Reconnecting with Your Body: The Power of Trauma-Informed Yoga

by GGC Clinician Sumiaya Caughey

  Trauma is likely something we will all encounter to some extent throughout our lives. Unless we find a way to acknowledge, reconcile and work through the trauma we experience, it has the potential to reside in our bodies and minds, long after the events occurred. Trauma that is unresolved can come out in various ways, manifesting as physical tension, emotional distress, or behavioral patterns that may feel difficult to control, often hindering our ability to live fully in the present. While traditional psychotherapy is a powerful tool in healing from trauma, trauma-informed yoga is an impactful complimentary approach to learn how to safely reconnect with the body in a supportive environment.  

Yoga is extremely popular and accessible in our culture today. While the practice of yoga has many mind and body benefits, for those that carry unresolved trauma, some aspects of modern yoga may be contra-indicated. Some of those contra-indications could include: certain types of expansive breathwork practices, over emphasis on the physical postures, pushing of boundaries, and connecting internally too quickly. This brings up the importance of finding a yoga practice that is tailored to consider the needs of trauma survivors. 

Trauma-informed yoga differs from a traditional modern yoga practice in a number of ways. Here are some ways that trauma-informed yoga is unique: 

• Freedom of Choice: In situations of trauma, we often feel powerless. Therefore, providing a sense of empowerment is key in trauma-informed yoga. You have agency over your practice and your body. You are encouraged to make decisions that are based on your unique boundaries and needs in the present moment. 

• Invitational Language: Instructions are given in a manner that encourages you to choose the right level and type of engagement, listening to the needs of your body. There is no pressure to push beyond your personal limits or comfort and each individual is encouraged to go at their own pace.

• Gentle and Grounding Movements: The postures we practice in trauma-informed are calming and restorative, to help reconnect to the body in a way that feels safe. This type of relationship with the body helps to re-establish trust. 

• Mindfulness: Through mindfulness, in trauma-informed yoga, we gently shift focus to cues of safety in the environment in the present moment. This allows us to anchor into the security of the present moment, continuously coming back to those safety cues when we start to feel overwhelm or hyperarousal. 

• Breath Awareness: We work to have awareness and shape the breath to encourage regulation in the nervous system in trauma-informed yoga. This helps resolve the hyperarousal that happens in the nervous system when trauma symptoms are present. 

• Titrating Focus on Body Awareness: Sometimes focusing too much on the body experience can be overwhelming and over-ride the nervous system in individuals who have trauma symptoms. Therefore, in trauma-informed yoga we very slowly and intentionally cultivate an awareness of what the body is experiencing while at the same time noticing the safety in the current environment. This slow titration allows us to be able to better tolerate and eventually find peace in the inner experience. 

• Judgement Free Environment: There is no perfect shape to a pose or right way to do something in trauma-informed yoga. The practice is an invitation to explore movement and breath in a way that feels right in your body. There is no prerequisite, no right body type, or right way to practice trauma-informed yoga, it is about you finding what is right for you. 

How Trauma-Informed Yoga Can Help with Healing 

Trauma-informed yoga can provide a compassionate and gentle approach to help heal from the deep patterns of trauma that live within the body and mind. Here are some of the ways trauma-informed yoga can help you heal: 

• Re-pattern Your Nervous System: Yoga is a practice, we do it again and again, and through that repetition we re-pattern the nervous system. We learn to tolerate discomfort without dissociating or becoming hypervigilant (the fight, flight, freeze response). Our old patterns change, we learn to be with our experiences and don’t have to be reactive. Working through titration, touching into discomfort just little by little, we find new responses. 

• Improve the Connection Between the Mind & Body: Through practice, we develop a deeper understanding of our physical and mental responses, promoting self-compassion and resilience.  In traumatic events, we may need to dissociate and disconnect from the body to survive, this disrupts that attunement between mind and body. Through trauma-informed yoga we can restore that communication. 

• Reduces Stress & Anxiety: Postures, breath work and meditation are all aspects of trauma-informed yoga that activate the parasympathetic nervous system, and specifically the Vagus nerve, which manages the body’s stress response. When the parasympathetic nervous system is activated, it promotes relaxation and calm.  

• Cultivates a Sense of Empowerment: Power and control is often compromised by the experience of trauma. Therefore, through the practice of trauma-informed yoga, we can reclaim power by having choice, agency, and finding strength in our bodies and minds that we may not have had awareness around previously. 

Final Thoughts

If you’ve experienced trauma and are looking for a way to reconnect with your body and your sense of safety, trauma-informed yoga might be an important part of your healing journey. Trauma-informed yoga fosters choice, compassion, and empowerment.  It helps you reconnect with your body, restore emotional balance, and build resilience.  What you do on your yoga mats exists in your body, the more you practice, the more your body becomes familiar with what safety feels like and the more likely you can access that when needed off your yoga mat.