Yoga as one path to healing
Harvard health defines somatic(relating to the body) therapy as the body expresses deeply painful experiences, applying mind-body healing to aid with trauma recovery. In “The Body Keeps the Score”, Bessel van der Kolk discusses the myriad of ways trauma expresses itself in long term effects to the body. In the healing world, I often see this express itself as chronic tension, elevated blood pressure, autoimmune disease such as fibromyalgia and digestive issues. I have had my own experience of how chronic stress and trauma caused autoimmune dysfunction and have explored many holistic paths to treatment and health including therapy and yoga. In today’s society we are bombarded by stressors. Work demands, balancing family needs, social obligations, maintaining a healthy lifestyle are a few things we often have to balance in the day to day. These demands on top of whatever else you may be experiencing such as grief, loss, stress, burnout, fatigue and health issues can add up over time and cause imbalances in the mind and body.
Yoga is one path to helping the body discharge this stress in a healthy way and reconnect to the self and present moment. I have found that when individuals hear the word yoga, there can be many preconceived notions of what yoga is “supposed” to look like. Sweating in a 100 degree room with 90% humidity while bending yourself into shapes you have only seen contortionists do could be one of those notions!! For many years of my yoga practice, I thought if I wasn't sweating and bending into a variety of odd shapes I was doing it wrong. It turns out, for my own healing journey, i could not have been more wrong! When we look at traditional yoga approaches, we see that what we often experience at many yoga studios today is a westernized version of yoga. Focusing on fitness, the right yoga pants, 200 dollar yoga mats and this approach could not be farther from the roots of true yoga. Traditional definitions of yoga, from ancient yoga texts such as the Rig Veda, offer that yoga is a uniting of the body and mind, which creates harmony.
I think we can agree that trauma, stress and chronic fatigue are the opposite of feeling harmonious in our lives!!!! There is a plethora of research that denotes how somatic therapies, such as yoga, can help bring individuals back into harmony and be a safe place to process trauma and stress. Most of the research in this topic focuses on slowing down and gaining interoceptive awareness of the body, which simply means paying attention and noticing what sensations you are feeling in your body. Through simple yoga practices such as breath and gentle movement, we can learn to become aware of how our body stores chronic stress and trauma and begin to move towards healthy processing. Because of this research, and personal experience, offering yoga as a part of my healing services is integral to living in my own truth!
