Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body

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

late body psychotherapist Thomas Hanna said in The Body of Life, We cannot hate or be angry without an organism that hates and is angry. We cannot love and hope and expect without actively, movingly, physiologically loving and hoping and expecting. Hate, anger, love, and hope are not “psychological states,” existing in some “mental” vacuum; they ar

Yoga is part of an ancient system meant precisely to address human

heart rate variability (HRV).

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.

However, reliving trauma-related sensations does not occur only in response to input from our surroundings; it also is triggered by sensations deep within our own bodies: the sensory experiences that are evoked by feeling angry, sexually aroused, or having your period; by feeling tender toward somebody; or by the sensations that accompany feeling r

could predispose these women to develop autoimmune illnesses.

assaults can cause a disintegration of people’s self-protective capacities.

Many traumatized people learn that self-injury such as cutting can make these sensations go away. Others race motorcycles or engage in other high-risk activities, like prostitution or gambling, which they say gives them a sense of control or provides relief by giving them an emotional “