In yoga studios around the world, millions of people are stretching, breathing, and practicing stress reduction. Some of them may also be finding support in recovering from difficult or traumatic events. Yoga traditions reach back thousands of years and have long worked with emotions and the body together. Many yoga students already use yoga alongside treatment for depression, anxiety, other mood disorders, and difficult life transitions, and researchers are now studying whether yoga can support recovery from trauma. More research is needed, and yoga is best seen as a complement to professional care, not a replacement for it.
Mindfulness, the ability to be present in the moment, is one of the central aims of classical yoga. Many trauma therapies also work toward helping people feel safe in the present, since traumatic events often take away the ability to find moments of peace. Mindfulness practices, especially movement practices like yoga, may support the trauma recovery process for some people, ideally alongside a therapist or doctor. Because meditation and movement can also stir up difficult sensations, it helps to go gently and, if you have a history of trauma, to practice with a trauma-informed teacher.
“What does seem clear is that talk therapy alone will not reinvigorate many parts of the brain that are damaged by trauma.”
Dave Emerson
Mindful Hub had a conversation with Dave Emerson, Coordinator of the Yoga Services Program at the Trauma Center, part of the Justice Resource Institute in Boston, MA, to better understand the link between yoga, mindfulness, and trauma. At the time, Dave worked with veterans, refugees, and survivors of domestic violence, using yoga as part of trauma treatment. Here’s what Dave said about the program:
“The program started in 2003. From the beginning, our classes for people with PTSD have been studied. That is, there has always been an empirical component to what we do – from subjective data (self-reports) to objective data associated with PTSD (Heart Rate Variability and, now, brain scans!). Though there is plenty yet to learn, we are at the point where we feel justified calling trauma-sensitive yoga an adjunct treatment for trauma and PTSD.”
“Our model has two primary components: first and foremost, doing what we can to make yoga ‘safe’ for our students. Trauma takes a tremendous toll on our body: from chronic pain and ‘un-ease’ to a deeply damaged sense of ourself in the world (that feeling that ‘I exist’ and ‘I am here, right now’ and ‘my body is a safe place’ – all deeply damaged by complex trauma). We need to do a lot of work in order to make it safe for people to ‘experiment’ with having a body again and we focus a good bit of our attention in this realm.”
‘I was able to move my body and be in my body in a safe place and without hurting myself or getting hurt’
Trauma-sensitive yoga participant
“The second component is teaching yoga in a way that is most conducive to healing from PTSD and this involves an understanding of neurophysiology. Luckily, we have a neurophysiologist on the team – Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. His work focuses largely on how the brain is impacted by trauma and finding the best ways to heal those impacted areas. It turns out yoga might be one of the best ways to heal the traumatized brain – although we still have a lot to learn. What does seem clear is that talk therapy alone will not reinvigorate many parts of the brain that are damaged by trauma especially those that allow us to sense and feel ourselves as living beings located in time and space. For this we need to ‘do’ something. To experience our bodies moving through space and to be able to notice and interact with sensations rather than being imprisoned or ‘hijacked’ by them.”
Here, three students describe their experience with the program’s 10-week study protocol of trauma-sensitive yoga. These are individual accounts, and experiences vary:
“[I] had been doing individual therapy so long and unblocking came during the study. Now I can access feelings and not feel overwhelmed. [They are] actually in control and manageable.”
“Moving around, I started feeling things in my body that don’t have a to be negative.”
“I was able to move my body and be in my body in a safe place and without hurting myself or getting hurt.”
To learn more about trauma-sensitive yoga, take a look at the book Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body by David Emerson and Elizabeth Hopper.
The Trauma Center’s yoga program is now offered as Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY). For more information, visit traumasensitiveyoga.com.
Interested in becoming a trauma-sensitive yoga teacher? Take a look at the facilitator trainings listed at traumasensitiveyoga.com.
