Working with Veterans

Working with Veterans

Many of you have likely heard about trauma sensitive yoga by now. You may even have read books on it such as The Body Keeps the Score, Waking the Tiger, and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Perhaps you’ve pre-ordered my book, The Essential Guide to Trauma Sensitive Yoga. I hope you have. Yoga for trauma studies are getting more and more popular and more information is getting out there during this time when more folks than ever are identifying as having survived trauma or traumatic stress.

This is a change from the earliest studies we had which were largely from veterans. Most of the earliest trauma sensitive yoga programs were for veterans diagnosed with PTSD. Those programs proved again and again the power of trauma sensitive yoga to reverse the impacts of trauma, restore the nervous system and give folks a chance to change their response to traumatic stress.

No one knows that better than the next guest of the Beyond Trauma Podcast. Pamela Stokes Eggleston has been sharing yoga years with Veterans suffering from PTSD or traumatic stress and their families. She was inspired to focus on this demographic after her own husband returned injured from service and she needed to learn how to live with that. The vicarious trauma she experienced from living with someone with PTSD also had to be addressed. Pam was able to address it with yoga and yoga related practices and one thing she was especially able to treat is sleep. This is deeply important because sleep is always disturbed with trauma and sleep disturbance makes the impacts of trauma more severe.

Take a listen to Pam on the Beyond Trauma Podcast to learn more about yoga for veterans and how she is improving their sleep and hers with some special practices.

If this resonates with you, you may want to consider a trauma sensitive yoga training. I’m offering both an online trauma sensitive yoga training (this weekend) and in many person trainings in the coming year including the weekend of June 30th at Kripalu in Massachusetts (which will be listed next week) and the weekend of August 18th at Miami Life Center, in Florida. More to be listed soon!

little t trauma

little t trauma

When we think of trauma our minds usually go to a single traumatic event like a crash or natural disaster, but traumatic stress actually goes way beyond this limited definition. There are medical traumas, trauma produced when we witness a violence and can’t act, and there is the trauma of lack when needs are not met, especially in childhood.

In some ways, we are more likely to get the care we require after a single traumatic event than when an ongoing disempowerment is taking place. Ongoing traumas are often hidden or when they are exposed, minimalized in deeply unhelpful ways. 

A traumatic response in our systems may occur anytime we are unable to act, get away, or metabolize the traumatic event and instead must hold in the tension of the flight or fight we desire to enact so deeply as our evolutionary response. This happens regularly to folks who experience racial trauma and it stresses the body to levels which often produce negative health outcomes.

Many of us will have experienced traumatic stress from covid and our inability to flee or be together in ways that we are so drawn to when fighting a common enemy. Even if we weren’t in the worst of situations when covid hit, it’s important not to minimize the impact that delayed response has had on our bodies.

Making sure to check in with yourself and if possible with your patterns to get to know what might be lurking below the surface “I’m fine” is essential for making sure your trauma isn’t passed on to others. In some ways our self work is our basic responsibility and it’s the work my next Beyond Trauma podcast guest, Dr. Liz Cohen is so familiar with and good at. 

She explains so clearly why what we may be calling little t trauma is actually where some of our biggest challenges lurk and why we shouldn’t shrug off what we’ve all just been through with covid even if we feel as if it is over. 

Take a listen on itunes or spotify and as always, please subscribe, rate, and review and comment here with your thoughts!