How does Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Work? | The Science of Yoga | Yoga Psychology |

Transcript

what is trauma-sensitive yoga and how is it different from other styles of yoga this is something I get asked a lot and something I want to share with you today my name is Kathy I have a PhD in psychology and 13 years of neuroscience research experience and I'm also a trauma-sensitive yoga facilitator to understand how trauma sensitive yoga works you need to know a little bit about how trauma impacts the brain and changes the mind-body connection there's a lot of contemporary neuroscience demonstrating that sense of self is tied to body sensations so our ability to notice what is happening in our bodies helps to give us a sense of being in the present and it's important for processing emotions I'm going to show you some research published in 2014 in this study 773 participants were asked to describe where they feel emotions and what we're looking at here is a heat map of the results where warm colors are increase in session in the area and cool colors decrease in session and we can see that different emotions were felt in different areas of their bodies so emotions have a body based component but following emotional trauma it's not uncommon for people to lose sense a sense of sensations in their body including sensations associated with emotions it's thought that this sort of body dissociation occurs because of a few reasons firstly during the trauma of in the the body sensations can be quite overwhelming and these could be sensations associated with the actual event or even just the sensations associated with feeling fear with feeling terror and in order to cope people often sort of dissociate from those sensations and another thing that can happen is that people can experience like a nervous system shutdown so they start to to feel that they can't move there's a sense of freezing of being immobilized not being able to fight back and in that instance is also the sort of feeling of body dissociation and after the trauma say days weeks months even years after it's not uncommon for people to stay in a trauma response so still feeling those sensations are being dissociated or they might still be in a fight-or-flight response so feeling those sensations associated with the fear and so in order to sort of cope with that in to move through their normal day-to-day tasks they dissociate from those sensations in an earlier video I've talked about the relationship between feeling body sensations the mind-body connection and how this impacts mental well-being and I'll link to that video below let's talk a little bit about the neuroscience associated with trauma when looking at the brain activity of people who have experienced trauma it's been shown that there's reduced activity in brain areas associated with sort of sense of self and feeling body sensations and one key area is the insular cortex which is involved in feeling body sensations but also processing emotions so how does trauma sensitive yoga work and the trauma sensitive yoga I'm referring to is that taught by the Center for trauma and embodiment at Brookline Massachusetts and they spent years developing testing and publishing their methods and there are other styles of trauma sensitive yoga and they can sometimes be a bit different now there's lots of facets as to heart Ramah sensitive yoga can be beneficial for someone who has experienced trauma I'm just going to focus on the neuroscience trauma sensitive yoga facilitates an introspective experience so that's your ability to feel body sensations and this is done by using Invitational language choice making and by cueing sort of body sensations and sometimes you don't get that sort of focus in other styles of yoga or their focus can be something completely different from the internal so what makes trauma-sensitive yoga different is that there's an emphasis on giving the opportunity for people to notice body sensations but feeling body sensations can be really intense for anyone who has experienced any sort of body dissociation or anxiety so the pacing and the range of movements in a trauma-sensitive yoga class can be quite different from other styles of yoga and the key here is that the client is in control the classes are designed so that they can choose how to move in their body and they can choose at what pace they want to sort of explore sensations what sort of results have been observed when using trauma-sensitive yoga as a treatment for complex trauma well it's been shown that there's a reduction in symptoms associated with complex PTSD and in the book the body keeps the score vessel Vander Kolk talks about a recovery of activity in the insular cortex and this was the area of the brain that I mentioned that was associated with feeling body sensations and processing emotions thanks for watching this video I hope you found it helpful if you liked it please give it a thumbs up if you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave those below and if you want to hear more about the 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