My personal Trauma-sensitive Yoga journey

I feel uneasy about sharing my own trauma-sensitive yoga journey because I am very aware that people are different and the way we respond to yoga can be dramatically different. Your trauma experience is not the same as mine and so is our healing journey. I need you to be aware that everyone is experiencing their own truth here and what I share is mine, but it doesn’t have to mean anything to you.

I will share my experience with you because I have learned from others and it has helped me to know that I am not alone, how they cope, their do’s and don’ts. Especially since I practice trauma-sensitive yoga alone and at home this has been valuable.

 

Yoga Journey

I have been practicing trauma-sensitive yoga since 2014 when I first got in touch with the concept of mindfulness yoga. What I am doing today looks different from what I did at the beginning. I adapted my practice to match my needs and challenges over time. Yoga can help in every phase of therapy, but your practice has to change with you.

 

The Beginning

When I first started practicing yoga I had difficulties to feel my body at all. My legs vanished from my awareness regularly and for long periods of time. I was barely aware of my torso and my hip region didn’t even exist in my experience. Oftentimes I felt like I was only eyes (and sometimes hands).

I started yoga as a mindfulness practice with a very limited number of poses that were all static and close to the floor. I moved into a pose as best as I could, then tried to feel the place where it stretched a muscle. In this I learned how to stay with a single body part without dissociating the experience. When that was possible I tried to „breathe into“ the stretch to intensify the experience a little. I kept it close to the floor because my body awareness was so low that I was often scared of falling and I felt more grounded with a lot of surface contact with the floor.

While this might sound easy it is not. It is a great challenge when you are phobic of your body.

Poses I used at that time were

• tabletop,
• cat (Marjaryasana) (&cow/Bitilasana, but that is more like an opening pose),
• childs pose (Balasana) ,
• torso twists (Matsyendrasana)
• modified pigeon pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana) ,
• knee to chest, (Apanasana)
• glute stretch,
• sitting forward fold (Paschimottanasana)
• stick pose (Dandasana)
• low lunge (Anjaneyasana),
• head to knee forward bend (Janu Sirsasana)

 

Later I added opening poses like

• cobra (Bhujangasan) ,
• camel (Ustrasana) ,
• fish (Matsyasana) ,
• bridge (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) ,
• cobblers pose ((Supta) Baddha Konasana) or
• side angle (Parsvakonasana).

Opening poses add another difficulty level because they make us leave our protective postures and it can feel very vulnerable to open these places. The experience that nothing bad happens when I do this has been very healing.

I ended every session with corpse pose (Savasana), a chance to relax the body completely, let the floor carry me and be grounded. Relaxation can be challenging and not feel safe at all. It still challenges me after 4 years, because it means not being hypervigilant for a while.

Poses I didn’t even try at that point were all poses that predictably triggered, like downward dog, halfway forward fold, happy baby, puppy or bow pose. Trauma-sensitive yoga is not supposed to be a trigger party, it needs time to approach more difficult poses. It is not wise to start there. I also avoided some poses that drew the focus to the hip region (for me that included warrior (Virabhadrasana I) because I was not ready to feel that.

 

Growing up

So far I had mostly practiced sitting or lying. Next I implemented standing poses and I struggled with it a lot. Even just mountain pose (Tadasana) left me gasping for air and I couldn’t do it for very long. I learned not to judge myself. Mountain pose is basically mindfully standing upright. I could shame myself for struggling or I could stick with my experience and just be there in the moment. To this day I am not sure why the standing poses were so difficult. My best guess is that they need more awareness of the whole body instead of just focussing on one part experiencing a stretch. The idea of „finding places to lift and places to ground“ has helped me here. I learned how to stay with my whole body all at the same time and find my center. Being centered is too hard for me to explain, but it matters a lot in many standing poses.

Poses I added at this time were

• mountain,
• warrior,
• triangle (Trikonasana) ,
• standing forward fold (Padangusthasana) ,
• tree (Vrksasana) ,
• chair(Utkatasana),
• high lunge

My struggles with the breath led me to explore connecting the breath with my movements and be more mindful about breathing in general.

 

Learning to flow

I started to understand that there is rhythm in yoga and that I can move in sync with my body and breath. With a growing awareness of my breathing I realized that the transitions from one pose to another are not empty, they are yoga as well and can be experienced mindfully. My yoga routine was less and less static and became more fluid, moving from one pose to the next and understanding them as one flow. It helped me to overcome some of my compartmentalizing that I was used to because of dissociation and challenged me to be more present for longer periods of time instead of turning awareness off during a transition. This had great effects on my every day life and my ability to move from one task to another and stay present while I did my chores.

I started to use sequences of yoga poses like the sun salute (Surya Namaskar), that is tightly connected to the breath and it is one of the things I do now when I get triggered and need to calm myself. Yoga started to become a tool for relaxation and calm instead of a struggle. At this point I felt safe enough to add downward dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) and halfway forward fold (Uttanasana) to my practice.

 

Advanced

I got really good at staying with my body even when it feels slightly uncomfortable and I found some security in the yoga poses I had managed so far. The new sense of safety in my body and the sense of agency that developed over time made it possible for me to start exploring yoga poses and trying new poses and variations. I knew that I could stop any time and it felt like an adventure to try new things. The first time I actually managed to do crow pose (Bakasana) I sat there, laughing for minutes, proud and totally amazed that I had really done it, even if it was just a few seconds. By now yoga showed a real effect on my self-esteem.

I carefully and with great gentleness started to explore the poses that were difficult because of their triggering potential. I knew that I had to stay present and oriented, but I dared to try happy baby (Ananda Balasana), puppy (Shishosana) and eventually even bow pose (Dhanurasana) . It was not comfortable, but it was also not dangerous. Nothing bad happened. I kept practicing whenever it felt like a good time and the poses got easier to manage. I can now do happy baby and puppy without negative feelings. I am still practicing the bow. This is almost like phase 2 work, exposure to trauma-related poses. It is definitely not for beginners.

I am now sometimes closing my eyes during certain poses. I am also more aware of tensing up, so I can change it and learn to move with ease. This is very advanced for someone with a lot of hypervigilance.

 

About triggers

I always made sure to be oriented in time and space before starting with yoga. I personally experienced almost no full flashbacks. There were some sensory flashbacks when the body remembered. I found it best to breathe deeply and focus on grounding when that happened. It didn’t last very long. I also experienced a release of emotion that was „stuck“ in the constant physical tension. People who practice yoga (and not just traumatized people!) sometimes experience that they start to weep without knowing why. This has happened to me a couple of times and the experience was rather freeing. Yoga often helps me to be more in touch with emotions I usually dissociate.

 

 

Yoga with a dissociative system

So far we had not practiced yoga as a system, the ANPs had taken turns. With increasing co-consciousness other parts got interested as well and we started a co-con yoga practice, of one EP joining us by trying to feel the body while we go through the movements and the ANP not losing them by moving too fast. It means not only staying with our body but also staying together while doing so. It adds another depth to the experience and it might mean returning to the very beginning, to try to be together in one pose, with one body part, before doing anything more advanced. Over time maybe more parts can join in. We have noticed that it is hard to do balancing poses like tree, dancer (Natarajasana) or warrior III (Virabhadrasana III) when co-conscious parts are distracted and busy with something else. To balance well we need to move in unison with our breath and our parts, we need to be centered as a system. To improve our co-conscious yoga practice we start it with mindfulness meditation in a cross legged seat, where we connect using the breath (pranayama). This was when we started to learn different breathing techniques used in yoga. We find a strong stress relief in conqueror breath (Ujjayi pranajama) and manage gentle breath retention (Kumbhaka Pranayama) and cleansing breath (Nadi Shodhana Pranayama) while skull shining breath (Kapalabhati Pranayama) leads to hyperarousal and we don’t use it at all. Even just moving into this posture (Sukhasana) while breathing mindfully is now helping us to re-connect with each other, like a conditioned posture.

Yoga can be translated as „connecting“ or „uniting“. It helps us not just to be more integrated with our physical experience but also as a system.

 

I hope that this can give you an idea of where you are at and how to approach trauma-sensitive yoga for yourself. Please take good care of yourself and find what feels good for you. Your yoga journey might look different, you might even find that yoga is not for you. If that is the case you can look into other options for body work.

Please remember that this journey has taken us 4 1/2 years of practice. Yoga needs time to do its thing in trauma healing. It can’t be rushed.

 

I am here to answer questions. Just leave them in the comments below.

 

 

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