What Is Trauma-Informed Yoga?

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Trauma-Informed Yoga, sometimes also called Trauma-Sensitive Yoga, is an emerging discipline within Yoga as Therapy, the latter defined as the explicit use of Yoga to alleviate or cure health conditions in the physical, emotional, and mental sphere.

Trauma-Informed Yoga (TIY) is a type of Somatic Therapy that aims at supporting people (through individual or group sessions) to come to emotional and trauma release through Yogic techniques and exercises. In fact, TIY is a form of what today is often called Body De-Armouring.

The idea behind TIY is for people to becoming more aware of and reconnect with their body through mindfulness and body-awareness techniques in order to gain a living, experiential understanding of the relationship between stress, pent-up emotions and emotional hurt on one side and bodily tensions on the other side.

The goal and benefit of doing so is that one can subsequently work with Yogic exercises to release bodily tensions, breathing anomalies, and postural holding patterns, which is thought — through their inherent psychosomatic relationship — to also release PTSD symptoms and/or emotional distress and trauma, or at the minimum will help to better cope with these phenomena in one’s life.

The practices applied during TIY classes usually include common Yoga techniques, such as carrying out asanas (Yoga postures), meditation, chanting, relaxation exercises, visualization, pranayama breathwork, mantras, mudras and bandhas, but then in a way that supports groups or individuals to work in an appropriate and safe way on trauma healing.

Nonetheless, TIY can also be less “pretentions” and not particularly being aimed at healing trauma, but rather relating to the way Yoga instructors give their lessons, that is, through a Trauma-Informed Practice (TIP). This would mean that the Yoga teacher is aware that people in their Yoga class may be living with trauma or deep emotional distress, and hence designs classes that don’t focus on trauma and/or trauma release, but rather on carrying out Yoga exercises that are neutral and safe, and which soothe, calm and relax, while taking care not to use Yogic techniques that incite distress or trigger trauma of students.

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