Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body

Treating Traumatic Stress in Children and Adolescents, authors Blaustein and Kinniburgh note, The experience of trauma is complex. Trauma varies in type, source, chronicity, and impact; it is experienced at different developmental stages, within different contexts—family, community, and culture—and in the presence or absence of different internal a

The common denominator of all of these traumatic experiences is that they involve some sort of threat to our physical, emotional, and/or psychological safety. Describing the impact of trauma is difficult because it is so dependent on the individual’s subjective experience.

As a consequence, adults often mistakenly assume that a child who has been exposed to trauma has escaped unscathed because he or she does not initially exhibit overt symptoms of distress or impairment.

The goal of treatment of PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] is to help people live in the present, without feeling or behaving according to irrelevant demands belonging to the past. BESSEL A. VAN DER KOLK

Yoga is part of the overall healing process. Being able to find the words that allow you to know what happened, and being able to place the memory in space and time, liberates a person from the tyranny of having to relive the trauma in the present. But only if the past can be remembered without the body being forced to relive what happened can one

Somatic experiencing, with an intuitive knowledge that there is a natural flow in and out of emotions, opens up an appetite for even deeper experiencing.

visceral experience of mastery, involving emotions and sensations, provides new resources, energy, and the capacity to take effective action.

sense of mastery.

change depends on the capacity to experience emotions directly and deeply. If our access to core experience is blocked or distorted, we are unable to deal with our most vital psychological processes.