The Body Remembers: Resolving trauma through yoga
It is more common than we think that people with a significant degree of trauma will turn to yoga for healing and even more common for trauma survivors to turn to strong and disciplined physical practices. Unfortunately, most yoga teachers and most students aren’t fully aware of how to support themselves and others in the process of unravelling the complexity of the trauma in a safe way. Students walk in and out of yoga classes everyday without sharing their feedback with teachers. So, sometimes, as teachers, we simply don’t notice or know that a student may have just walked out of class feeling exposed, raw, vulnerable, and confused about how a practice that has a potential for healing has just surfaced the very adverse emotional state that he or she has spent so much time suppressing and masking. Or sometimes, the immediate feeling after a class is a lifted energy. The adverse emotional state may surface a few hours later,...