heart rate variability (HRV). HRV had recently been discovered to be a good way to measure the integrity of one of the brain’s arousal systems, the one located in the oldest part of the brain: the brain stem.

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

tolerate visceral experience is indispensable in being able to change one’s fundamental approach to life.

Maybe the most difficult part of having been traumatized is dealing with the triggers that reside inside. The trauma is a thing of the past, but your body keeps reacting as if you still are in imminent danger. These internal triggers transform your inner world into a minefield. At least the trauma itself had a beginning, middle, and end, but these

Yogis discovered that there are two primary roots to physical suffering. One is craving and its many effects: greed, grasping, clinging, addiction. The other is aversion: fear, terror, hatred, avoidance, anger, resentment. Trauma is an aversive state par excellence—a hardwired, persistent aversive state. Yogis—practicing intensively over the course

traumatized women: we observed that during Savasana, the state of total relaxation at the end of a yoga session, their muscles continued to twitch, as if still fighting an unseen enemy. We saw this also in our immunology research, where the immune systems of incest victims were shown to be excessively activated, as if they were in acute danger of

Yoga became a major cornerstone in our understanding that it is imperative to befriend one’s bodily sensations to overcome the imprints of trauma.

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

I started to see it happening. I didn’t feel pain, and I didn’t feel too scared, but I noticed exactly what was happening, and some part of me accepted it as in “Yes, that happened.” Am I making any sense to you? In a strange way, this felt like movement forward, not backward.