Last night I had the good fortune to attend Yoga Outreach’s Trauma Sensitive Yoga Training. This class is for volunteer teachers who teach through the Yoga Outreach program, but also for any teachers or workers who want to learn more about supporting clients who have been affected by trauma.
The Georgia Straight published a great article on how Yoga Outreach is helping people who have experienced trauma in their lives. Not surprisingly, many of these people are in the populations that Yoga Outreach serves: people in prison, people with addictions, people with mental health issues, women who are leaving abusive relationships, and so on. Many of the people in the class last night work directly with clients who deal with these issues, and I think it is evident that trauma has a big part to play in addiction and harmful behaviour. It would be great to get at the root cause of violence, abuse, and addiction in our culture. Working with people who suffer from the results is one way to step into the cycle and help people choose a different response.
Yoga provides a way of overcoming the deeply ingrained physical impacts of trauma (which evidence shows is hard-wired into the nervous system if it cannot be released effectively at the time of the traumatic incident). People become trapped in repeating the physical and emotional response to the traumatic situation (elevated heart rate, fear of danger in the present, difficulty trusting others), and the impact of the trauma shapes their world view. Yoga can help by gently re-learning to inhabit the body as a safe place, using breath, grounding, and movement to experience calmness, inner strength, and self-control.
Research has accumulated over the last decade or so to provide evidence of the benefits of yoga in many healing situations, and particularly in healing trauma. A great book on this subject is Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body, by David Emerson and Elizabeth Hopper, with an introduction and foreward from yoga-trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk and pioneer PTSD researcher Peter Levine.
Part of the class included a sample yoga practice that demonstrated good practices for teaching trauma sensitive yoga. This includes using language that invites the participant to do their own exploration and offers plenty of choice points, so that the yoga practioner begins to trust in their own inner guidance and feels empowered to control their practice. These can be new behaviours for people who have experienced chronic abuse (which can lead to feelings of helplessness and lack of control), and can help them to develop a stronger self image as someone who has the power to make choices. The calming benefits of the yoga practice allow the new learnings to penetrate into the psyche, and breathing and body sensing practices give the participants skills that they can use in stressful situations.
I found that this orientation led to a very gentle practice, and filled my heart with the desire to bring the benefits of yoga to people who are suffering.
Thanks to my friends and family who have pledged 50 cents or a dollar or even two dollars a day for the 30-day Reach Out Challenge. The total pledges is now at $285 dollars! Almost at my goal of $300. If you haven’t done so and would like to sponsor me to raise money for Yoga Outreach, you can use the online donation link. Or phone me at 604.251.6337 or send an email to kyrempel [at] gmail [dot] com. Thanks!
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