Creating safe as possible spaces is at the heart of trauma-sensitive yoga trainings and all my teachings.
It’s something teachers, coaches, and facilitators of all activities and teams, including in the workplace should learn how to do. The beautiful thing is that workplace, school, sports and yoga classes, and events can be made exceedingly safer by implementing even a few of the skills I and other trauma sensitivity trainers teach.
Many people misunderstand these safer spaces as providing a way for people to avoid their fears and yet, it is actually the opposite. It’s by entering safe as possible spaces that trauma survivors are able to relax enough to expose themselves to stress-inducing situations and work through them.
The safest and most effective way for a trauma survivor to do this is at their own pace. Just like in exposure or desensitizing therapies, they must have the tools to consciously relax the body once the sympathetic nervous system response is activated. They can do this immediately using the breathing and relaxation techniques taught in yoga and later increase the amount of time they allow themselves to be stressed until the body gets used to it and no longer becomes dysregulated in the position. It’s a practice and an important one that has resoundingly positive ramifications off the mat in real life.
This is the same in any environment, including the workplace, sports teams, or school. However, this is only consistently only possible if the student, player, or practitioner is in charge of how much they expose themselves to the stress and only if they have a coach, teacher, etc whom they trust and who can help them through the process. Only in the case of a licensed and very skilled exposure therapist does this rule change. As most of us aren’t that, we need to step back on the pushing and adopt a stance where the practitioner leads and we celebrate their pace. They will grow at their pace. This is not something we need to worry about. We need to worry about the safety side.
Exposure is all around us. Safe spaces are not.
See my upcoming trainings and workshops to delve more into this and more aspects of trauma sensitivity in yoga and in the workplace.
I first started working with Besty Polatin when she was my Alexander teacher at Boston University where I was studying Theater.
Alexander Technique was one of the solid handful of body-based models I strongly attached to during my time at University and which pulled me in the direction of body-mind healing as a profession and core interest in my life.
Besty’s interpretation of the Alexander Technique and emphasis on doing less caused me to look at my life in a new way. I started questioning the busy work I was hiding behind and began focusing on actions that birthed larger results and left more space in my life. I also began to realize where I wasn’t taking responsibility in my life and shift that dynamic.
To this day I do Alexander Technique exercises and use the guiding principle of doing less in my yoga poses and classes. I will often ask my students what tensions they can eliminate while still keeping the shape of the yoga pose.
What I didn’t know during my Boston University years was that Betsy Polatin’s body of work contained so many more modalities and eventually culminated in her own framework which she describes in her book Humanual. Betsy uses breathwork, centering, somatics, and other techniques all with trauma sensitivity. Her fresh and impactful look at trauma and the artist has made her a go-to for all kinds of artists and performers seeking to get unblocked and fully express themselves. She even has a course on trauma and the artist with Somatic Experiencing founder, Peter Levine.
Betsy and I discuss all of this in the latest episode of the Beyond Trauma Podcast and conclude one thing is certain: Bodywork isn’t about the body at all. It is human work, capable of releasing all types of trauma.
I was honored last week to speak on Adam Keen’s Yoga and Mental Health panel with many esteemed colleagues including Eddie Stern, Shanna Small, and Gregor Maehle. Each of us were asked to speak on a specific topic. The question I was asked to address was the role of touch in yoga and if it could be therapeutic. Below are some of my thoughts on this very sensitive topic. As you will see I decided to focus not directly on that question but on the topic of touch and boundaries and their origin to give folks more of a context and the information they can use to make their own decision.
Where does our sense of boundaries come from?
Our first sense in the embryo is the sense of touch. It begins at our nose tip and grows throughout our largest organ, our skin. Soon we begin to move around inside the womb. It’s there that we first discover the sense of what is me and what is outside of me. Later, when we are little and begin to crawl, we experiment with boundaries by moving away from and back to our primary attachment figure, a figure so important to our development.
The primary attachment figure provides us with essential eye contact, appropriate reactions, and… you know it… touch. Touch is so necessary that we can not grow or heal without it. With it, our colds go away faster and we are generally happier. During the conference, I shared my personal stories of experiencing touch deprivation during my first year of college and again during the pandemic. What can I say… I’m a hugger!
Touch is wonderful and necessary, however, there are some real questions as to whether it can be totally consensual in a yoga classroom setting where it’s hard to argue that there isn’t some power imbalance, no matter what the teacher does to try to even that out, and a desire on the student’s part to please their instructor. Also, when it comes to the powerful physical adjustments often associated with Ashtanga Yoga, they are clearly designed to push us past our body’s natural and necessary boundaries which is problematic, especially from a trauma sensitivity framework.
Trauma survivors, in particular, have many issues around safe boundaries since those were often violated during the traumatic event or events. In addition, the trauma response inhibits the prefrontal cortex which is the part of the brain that regulates our social relationships, signaling what is appropriate and inappropriate. The fogging of this part of the brain can cause survivors to have very leaky and confusing boundaries. This is further magnified by the very frequent trauma response instinct to try to recreate the conditions of the traumatic event in order to respond to them differently. This, in addition to a common trauma survivor feeling that one’s life isn’t really theirs (disassociation), leads to unskillful boundaries and unnecessary risks.
Awareness of this phenomenon and the fact that almost everyone who walks into a yoga room is likely dealing with some kind of trauma or traumatic stress should make yoga teachers more, not less respectful of their student’s boundaries. Instead of pushing yoga practitioners past them with intense adjustments such as the ones we commonly see in the Ashtanga Yoga practice, instructors should validate, support, and celebrate boundaries and encourage their students to work at their edge and even back away from that edge to self-regulate as necessary. As Eddie Stern mentioned in his comments following my observations, a simple touch on the shoulder or hand on the back is enough to move prana and signal support. This is the kind of touch we should be considering as we hold space for our yoga students.
The subject of trauma sensitivity in yoga has been at the core of my work for the last twenty years and is summarized in my forthcoming book, The
As a trauma-informed yoga teacher trainer and trauma sensitivity trainer, you would think that I would know and have expertise in every type of trauma.
That, however, is not the case. Definitions of trauma keep evolving and expanding to include survivors yearning to get their voices heard, and it is deeply important that we listen. It’s how a trauma survivor frames their story that is important and that needs to be acknowledged and believed.
Thenmozhi Soundararajan opened my eyes to the trauma of caste. Though I have spent years in India and was very aware of caste oppression, it wasn’t until her telling of it, that my understanding deepened into a bodily knowing of how traumatic the experience of being caste oppressed is and how much it still very much exists both in east Asia and here in the United States.
Caste oppression also involves religious oppression. It is taught in religious texts that certain castes are not allowed to read, speak or listen to. They are deprived of religion and taught it is due to their karma leaving many wondering what horrible thing they did in their past life. It is cruel and it must be acknowledged and stopped.
I am so grateful to activist and artist, Thenmozhi Soundararajan for sitting down with me to discuss the important topics of caste and religious trauma and how some of us are perpetuating this in yoga spaces even as we are trying to respect Indian culture.
Take a listen HERE and please don’t forget to rate and review!
Trauma Sensitivity Training
for
Companies and Schools
Pre-covid, we know that over 70% of the US population had survived some form of trauma. Since the pandemic, those numbers have only risen. Trauma survivors and folks dealing with traumatic stress are in every room. They don’t wear signs, and they might not tell us. It is our job in corporate, school, or other shared settings to be aware of the hidden trauma that is in every room and to educate ourselves so that we don’t unintentionally do harm.
You can improve your skills by learning about trauma and implementing some simple, tangible techniques for creating safer spaces for your team and the folks you serve.
Half and Full-Day Trauma-Sensitivity Workshops are available both in person and virtually.
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Trauma Sensitivity Training for Companies and Schools
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