Trauma Sensitive Yoga Project, LLC

Too often, the burden of healing gets placed at the level of the individual. The individual is often shamed for their responses, defenses, and coping mechanisms and then left to navigate their recovery on their own. While only we can be responsible for our healing, it is often something at the systemic, cultural, and institutional level in which much of the harm occurred in the first place. This isn't something that any one individual can be responsible for, and we are often left feeling like we're running on hamster wheels trying to fix something that we didn't break-- and cannot possibly repair on our own. We feel like we are trying to "hold it together," while everything around us keeps falling apart.

But this is something we can hold, together. We don't have to do this alone. I believe yoga offers us tools in which people can come together to heal, grow, and thrive.

In the words of Judith Herman, "Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation."

We offer choice by using invitational language, normalizing all options, offering clear structure (with freedom within), inviting sensory awareness, encouraging the invitation to notice, modeling permission, and acknowledging capacity.

When our nervous system is regulated, we're in an optimal state of arousal. We feel safe, connected, relaxed, and engaged. Trauma narrows this window. We spend more time feeling immobilized and depressed, or, we spend more time feeling stressed, anxious, or fearful.

Yoga and somatic practices widen this window. When we spend more time engaging in practices are grounding, centering, and stabilizing, we spend more time in our optimal state of arousal.

The more we practice being in this state, the wider this window gets. A wider window means we strengthen our capacity to handle stress and a develop a greater ability to come back into a regulated state after something activates us.