How do mindful yoga practices help in healing from traumatic experiences?
Build Resilience to stress and trauma by connecting to your body
What is trauma? How do we define a traumatic event? According to The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto, trauma is defined as, “The lasting emotional response that often results from living through a distressing event. Experiencing a traumatic event can harm a person’s sense of safety, sense of self, and ability to regulate emotions and navigate relationships. Long after the traumatic event occurs, people with trauma can often feel shame, helplessness, powerlessness and intense fear”.
No matter how long ago the traumatic event occurred, it can have long-lasting effects that can interfere with a person’s daily life. We typically think of these long-lasting effects as post-traumatic stress disorder, but trauma can be experienced in many different ways. There are the experiences we often think of when hear the word “trauma”- physical or mental abuse, war, systemic oppression, car accidents, death of a child, etc. but there’s also grief from a loss of any sort including family, friends, pets, personal health, job loss, retirement, etc.
We’re all going through a collective traumatic event right now with the pandemic. We all need strategies to cope and build resilience through these stressful times.
When you think of all the different events that occur in our lives, everyone has experienced loss. Whether or not that loss is experienced as “trauma” depends on how the event was processed in the body/mind. Both cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and somatic experiencing (which focuses more on the body) have been used with success to help trauma survivors.
Since there are so many forms of trauma, more and more yoga teachers are learning the techniques of trauma-informed yoga, which helps people engage in somatic experiencing. According to somatic experiencing researchers like Dr. Peter Levine (who wrote In an Unspoken Voice – How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness), people tend to hold trauma in their bodies. Our primitive brain puts us into “fight or flight” mode when we’re experiencing trauma. This biological tendency causes our bodies to be filled with hormones as we perceive a threat but our bodies hold onto that fear even after the threat is gone. It also means we don’t process the event properly and get “stuck”.
That’s where mindful practices such as yoga can help. According to Dr. Levine, through movement, the trauma can eventually be released from the nervous system. Many yoga teachers now regularly use trauma-informed language and techniques when teaching yoga classes. This includes invitational language (i.e. “you are invited to come to a seat…”) and many variations offered in the poses. Even the word “variation” is important instead of “modification” so that everyone feels included. The goal of this trauma-informed approach is to make sure everyone feels welcome and safe in the yoga space. More importantly, they feel like they have complete control of their own bodies and can make decisions for themselves.
Here are some of the ways that mindful yoga practices can help people more through their traumatic experiences. Mindful practices:
Help to improve the mind-body connection. We still tend to think of the two as separate and it’s important to realize that they are intricately connected. You may know something in your mind but your body doesn’t quite believe it yet. The integration of the two is necessary for healing.
Bring you to the present moment. When we experience a traumatic event we tend to relive it over and over. Through mindful practices we are encouraged to stay in the present and develop interoceptive awareness to help in noticing bodily sensations. This happens by focusing on the breath and grounding practices.
Help you to realize that you are in control. When we experience trauma there’s a feeling of lack of control over the situation and a feeling of powerlessness. Mindful practices help people build up their self-confidence and feeling of self-control.
The next time your body goes into “fight or flight” mode, I invite you to pause for a few minutes and engage in a grounding exercise. This can include yoga poses such as standing in mountain pose (tadasana), coming into a forward fold (uttanasansa), meeting the ground in child’s pose (balasana) or knees to chest (apanasana), or moving into complete relaxation in corpse pose (savasana). While you’re in one of those poses (or while you move through all five), I also invite you to connect to your breath. You can try to lengthen your breath or simply breathe naturally. You can have your eyes open or closed. If they’re open, then it may be helpful to scan the room you’re in and notice the colours, shapes, and sounds all around you.
Reference:
There are many resources and websites to explore if you are interested in trauma research or somatic experiencing.
For further information on somatic experiencing, I highly recommend the following book: In an Unspoken Voice – How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness by Peter A. Levine, Ph.D.
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