When Crisis Hits, the Body Remembers—And How Yoga Helps Us Return From Trauma.
I have a half-written, promised essay on child marriage, the trauma it causes, and what you can do to fight it.
And I’ve spent the last few days caring for my best friends’ kids while he’s in the hospital in critical care and she’s sitting at his side. Sleeping in their bed, not my own.
My brain feels chaotic. Frenzied. Forcing focus with patients, with children, trying to care for my own teen without being fully available, exchanging texts for medical updates. I’m behind on hundreds of emails and hopelessly lost on trying to keep up with my substack subscriptions (sorry). I’m speeding back and forth across town (I know, I know) and the battery of my little electric Mini is down to a 19-mile remaining range.
I think my own battery is, too.
Is it okay to let some things go sometimes?
I think so. I think it has to be. When a battery is down to nearly drained, there’s nothing you can do but plug in, stop moving, rest and reset. It’s best not to go to full zero.
I head home to start a load of the overflowing laundry (which items to prioritize for the coming week?) and check on my teen, who is preparing for finals and the last week of classes. There’s a stench of death. Ominous, unwelcome, putrid. A small creature’s body lays on the threshold of the side door.
I do not want to think of death, to dispose of bodies, to inhale this acrid smell.
I do not want to research child marriage today.
My body is tense, and a restlessness roars through my veins that is easier to ignore while attending to the high energy of younger children. In this pause with a neighbor there, the energy surges. I want to keep moving. I force myself to sit.
I keep noticing my breath these last few days: tight, shallow, fast. I know this breath pattern: it is old and learned and kept me poised and ready to respond to danger throughout childhood. Crisis breath.
And so, I shift.
Over and over again throughout these days, I consciously inhale, exhaling through lips like an O.
We can shift our physiological reactions, and in so doing, remind our bodies we are safe, and we are strong, and we can get through whatever lies ahead.
After trauma, we forget these things. Our bodies forget. Even when we believe it to be true, we have to remind our bodies so that we will know it and be able to live it.
This morning I took the younger of my “bonus kids” to the park to practice yoga under the towering trees while the older slept in and my teen studied. We stretched, we moved in the morning breeze, we listened to what our bodies needed. We rooted down and we found balance.
Self-care in the midst of stress.
Not as a luxury. As a necessity.
Studies from Bessel Vanderkolk’s Trauma Center (author of the best-selling The Body Keeps the Score) have found yoga to be effective in reducing the reactivity, hypervigilance, and feelings of unsafety in one’s body that come with PTSD. I have found this to be true in my own life, too. For a long time, yoga was a personal pursuit, which felt entirely disconnected from the professional and clinical side of me.
Until, in 2016, while writing a research paper on the best practice treatments for survivors of sex trafficking (a population I was working intensively with through a local safe house and in non-profit advocacy groups), I came upon recently published research on the success of the Trauma Center’s Trauma Sensitive Yoga [TC-TSY] model1. I was intrigued and excited: could this “woo-woo hippie” side of me have a point of connection to professional me?
I searched for opportunities to train in the Trauma Center model, and that Spring flew across the country for an intensive three-day training. I felt enlivened, integrated, inspired. These passions of mine were not so separate, after all. A month later I began the year-long process of becoming a registered yoga teacher to offer this therapy-adjunctive model to my clients and the community.
Trauma-sensitive yoga (TSY) is not about achieving social-media worthy poses, attaining feats of flexibility, or becoming physically strong. It is about learning to listen to your body, to befriend it and integrate with it as a resource rather than an enemy to estrange. TSY may look as simple as sitting in a chair and slowly rolling your shoulders or your neck while you slow your breath to relieve stored tension, or laying on your back and leaning your legs against a wall to experience a sense of calm and restoration. TSY is a pathway to get to know and reconnect with a body that may have been threatened or harmed in traumatic ways, or that has been holding the tension of unprocessed fear for far too long.
Trauma-sensitive yoga also helps to re-regulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for our “rest and digest” physiological processes. Trauma flips our internal switch to be stuck in an on position, so that we live more in sympathetic nervous system mode: activated for action, to fight or flee or tense up and freeze. Trauma teaches us it’s not safe to relax and let down our guards because bad things have or will happen; trauma-sensitive yoga reminds us that we are not in danger in the present, and rest is good.
While Trauma-Sensitive Yoga is not about achieving impressive poses, as you stay with the process, it is likely that you may gain a sense of self-efficacy, empowerment, and strength – experiences too often stripped away by the overwhelming and out-of-control nature of traumatic experience. TSY is about making choices. Every movement is a personal choice to try or to skip and rest, which helps to rebuild awareness of and confidence in your personal agency and control.
Trauma Sensitive Yoga also fosters mindfulness, which gradually helps bring awareness to self-critical and other negative thought patterns, creating space to gently release and replace such thoughts with kinder, gentler truths. Meanwhile, TSY group classes create opportunities for community and connection, rebuilding or replacing the loss of interpersonal trust and support that all-too-often accompanies Post-Traumatic-Stress.
There are many paths to healing; many resources for self-regulation in crisis. TSY is but one. If this non-verbal approach feels like something you’d like to try, start by searching for trauma-sensitive yoga in your area. Online guided TSY, restorative yoga, or even beginning yoga classes may be options to explore if TC-TSY is not available in your area. If yoga is already a resource in your life, this is your gentle reminder to reach for it when things spiral out of control, when life feels uncertain or old fears and flashbacks resurface.
Practicing yoga in a park may seem like an odd choice while your father or best friend is in a hospital, but perhaps it’s the very best thing.