me through that. And I love how as you’re describing it, I am connecting it to the parts of my own practice and how my teachers are taking me through a class. And um—like sometimes I have one of my yoga teachers in my head, she says, “Let it be, let it go, let it be, let it go.” And like I need that! Like I—I need to be told that. This hour is for you. Do not think about what is going to happen afterwards, because what’s going to happen afterwards is I’m going to get in my car and in five minutes I’m going to be swearing at somebody on the highway. So like let’s not—but for this hour, we’re going to find together um—as much bliss as we can, you know. And so I—I love that I’m recognizing the parts of the practice and what you in what you just described. So I was doing it without knowing that I was doing it.

Bari Gratton: We’re kind of ninjas that way as yoga teachers. We know—we try not to reveal all the secrets, but sometimes the secrets are really helpful because you’re like, “Oh! That makes so much more sense now!”

Amber Tresca: Bari, I want to know more about the differences between the yoga classes we take online or we take in person and Clinical Yoga Therapy. And I completely understand your initial reaction to that, having had so many clinical touchpoints in your—in your life and—and dealing with these things since you were 16 years old. So I want to know from you, what is Clinical Yoga Therapy? And then like who might benefit from it? And that might be everybody.

Bari Gratton: Well, my answer would always be everybody because I think—I will say this: I am an equal opportunity yoga instructor. Any kind of yoga that you have access to is a doorway. So um—before I describe or define Clinical Yoga Therapy, I want to zoom out and give a little bit of a definition about yoga, because I think that is um—it’s really hard. If I asked you right now what is yoga, what do you think you would answer?

Amber Tresca: I don’t know. Stretching? I mean, there’s—there’s mindfulness in there as well, but also community. For me, it’s also meant community.

Bari Gratton: So yoga is like this elusive thing that we kind of all think we know about, and yet we don’t know it. We don’t have a definition. Um, and so there’s a little bit of a tricky thing here. Yoga is now—has now become widely associated with yoga asana or yoga postures. So Vinyasa, Ashtanga, everything that we see presented is a body form of some kind of stretching or exercise, and yes, there’s meditation that comes with it. Here’s the big kicker: yoga is a mental practice. It is all about the mind. So in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which is the central text of classical yoga—it’s used as the foundation for many of the teacher trainings in this country, um, it is one point of view. One of the things that yoga does really, really well is it recognizes diversity. It sees that all of its expressions, many of these traditions, are much more nuanced and more complex than I’m about to share. So from an overall perspective, yoga is a much bigger umbrella than I think any of us actually realize. And yoga in the Yoga Sutras is described as “stilling the fluctuations of the mind.” And then what follows the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind is a practical method in which to do so. So yoga is the practice and the means in which to still and calm the mind, and it is also the state and the destination.

Bari Gratton: So when you still your mind, when you bring your mind to one-pointed focus, you experience a transcendent state. You understand and experience who and what is at work at the core, your capital S self. Who are you really? So when somebody says to you, “Hi, my name is Bari, it’s nice to meet you,” and they ask me, “Hey, what do you do for a living?” I say, “I am a yoga teacher,” right? Or “I am a yoga therapist.” I use whatever it is. But I am identifying as something that is not me. That is not the self. That is not my true self. So yoga is the practice of self-realization. And the way to do that is through stilling the mind. And Patanjali goes on in this text to give us eight limbs. Um, we move again, similar to the five koshas, we move from the outermost gross layer and refine as we get along in the process. Quickly, those eight limbs are recognized as your first two are your ethical cores, your Yamas and your Niyamas. These are the way we behave outside, non-harming being the very primary one. And these are the things that we do for ourselves. So we engage in self-study, because when we engage in self-study, we find relief from suffering. Because everything in yoga is about resolving the suffering of the human condition.

Bari Gratton: So if you have a human body, if you have a human life, you are suffering. That is—that is—that is a—that is a truth. That is a truth. The purpose of yoga is to alleviate that. So even before we look at Clinical Yoga Therapy, the whole practice of yoga is meant to be healing and therapeutic because we are currently existing in a state of suffering and confusion and ignorance. And what this practice is intended to do is to pull those layers back so that we can reveal the core self. Now, Clinical Yoga Therapy. Clinical Yoga Therapy is—has only been introduced into sort of this Western world in the late 80s, early 90s. So for example, um, in 1990, Dr. Dean Ornish released a program for reversing heart disease, and it was the first time that yoga therapy was featured in a scientific um—publication. Then in around 2007, the International Association for Yoga Therapists developed. And this is the primary certifying body for yoga therapy in this country. And if you think about that for a second—we’re in 2026—less than 20 years ago this practice became recognized and codified in a way. And now what the International Association for Yoga Therapists does is they help get this into the medical field. They find ways to—they work with insurance etc. so that this is continuing to be a developing and more well-known and recognized field.

Bari Gratton: So I’m going to read the definition that the International Association for Yoga Therapists has on their website, and they also recognize it’s difficult to define this, similar to how it’s difficult to define yoga. But they say: “Yoga therapy is the process of empowering individuals to progress toward improved health and well-being through the application of the teachings and practices of yoga.” So that kind of doesn’t give us too much information either, does it? Now, for anybody who’s curious about this further, the International Association for Yoga Therapists has a great website, and they have a list of other definitions, and they’ve included other yoga masters in those definitions. One of them being TKV Desikachar, who is very—very um—informative of modern progressive yoga therapy. What yoga therapy really is is just like I said it does well with expressing diversity and recognizing diversity. That diversity of practice and diversity of ritual is actually applied in the same way to the human instrument. We are all diverse in ways that none of us can actually reconcile. We collect experiences through our lives, we have unique positions in time, in space, in our environment. And what the practice of yoga therapy does is it allows us to orient to our whole person. So we’re not just talking about that physical layer anymore. We are looking at ourselves as these five interpenetrating materials and looking at ways to utilize these practices to then find ease in our system.

Bari Gratton: In yoga therapy and in yoga, we see the body as constantly moving toward homeostasis. So whether we are—whether we are complicit in that or not, the body’s intelligence constantly wants us to be at a baseline of equanimity, of balance, and it all of the actions that it’s doing inside is to offset that. So for IBD, a great way to explain this is: those of us who have IBD often have other conditions and other, you know—I always joke around, I was like Crohn’s disease is a lonely friend. They want to bring everybody to the party. They want to bring thoughts, they want to bring everything. The reason that makes sense to us in yoga therapy is because our digestive and immune system in IBD patients is dis-eased, it is experiencing some kind of dysfunction. And what ends up happening is all the other systems in our body are trying to meet up to—to stabilize and support that dysfunction. So now everything’s tilted on the axis of our—of our particular chronic illness. Um, and what yoga therapy does is it—it doesn’t do anything. I as a—as a yoga therapist, I don’t even do anything. It’s the person experiencing it. It’s opening up the way to—to change your mindset. To learn how to down-regulate. I mean, if there has ever been a disease that requires resilience, this is it. Yoga therapy teaches you these coping tools. And these coping tools come in the form of pranayama or breath practices and breath—breath restraint and breath control, or meditation and mindfulness, or my favorite practice, Yoga Nidra, which is the sleep of yoga, the intelligence of sleep. In that practice, you lay completely resting and you move through all of these layers because you get to experience and uncover the core that is perfect and unaffected as it’s always been. It’s all this other stuff that goes on top. So, very long way of trying to explain what yoga therapy is, but it’s—it’s not—it’s not so cut and dry. The most important part of it is it’s a whole-person approach and it is individualized and it respects and sees the diversity of the individual, but also contextualizes that in the larger scheme, whether it be the world or whether it be the universe. So I hope I did it justice.

Amber Tresca: Yeah, yeah, I think you did. Um, it does make a lot of sense, and I see the very particular ways in which this type of therapy could be extremely helpful to so many people who live with an IBD. And let me tell you, I’m going to steal that phrase from you. That Crohn’s disease is lonely and it is pulling in all that other stuff because I often say IBD touches your whole body and every aspect of your life, but I like the way that you put it much better.

Bari Gratton: It’s taken me a long time to be like, “Okay, friends, you can all come to the party. I’ll take the anxiety, I’ll take the trauma, I’ll take all of the other stuff. Okay, all right, bring it on.” But yeah, that—that—well, let’s uncover it so that we can then work our way through it as I feel like this is part of this is part of the whole practice of it as well. Yes, and this is now let me integrate this into my life into my being. So where I spent the last 20-plus years fighting and overcoming this thing, I was like, “Okay, I mean this is surrender.” In yoga, the last pose of every class is Savasana or Corpse Pose. I surrendered after 2017 in the lowest of my suffering when my identity was taken away from me, when I had no—like when your system shuts down under one of these flares, everything goes into emergency mode. So they’re using—it’s like your low-power mode on your—on your phone. You charge your phone every night, right? Or when you get to that red line, you’re like, “Oh, I better charge my phone.” Well, why don’t we do that with our bodies? We should be. So don’t push through, no more pushing through, anybody for anything, with a disease or otherwise. There is a way to work with what you have. Be happy. Find ways to accept this. Integrate it. It is literally—it is my driving purpose. Every day I think to myself, “Thank you for all of that crazy life in marketing and events because I didn’t think I was going to survive it as a Crohn’s patient or I thought my life was going to be basically periods of illness punctuated by periods of productivity.” But it’s not. It doesn’t have to be. It’s—let’s take it in another direction. You get to be in the driver’s seat. And that’s what makes yoga therapy effective also because you become the witness. You realize where you have the place to be in control and when you have to let go and surrender. Um, I appreciate so much that working to your capacity, that resonates with me, that aligns, that feels good in my body. Pushing through? No. It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it, you’re going to hurt yourself in the process.

Amber Tresca: Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I’m maybe not doing as well as you have from learning how to work within your capacity and completely overhauling your life and not only going through that, but also the idea that you felt you had no community or you did have really no community to where now you are deeply entrenched in community. Which, you know, we are so—we are so lucky to have you doing this work that you are doing because you’re involved with a few different nonprofits in the IBD space in different ways. And so I want to go through that so people can um—see what you’re doing there and learn more about the groups that you work with. And so I want to start with Girls with Guts, which you’ve mentioned previously. And so I want to understand what you’re working on there and how people can get involved with Girls with Guts.

Bari Gratton: Um, I love Girls with Guts. And going back to that program, the camp that we were talking about earlier, Girls with Guts was the organization, the organization that I pitched to in this project. Um, they didn’t know this at the time and I wasn’t even affiliated with them at the time, but now, boy, do they know me! They might be sorry about that. My involvement with Girls with Guts was I saw this program as being really well suited for what they do, and they—they are entrenched in making a community for women plus living with IBD or with ostomies. And the vision is a world where these—where all of us are accepted and we have access to care and we have access to one another’s wisdom. So um—I started to investigate Girls with Guts after grad school because I was like, I mean, why did this need to be a fictitious presentation? And I started to become involved in their community. Now, which is interesting because in my personal life, I don’t have social media. I lived in the world of marketing and events, I understand it and I know it, and I feel very lucky that I don’t have to use it for my work and live on it for that purpose. However, Girls with Guts has done an incredible job in the social space creating a community and a location for people to gather. For women plus, for caregivers, for people who for—for family members. It is not exclusive in any way. And they provide information and resources. They do all sorts of community-building events. Right now they um—they do something called Crafternoon, and that was a project where they get together and do a craft and they—that was so successful they added in an activity called Chapternoon, which is their book club version of that. So they offer all of these different community programs for people to be involved at any level. Their Facebook group they—they run and they utilize for information and for highlighting certain features. They do have a robust blog which has a ton of information. They are involved in all of the major conferences, they go and get information and information is disseminated back to the community. Um, and one of the programs that is really, really popular is Love Your Guts mail. So going back to the days when we had pen pals, email now a little bit more, but this idea that for those of us in the midst of a health crisis, when we’re in the midst of a flare, that there is somebody out there that knows us, that sees us, that’s our friend that wants to reach out and touch our heart in some way.

Bari Gratton: So I love—I loved Girls with Guts as a group. Um, I first sort of started poking at them. They ran a strategic task force a couple of years ago because they are in a growth period. They have been established, they have built a beautiful community, and now they are looking to grow a little bit. So once I got onto that committee, I was contributing in the natural way and I started to see other places that I wanted to insert my two cents. And having no fear, I just went in headfirst and I said, “Hey y’all, this looks great, but what if we started from the—from the beginning and we recreated a really—a really detailed, very clear brand and marketing identity? So that everybody, all of your volunteers that come on board and participate can immediately pick up on who we are, what we do, how we speak.” Um, it’s a great way to not only homogenize the voice and really clarify the brand, but it will give them the opportunity to grow programs from there. And part of their—part of their interest or their desire is to really create the volunteer community and take care of them. To truly recognize what commitments happen through volunteers. So right now I’m working on a volunteer manual so that anybody who comes on board at Girls with Guts will have all of the information and the tools that they need to organically extend the brand outward so that they can keep doing this amazing work in these communities that they’ve been doing. Oh, and my last thing that they do that I love, and I’m partial to, in October they have a Newbies Retreat! And it is up in La Honda, California. And I will be teaching yoga and meditation. So if anybody is out there listening and interested, go onto the Girls with Guts website and check them out to see um—how many spaces are left in that retreat because I will be there and we will be yogaing and meditating and battling this Crohn’s disease anyway we can.

Amber Tresca: I love that. I sometimes feel like Girls with Guts is sort of like an open secret, you know. It’s like a major community, yet still I feel—it’s correct, there is room for growth there. And um—I wasn’t even aware and I work in this space every day, obviously I wasn’t even aware of some of the programs, so I appreciate you bringing that forward and hopefully people can um—can take part in them and enjoy them as well. And so another role that you’re in is that you’re involved with the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation as well and also Take Steps. Uh, so tell me about Take Steps and then tell me about your team and make sure that you mention the name of your team so that people can donate.

Bari Gratton: Um, I if it’s okay, I’m going to back up to my first Take Steps experience which was only last year. Oh! Um, my—so I as I mentioned, it took me a long time to get to these community programs, it wasn’t until after grad school, um, and I had been working with Camp Oasis and my husband and I happened to be home on the day of the event for Take Steps. Um, and it’s uncommon because he travels for work, so we don’t—it’s not often we’re in the same place. Um, and I said to him, “Hey, would you be interested in volunteering over there?” And he was like, “Sure, whatever, whatever you want.” And my husband’s like my biggest cheerleader, he was my nurse in for our first year of marriage, like he has been through it too. So nobody talk about being—Crohn’s disease not wanting to be alone, they want to bring in your family, they want to bring in your caretakers, everything. So um—we reached out to the Foundation, the chapter, LAOC chapter, and said, “Hey, do you—we’d love to be part of event set-up.” I have experience in setting up events, my husband works in touring music so he has tons of production experience, and they were like, “Okay, great, just show up here at this time.” And it was like super early in the morning, we showed up in like our hoodies and we’re like not really knowing what to expect, there weren’t a lot of people there, and the two young women who were running the event said, “Okay guys, will you—will you put up the stage? Will you set up some tents?” And they did not know that they had like undercover event planners there. And we were like—we were like rerouting the speakers and the wires, the stage was set off and the—and the step and repeat in the backdrop was perfectly aligned, and we did all of these things and like then we went around and we were like clipping all the signs and making sure everything was level and then supporting all of the tents. I at the time I think they probably were like, “Who are these crazy little elves that came in here to do this?”

Bari Gratton: But I had no other experience with the Take Steps event except for that. And afterwards I was like, “All right, you guys win. I love you all. Tell me when you’re doing the site visit for next year’s event. If you need anything in terms of event set-up, please don’t hesitate to call us.” And one of the things that happened that is such a testament to this event in particular—they called us! They asked for help, and I think that’s a really uncommon thing to see. I know that especially in the nonprofit world where volunteership is so valued that there is a tendency to be afraid to ask for volunteers or to ask more from volunteers than what was originally expected. And I like to look at it like volunteering is an energetic exchange. So if fundraising raises dollars, volunteering, that energetic exchange, that moves toward the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s mission of improving quality of life. Their primary mission is to find a cure, that’s what we raise money for, for research, for programs, for early diagnosis, all of that. But the second part of their mission is to improve quality of life, and volunteership in these environments is that energetic exchange. That’s the currency of volunteership.

Bari Gratton: So they asked for help, we went on site visits, and in the interim they asked me if I would come and join them for the Gala site visit. And I went for the Gala site visit and I started to get involved and help them run that show, so I was like their technical producer and show runner at the Gala in October this past year. And now I have spent a lot of time working with these young ladies who are developing the chapter um—their programming, and they asked me if I would chair the um—the Take Steps committee. And it is our first year as a fundraising committee at the LAOC chapter that we have this committee. And it is beyond an honor. But the event Take Steps is, in my opinion, it’s the most important event because this is where we bring people in. The name alone, Take Steps, is incremental contributions is what gets us there. So every dollar matters. Every participant matters. If you don’t want to fundraise, and that’s an uncomfortable thing for many people, there is no pressure to fundraise. If you show up and you come to this event and you walk and you don’t have a team that fundraises, you are welcome! By all means, come see this. There is a whole like event area where we do a ribbon ceremony, and then there’s all of these like little maps and cards so you can go to Mount Remission and take a photograph in front of Mount Remission. It’s very interactive, there’s a lot that happens, there’s a presentation and a highlighting of patients and providers and doctors. This year, our—our doctor that’s being honored, his name is Dr. Patel, and he is one of the doctors at the med shed in Camp Oasis, so I’ve had the privilege of getting to know him really well. But what Take Steps does is really highlights and elevates the community and provides a place for us to connect. All the while raising money—enough money to keep us moving and advancing what it means to find a cure and to improve quality of life. And my team name—I thought I was so clever, I still think I’m rather clever—is OMG. Om My Guts. So our team is on track to make our goal, but we definitely would love any kind of contribution that anybody could spare. Five dollars is enough, 25 dollars is awesome, and if you’ve got more and there’s more there, that’s—that’s unexpected and spectacular. But it is a fundraising mission, but everything counts. Every small dollar counts. So even a dollar, if you just want to say I did something for Om My Guts or I did something for IBD research, I will take that dollar and I will make sure it gets to the right place. So that’s my Take Steps story.

[Music: IBD Dance Party]

Amber Tresca: Perfect. I—I knew the name of your team, I just wanted to hear you say it. So. Oh! And absolutely will put all that information in the show notes so that people can find it and people can donate. And I have a long-standing habit of donating to all of the walks and the fundraising things for my friends, um, myself, my company, we always donate. So now we’re friends and of course I will be donating to your team event as well. Um, Bari, it’s been lovely to get to know you. Uh, I could probably listen to you all day. And I really appreciate you taking us through the different aspects of yoga and digging into these parts of it that most of us are not aware of. We may be doing it, we may be interacting with it, but now we have names for it and we have a further understanding of it. And yoga is transformative for people living with chronic illness and IBD in particular. I know you won’t disagree. So I would encourage everybody to find their local studio or even if you want to practice at home, do that as well. It is one of the very few spaces in my life that I walked in not knowing a soul, not knowing, you know, but you walk into the studio and you are welcomed and accepted in a way that few other places in our world do. So I would highly recommend it. So thank you so much, Bari, I really appreciate you.

Bari Gratton: Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to share some of these secrets to the wider audience and yes, any kind of yoga experience that you have access to, try it. If it doesn’t work for you, try another one, try a different role. There is something out there for everybody, and you will feel it. So I’m so—I’m so grateful for this chance to share, and it’s really nice to have this feeling connection between us now with this little bond we share.

Amber Tresca: Hey super listener! Check the show notes to find links and information about the topics discussed in this episode. Plus, get a written transcript and much more on my website, aboutIBD.com. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it with someone else or leaving a rating in your podcast app. Reviews and ratings help me grow this show and bring you more great episodes. Thanks for listening and remember, until next time, I want you to know more about IBD.

About IBD is a production of Mal and Tal Enterprises.

It is written, produced, and directed by me, Amber Tresca.

Mix and sound design is by Mac Cooney.

Theme music is from Cooney Studio. 

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