Happy New Year to all my wonderful students and readers. And it was a special Christmas and New Year. Some families who hadn’t seen each other for up to two years got the chance to reunite and re-establish those wonderful family bonds.

Many of us in the yoga world has been thinking about New Year’s resolutions (NYR). And if the idea of another boring list of good habits sends you to sleep, have you ever thought about reframing the narrative and seeing your good habits and lifestyle choices as affecting more than yourself? Could your behaviour and lifestyle choices affect the genes of your children and descendants in future generations? It’s an intriguing thought to think that something positive you adopt or master in this lifetime could potentially change the choices of future generations for the good. 

This understanding belongs to the growing field of epigenetics. Epigenetics is the study of the epigene, the complex sheath of proteins that surrounds DNA; this is where various genes are switched on and off. According to researchers, taking up a healthy lifestyle habit can alter the activity of 500 genes. So according to epigenetics, positive NYRs like resolving to meditate daily, get more sleep, eat more plants and exercise regularly can have a beneficial effect all the way down to the genetic level. 

These behavioural changes can be passed on to the next generation, through so-called "soft" inheritance. So even though the genes a child receives from its father and mother are fixed, events that changed the parents' epigene (either positive or negative events) can be passed on without altering the genome, only its activity. A key experiment with mice showed that a mouse who benefited from good mothering or suffered from bad mothering was likely to become a good or bad mother in turn and pass the behaviour along to the next generation. Similar findings of events that affected our ancestors are beginning to crop up in human studies.

The genes you're born with remain the same throughout your lifetime, but the activity of those genes varies considerably, not just from year to year, but also minute to minute. The genetic readout of two identical twins is the same at birth but looks very different by age 70. By then, they are no closer than two siblings who aren’t identical twins.

In reality, everything you say, think, or do sends a message that’s received by every cell at the genetic level. Thus the old picture of genes as fixed, static things has been radically revised: your genetic material is active and highly responsive to such things as thoughts, feelings, behaviour and the environment. So if you’re thinking about some NYRs and you need a bit more motivation, see your positive lifestyle choice as affecting the epigene of future generations. 

Margot Wagner
Yoga Under the Bodhi Tree
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