trauma-informed yoga: the how and why it helps for people with trauma or chronic stress

Trauma results from intensely stressful experiences that overwhelm our capacity to respond effectively. Peter Levine defines trauma as what happens when too much happens too fast too soon: when overwhelming experiences cannot be processed and integrated, particularly in the absence of an empathic witness or support.

Whether we understand it as the body keeping the score, the issues being in our tissues, or the study of how our bodies and fascia hold stress and tension, these big life experiences can have impact on us beyond the initial events. This includes chronic stress, which may not meet a clinical definition of trauma but can produce similar patterns of dysregulation in the brain and body.

At a neurobiological level, trauma and chronic stress can alter the functioning of key brain regions. The amygdala, our brain's ‘alarm system’, can become hyper-vigilant. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for rational thinking and decision-making, can experience decreases in activity. So, the nervous system can feel ‘stuck’, or often be in dysregulation, showing up as either hyperarousal (feeling constantly on edge, irritable, anxious) or hypoarousal (dissociation, numbness, disconnection, fatigue).

Yoga is one of the most beneficial things we can do for our brain-body connection - and research has shown that it can assist a great deal in the healing, or integration of these experiences. Different styles of yoga work brilliantly for different people - and trauma-informed yoga has been developed specifically to help address the impact of trauma and chronic stress.

Trauma-informed yoga, comes from trauma-informed practice, and acknowledges the widespread impact of trauma and supports healing and integration through evidence-informed practices. In practice, this means prioritising safety, trust, and choice in every interaction, collaborating rather than directing, and recognising each person's existing strengths and capacity. It also means being deliberate about the conditions we create, using invitational language, minimising unnecessary triggers, and supporting people to notice and trust their own experience.

Trauma-informed yoga centres choice and autonomy, participants are ‘invited’ to participate how feels best for them, and are given regular choice points with the cadence/structure of the class supporting a series of ‘pendulated’ and ‘titrated’ moves and sequences to help participants experience the possibility of choice, collaboration interoception and learning to shift their own nervous system regulation through movement. 

These principles apply well beyond a specialist trauma class. For yoga teachers, a trauma-informed lens asks us to consider the prevalence and impact of trauma in how we lead any space, potentially reconsidering how we cue, how we offer choice, or how we create conditions for felt safety. We might apply these principles formally and with supervision (trauma-sensitive or trauma-informed yoga), or we might just integrate this into our classes - making them more trauma-aware. 

For yoga practitioners, trauma-informed yoga offers another way to understand your own nervous system responses - a methodology that allows us to ‘move through’ trauma and chronic stress without the need for talk-therapy (or to sit alongside it, as the TCTSY-style was originally designed to do within a clinical setting).

I became a trauma-informed yoga facilitator after finding so much benefit personally. I continue to be amazed at how much providing the possibility of interoception and choice in a gentle practice can have such significant impact in people's lives.

Pendulation is to the practice of moving attention between states of activation and rest, building the nervous system's capacity to tolerate and recover from stress.

Titration means introducing material or movement in small, manageable increments rather than all at once.

Interoception is our ability to notice and interpret sensations inside the body, physical, emotional, or both.

This article first appeared in Australian Yoga Academy’s Newsletter as a part of the trauma-informed yoga teacher training programs that I lead each year.