Yoga
‘Human beings are tender creatures. We are born with our hearts open. And sometimes open hearts encounter experiences that shatter us. Sometimes we encounter experiences that so violate our sense of safety, order predictability, and right, that we feel utterly overwhelmed – unable to integrate, and simply unable to go on as before. Unable to bear reality. We have come to call these shattering experiences trauma. None of us is immune to them’ (David Emerson, Overcoming Trauma Through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body)
Our sense of ourselves is anchored in our connection with our bodies and being aware of and able to interpret our physical sensations is vital in navigating safely through life. Many recent findings from various fields suggest that cultivating sensory awareness is a critical aspect of being present, and also, of recovering from trauma. However, these findings are not new ‘many different cultures have healing traditions that activate and utilize physical movement and breath, such as yoga, chi qong, tai chi, and other Asian and African traditions. However, in the West, approaches that involve working with sensation and movement have been fragmented and have remained outside the mainstream of medical and psychological teaching’ (Pat Ogden). Research has shown that trauma-informed yoga, for instance, is now considered an evidenced based intervention. Bessel van der Kolk and David Emerson founded the Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Program at the Trauma Center in 2002 and researched yoga practices in relation to chronic childhood abuse and neglect. It is now supported that practising yoga can, among other things, facilitate growth for those that have survived complex trauma.
Summarily, a Trauma Sensitive Yoga may differ from other yoga classes in that there is emphasis on creating a safe environment and then using invitational language rather than commands and the teacher is mostly committed to fostering personal exploration and experience. In brief, yoga like meditation foster our capacity to be present, and also, develop interoception, which is our ability to be aware of what is going on in our body. This kind of internal sensory awareness is also critical for healing from all sorts of traumas because in order to heal and take care of our body we need to be aware of what it needs. As I mentioned in the previous post Bessel van der Kolk (2014) writes ‘if you are not aware of what your body needs, you can’t take care of it……..This is why cultivating sensory awareness is such a critical aspect of trauma recovery. Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, in the contraction of the striated muscles of the face, throat, trunk, and limbs. Traumatized people need to learn that they can tolerate their sensations, befriend their inner experiences, and cultivate new action patterns’. In addition, trauma sensitive yoga provides opportunities to make choices, which is important for people, who have often been left without choice. In trauma-informed yoga people are provided with opportunities to choose what to do with their bodies in the moment. In the short videos at: https://www.traumasensitiveyoga.com/audiovideo.html, David Emerson demonstrates some exercises within a trauma sensitive yoga approach. Also, meditation and yoga help us understand that bodily sensations like emotions rise and fall, come and go and this decreases the sense of stuckness and helplessness. They help us build our emotional regulatory capacity, stay grounded and act and respond from a more mindful place. Bessel van der Kolk supports that yoga improves Heart Rate Variability (HRV). He explains that people with PTSD have very low HRV and yoga practice is shown to increase HRV, and thus, bring the systems towards balance which in turn improves the body’s overall response to stress. There is more on yoga and its regulatory and healing potential in an interview with Bessel van der Kolk at: http://www.traumacenter.org/clients/maginside.su09.p12-13.pdf.
This post on yoga and sensory awareness today has also sort of come about as a result of my recently re-engaging with yoga. This time the experience is somewhat different. – one reason being that I have been meditating daily for over four years. What is different or rather more intense this time round is my capacity to be more aware of internal signals and sensations while doing the poses and engaging with the breath. As a result traces of past physical traumas or health experiences easily become salient and deeper insights arise, a process that is completed while mediating after the yoga practice, and which feels like a wholesome integrative experience. I will provide an example to maybe describe the process better. Several years ago a health provider, introduced to me by one of my current yoga classmates, believed that massaging my left foot would alleviate the mild pressure I felt from the varicose veins on my left lower leg; however, instead of relief within about sixteen hours my left leg became so swollen it resembled and felt like a wooden log three times thicker than my leg. It got so bad that I had to be taken to the emergency room of the local hospital. Unable to find any organic causes, the people that saw me sort of left me to my own devices as to how I was going to resolve the problem. Over the next few months the swelling and the accompanying problems persisted, and only gradually, did my leg return to its previous size; meanwhile the state of my varicose veins had deteriorated. Many years prior to this. a hit and run accident had resulted in my breaking my left elbow, which had then taken many excruciatingly painful physiotherapy sessions to heal because it was not put in plaster during my visit to the emergency room that particular night, but only the following day. So, the left side of my body has caused me discomfort, and it also, seems to be more micro accident prone. While engaging with these body areas during yoga and then meditating at home this and other related lived experiences became salient and more clarity and a sense of some sort of physical release, as well as, release of stuck emotions, and integration seemed to take place. The experience was interesting because I was not processing or releasing discomfort that I was feeling in the present, but what I got to actually witness is that our body does keep the score and that there may be a residue of emotional material or cellular memories that we are not aware of, but still needs to be released or some further level of understanding that still needs to be attained.
References
Emerson, David, https://www.traumasensitiveyoga.com/audiovideo.html
Kolk, Bessel van der (2014), The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Yoga and the emotional brain /An interview with Bessel van der Kolk at: http://www.traumacenter.org/clients/maginside.su09.p12-13.pdf
Ogden, Pat; Pain, Clare; Minton, Kekuni (2006), Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy
(https://www.rickhanson.net/writings/just-one-thing/). He writes ‘abuse of power can be called many things, including intimidation, fraud, discrimination, and tyranny. I’ll use a term that’s down-to-earth and gets at our nature as social primates: bullying’. He goes on to say that bullies and bullying are common ‘from homes and schoolyards to boardrooms and presidential palaces, they create a vast amount of human suffering’. He describes bullies as ‘a) Dominating; b) Defensive – Never wrong; fault and scorn others; avoid personal responsibility; c) Deceptive – Manipulate grievances to gain support; blame scapegoats; cheat; hide truth since power is based on lies’. He writes deep down ‘the mind of a bully is like a hell realm of fended-off feelings of weakness and shame always threatening to invade’ so this suffering deserves our compassion. He also makes suggestions of how to deal with bullying at all levels from naming the bullying for what it is and confronting their lies and their denial of the harm they’re doing to confronting enablers that are complicit in bullying to engaging the legal system and so on. And finally, he reminds us to see the bigger picture and the fact that ‘bullying is enabled and fostered by underlying conditions’.
I hope to describe the process in some future post. Meanwhile, here’s a short extract from her book of the many un/conscious negative core beliefs that we often carry: ‘In this week, we will work at uncovering our negative beliefs and discarding them. Here is a list of commonly held negative beliefs: I can’t be a successful, prolific, creative artist because: Everyone will hate me. I will hurt my friends and family. I will go crazy. I will abandon my friends and family. I can’t spell. I don’t have good enough ideas. It will upset my mother and/or father. I will have to be alone. I will find out I am gay (if straight). I will be struck straight (if gay). I will do bad work and not know it and look like a fool. I will feel too angry. I will never have any real money. I will get self-destructive and drink, drug, or sex myself to death. I will get cancer, AIDS—or a heart attack or the plague. My lover will leave me. I will die. I will feel bad because I don’t deserve to be successful. I will have only one good piece of work in me. It’s too late. If I haven’t become a fully functioning artist yet, I never will. None of these core negatives need be true. They come to us from our parents, our religion, our culture, and our fearful friends. Each one of these beliefs reflects notions we have about what it means to be an artist’.