Why trauma informed yoga?
Why trauma informed yoga?
If you are frequently….
- Feeling anxious, tense or on edge
- Clenching your jaw or holding your breath
- Experiencing a racing heart or buzzing body
- Having trouble concentrating or feeling disconnected from yourself or your body
Trauma informed yoga might help.
Trauma informed yoga instructors are specially trained to understand the way trauma and mental health impact the physical body and the ways the body can be used to provide support to the human experience. They’ll use a specific set of principles like the ones listed below (Overcoming Trauma through Yoga Reclaiming Your Body by David Emerson and Elizabeth Hopper, PhD) to help individuals reestablish safety in their bodies.
- Experience the present moment
- Make choices for oneself
- Take effective action
- Create rhythms
Trauma can make it difficult to tap into the body’s current state. Yoga helps reestablish the ability to sense into one’s current state and rewires the brain to know that sensation and experiences have a beginning, middle and end. Creating awareness of the present moment allows folks to begin exploring what’s happening within the edges of the body (interoception) and gives opportunities to lean into and move through sensations occurring in the body (anxiety, dissociation, distraction, tension, fatigue).
Choice is one of the most important pieces of this work as trauma often robs individuals of their ability to choose of their participation in an experience. Practicing yoga allow folks to remind the brain and body what it’s like to choose for oneself.
Along those same lines, once participants have arrived in the present and have an awareness that they have choices, they can use yoga postures and breathing techniques to sense into the body and choose variations that are most supportive to their bodies in that moment.
Lastly, creating rhythms. The body functions best when it’s in sync, and the human body has many natural rhythms: breath, blinking, walking, digestion, heartrate and more. Trauma can disrupt synchrony in the body, but utilizing tools like yoga and breathwork can help reestablish it.
If you are noticing disconnects with your ability to be in the present moment, to make choices, to know how to take effective action and to establish synchronicity/rhythm in the body, trauma-informed yoga might help.
