Part I
Foundations
Understanding Trauma and Recovery
Introduction
The Evolution of a Field: Trauma-Informed Yoga
Begin Anywhere.
â John Cage
I arrived at Massachusetts Correctional Institution (MCI) Framingham, ready to teach yoga to a group of female offenders after months of logistical emails. Dressed simply with my hair tied back, I followed the correctional officer through the gates and entered a large visitation room, where the program participants would soon arrive. I was used to working with adolescents; instead, I had a group of shy children eager to see their mothers, and mothers awaiting a moment of connection with their daughters. The girls filed in first, then the women, quietly. I had expected more commotion. The correctional officer immediately directed everyoneâs attention towards me. âThis is Lisa and she is here to teach you yoga.â All 26 pairs of eyes, with mixed emotional expressions, rested on me.
A colleague recruited me to teach this class on behalf of the Girl Scouts Beyond Bars program; this was a motherâdaughter group with ages ranging from 6 to 60 â a unique population for a correctional facility. We stood in a circle as I led the group to move, breathe and explore different shapes. Perhaps because of the rare opportunity for these families to connect, everyone was on their best behavior. It was clear that the yoga practice was difficult for them, and I could see their faces cloud over with self-doubt when falling out of postures. I did my best to encourage them and to teach the yoga poses as experiences, rather than shapes to be perfected, and modeled this by stepping in and out of tree pose, myself. The clouds in a few eyes cleared.
The childrenâs presence magnified the vulnerability of the group: love and desire to connect filled the room, as did a pervasive feeling of sadness and longing. This was their family time: supervised in a locked facility, barely allowed to touch. Two generations stood before me, and while I was not in a place to read any case files, Iâd worked with the Department of Justice enough to know that these women and girls faced immense adversity, and could safely assume that most, if not all, were coping with the effects of neglect, abuse, and other forms of systemic, intergenerational, and personal trauma.
We didnât call it trauma-informed yoga then, but it was happening. Step by step, volunteers like me carried yoga practices into schools, prisons, mental health programs, and beyond. Soon classes became programs, programs became trainings, and research and books began to sprout about the topic. Itâs been a decade and a half since the class at MCI-Framingham and, as a field, weâve learned so much. This book serves to collect the wisdom of theory, research, and practice into a digestible guide for your work in the field of yoga and trauma recovery. Whether you are a yoga teacher, studio owner, or mental health clinician, this book will help you understand the connections between the fields of yoga and trauma treatment, and will guide you as you support your students and clients on a path of healing.
Yogaâs popularity has grown in recent years and, as classes like the one above become more commonplace, curiosity about how it plays a role in trauma recovery has increased in stride. In 2003, 15 million people were practicing yoga in the US, a number that blossomed to 36 million in 2016 (Yoga Alliance, 2016). Researchers estimate that for every one current teacher, there are two people interested in becoming one (Harris Interactive Service Bureau, 2003). As yogaâs popularity has grown, trauma-informed care has become a mental health phenomenon, and the collective understanding of post-traumatic stress has broadened and deepened. Over these past 15 years, professionals in the field of mental health have grown an increased appreciation for the need for physical and somatic work; simultaneously, yoga teachers have sought training on trauma in order to respond to studentsâ emotional experiences on the mat. These two fields have steadily come closer together as clinicians seek to bring yoga into treatment while yoga teachers, many with mental health backgrounds, teach classes like the one I offered at MCI-Framingham. This increasing overlap led to the rise of the integrative field of trauma-informed yoga (TIY). As the aphorism attributed to John Cage at this chapterâs opening encourages, teachers began where they were, and in doing so, created a movement of yoga, service, and trauma-responsive care.
As yoga studios have blossomed throughout the world, the term âtrauma-informedâ has nudged its way into article titles, nonprofit mission statements, and agency task forces. Iâve listened to many people, including friends and colleagues, with a superficial understanding of yoga and trauma-informed care question how they can connect. Of course, if you think of yoga as flexibility training and trauma as something that only happens to a limited number of suffering souls, you would not see the connection at first glance. How could being able to do the splits help someone recover from early childhood abuse? As a simple action, it canât; however, when we are fully informed in the theory, philosophy, and subtle teachings in each field, we come to understand how even a single posture can play a role in oneâs healing.
Thankfully, researchers, teachers, and clinicians continue to develop an understanding of the mechanisms of healing that yoga provides. As researchers and practitioners in the fields of yoga and trauma recovery continue to understand yogaâs healing components in more detail, we all can make increasingly well-informed choices. Important conversations about how to apply TIY are now happening in conference rooms, courts, and in makeshift yoga spaces in schools, jails, and disaster relief settings. As in any human relationship, in order to understand how these two disciplines connect, we must look to the depth of their organizing principles, belief systems, and goals, rather than rest on superficial observations. This book will walk you through some of the many decisions you can make to bring these two practices together in a thoughtful, educated, and purposeful manner.
Trauma Therapists Reach Toward Yoga Practice
While I was quite young, I had the opportunity to follow my mother, a psychologist with a gift for working with Dissociative Identity Disorder, to psychology conferences. I loved her colleagues; they were genuine, heartfelt, respectful, and good listeners. By the time I got to college, I began to join these professional organizations, and developed a network of friendships with fellow young professionals. My love for the process of trauma recovery and the people I worked with deepened and, yet, there remained a significant challenge: sitting all day in conference chairs was simply not an option for me. Itâs so uncomfortable! I became known as the person sitting on the floor in the back of the room in some form of a yoga posture. As we spoke of dissociation and disconnection, I wondered, âAre we dissociated from our bodies, or is my body stuck in a 6-year-old state?â My body screamed, âMovement! Dance! Anything!! Energy, vibrancy, please!â At psychology conferences, I yearned for more physical movement, more ability to respond to my own body and its need to not sit in a conference chair for five days straight. As you may have heard your yoga teacher say, sitting is quickly becoming the new smoking. Unless youâre sitting to meditate. So, the message becomes âStop sitting and move the body so you can sit and still your mind. Then you can move with more clarity and intention.â Oh, how complicating it all becomes!
I recall a conversation with a prominent psychologist at a conference in 2005. I explained that I taught yoga to youth with trauma; she paused, then offered,
At this point, if we are to use the motivational interviewing model of change, the mainstream mental health field was in either pre-contemplation or, as in the case of the psychologist above, the contemplation stage of change (DiClemente & Velasquez, 2002). Yoga was not a popular approach to trauma recovery and, yet, many clinicians had personal, or professional, stories that they felt comfortable sharing with me. At this time, yoga was still viewed primarily as either flexibility training, stress management, something people do in an ashram, or something people do in a spa. Perhaps you see it continuing to fit into these categories. In a number of conversations similar to the one above, I heard a mixture of curiosity, dismissiveness, ignorance, and interest, as our collective understanding of the therapeutic role of yoga in trauma recovery slowly deepened.
Over the following five years a fascinating shift occurred â more yoga teachers began appearing at the psychology conferences I frequented. At a conference in Montreal, hosted by the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) in 2011, I attended a session on creative visualizations for use with dissociative clients and found the instructor teaching in yoga language, using colors and images I had learned directly from my yoga teachers. I raised my hand and asked, in one part bold, one part timid fashion, âAre you using the chakras as a template for these visualizations?â âYes.â The instructor replied simply and directly, smiling. A simple affirmative response, but it felt like an opening, and the metacommunication I received was, âItâs okay to use yoga with clients.â I breathed a sigh of relief and connected with the presenter after class. Weâve since collaborated on conference presentations, webinars, and educational efforts to bring yoga and mindfulness practices to severely traumatized clients in a skilled and educated manner. The presenter was Christine Forner, who is now president of the ISSTD. She also happens to be a warm, hilarious, heartfelt human being. That presentation remains a turning point in my mind, a moment where the cultural shift moved beyond contemplation and preparation to the action stage: yoga was appearing on the scene.
I witnessed as the culture of mental health and trauma conferences continued to evolve to include morning yoga, more yoga practitioners on the floor or doing gentle dynamic movement in the back of the room with me, dance parties in the evenings and (sometimes) more comfortable chairs. During the same time frame, the culture evolved from accepting yoga, but rejecting my proposals to speak about it, first to accepting speakers like me who teach about yoga, and then to inviting keynotes and day long intensives about the topic. In fact, Iâve just returned from teaching an in-depth post-conference session on yoga, vicarious trauma, and self-care, where we explored how therapists can incorporate movement practices into their own healing and growth. The progression continues.
Yogis Reach Toward Trauma Theory
Although psychology conferences lacked movement, the opposite was true of yoga conferences. True to the pace and values of western culture, at yoga conferences I would hop from session to session to bend, twist, sweat and move my body until it called uncle. I had a policy of registering for at least one restorative, meditative, or discussion-based practice each conference day, but the offerings in general were very dynamic and asana (posture)-centric. At these conferences, I yearned for more stillness, investigation, research, and theory.
It was also not unusual to have, or to witness, what some would call a healing crisis on the yoga mat â tears, shakes, upsetting memories, psychological projections onto the teacher or a nearby student, or struggles in connecting with the body. Yoga, like meditation, gives space for internal monologues, dialogues, and diatribes to come to the surface and into consciousness. Some teachers spoke to this; others did not. Some were able to catch mini-crises building and offer appropriate tools, preventing students from becoming overwhelmed or flooded. Others, though thoroughly trained in teaching asana, missed these opportunities to facilitate healing, or even worse, exacerbated the crises with misguided responses.
I discovered that the teachers who were catching the subtle psychological experiences were also developing an interest in trauma recovery. Through their own personal journeys with psychology, and through reading and training, they were developing new ways of communicating these very common human experiences to their students. Pop psychology is popular in yoga culture. As my own training in psychology gained depth, I developed an increasingly refined ear for helpful guidance, as compared to gross overgeneralizations and pithy clichés, and witnessed as well-intentioned phrases landed as invalidating at best, and infuriating at worst.
Some sayings that were meant to be helpful could be sharp, shame-inducing tools â âcrooked mind, crooked bodyâ comes to mind. Others served to create an air of purported wisdom around the teacher. I recall a highly-anticipated class I took with a world-renowned teacher. His comment, âSometimes fear keeps us alive â dramatic pause â but sometimes, it keeps us from living,â fell flat on my ears. The words are true in some contexts, but the oversimplified and dramatic delivery insulted the intelligence of the group. At the time, I was working with youth who lived in oppressive conditions and experienced constant fear of all kinds, and his words were targeted to situations where the people have the luxury of feeling physically safe. Fear of growth and fear of violence are not one and the same, and should not be called by the same name. Luckily, other teachers were more skillful in responding to trauma resurfacing on the mat; I even recruited some of them to teach at my favorite psychology conferences and in a program for juvenile offenders where I worked as a counselor. Moments such as these bridged gaps in care and brought yoga into the world of trauma recovery...