The world is hurting. It’s all right in front of our faces on the nightly news, on our feeds and in our lattes. It’s not rocket science. Russian hacking, civil war in Syria, the break-up of glacial ice, human trafficking, the opiate epidemic, racial, ethnic, gender, and economic inequality, the global healthcare crisis, the list goes on. Day after day, year after year, we seem to be on a trajectory that’s bending toward destruction. What’s worse, the politicians we elect to solve these big problems only exacerbate the issues and make things more and more toxic. At a time when we should be more connected than ever, the grim reality seems to be that we’re falling apart. Civilization is a thin, translucent veil. We’re on the brink—stand still long enough and you’ll feel the wobble.
Trauma Unbound.
In The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014), Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., cites the research of Felitti and others, who note: “Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit” (van der Kolk, from Felitti, et al.). Our families, our neighbors and our friends are feeling the bite. One doesn’t have to be a combat soldier coming home from a tour in Afghanistan to experience the sleepless nights, the dissociation between mind and body, or the feelings of anxiety, rage, or guilt, although these hero humans are disproportionately suffering these effects compared to the rest of society. Translation: trauma is a fact of life.
There’s enough to be afraid of out there in the big-bad-world, no doubt, and yet, somehow I feel that we live in one of the most hopeful moments of all human history. It’s true, trauma may be one fact of life, but I also cling to another—that human beings are a resilient bunch, a rag-tag band of wandering gypsies on a ten-thousand-year journey to understand who we are, where we are, and where we might be going. Van der Kolk reminds us how “[s]ince time immemorial we have rebounded from relentless wars, countless disasters (both natural and man-made), and the violence and betrayal in our own lives” (1). And one of my literary heroes, William Faulkner, echoes this sentiment as well: we’re here for a reason, we have a purpose. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Faulkner reminds of us of our resiliency:
“I decline to accept the end of man,” he writes. “It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance” (Faulkner).
I share this optimism because at least one time each week I get to witness someone transforming a crisis into an opportunity; I get to observe struggle metamorphosis into success, fear change to hope, restlessness recover into some semblance of peace and calm. I’m lucky enough to experience these wonders because I teach trauma-sensitive yoga classes. It’s probably not even a fair statement to call myself the teacher—I’m a student sharing space, learning and evolving in the process too. We’re passengers on the same flight, sucking the same oxygen. Yoga is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but love and connection bring us back together time and time again—love and connection to the practice, to ourselves, and to the shared sense of being amongst our band of sisters and brothers. Humans need humanity.
So we start with the basic premise that if you can breathe you can do yoga. And then we just try to promote being a little kinder to ourselves than we may actually feel. The toolkit for mindful resiliency is a series of five activities that when coupled together produces a greater sense of body and breath awareness. A typical class involves breathing exercises, meditation, mindful movement, guided rest (Yoga Nidra), and gratitude. We approach these practices by supporting before acting, by promoting whole body wellness, and by fostering safety, predictability, and control.
Some will argue that yoga can cure PTSD. I’m not sure I’m qualified to make that claim. What I see and experience without question, though, is that yoga is a complementary healthcare and mental health treatment. It can help an individual sleep better, concentrate and think more clearly, manage anger and aggression more easily, and find comfort in his or her own skin. It definitely is more complicated than all of this, but at its core it really is this simple. Yoga means to yolk, to bring together; the yoga experience, especially the practice of Yoga Nidra, helps an individual reconnect with his or her body, mind and spirit. It increases the window of tolerance in the optimal arousal zone and engages the parasympathetic nervous system. These are good things. Research suggests eight weeks of daily mindfulness meditation reduces the size of the amygdala, the seat of fear and rage, startle responses, defensive behaviors, aka our fight or flight brain (Holzel et al., 2010). Mindfulness meditation has also been associated with increases in hippocampal volume. Fun fact: meditators have larger hippocampi than non-meditators (Luders et al., 2012). This all matters because the hippocampus is the seat of declarative memory and context-dependent memory; in other words, reduced hippocampal volume consistently points to Post-traumatic stress, Depression, and leads to a decreased ability to modulate emotional responses in a context-appropriate manner. There’s additional indicators in Broca’s Area, in the cerebral cortex, the research is revealing more and more. It’s a weird thing to say, but it’s an exciting time to be studying trauma.
It’s also an important time to be practicing trauma-sensitive yoga and mindful resilience for trauma recovery. There’s help out there. And yet, the most important teacher, the greatest guide, is within. This is what we practice on our mats in class. The primary functional deficit in PTSD is the ability to regulate arousal. By getting into the body, by exploring our internal states, we create for ourselves a space to—
- focus on breath and sensation
- normalize sensations and experiences
- encourage non-reactive awareness and acceptance
- facilitate consciousness rotation throughout the body (body scanning/sensing).
And in doing so, we can increase the optimal arousal zone in the window of tolerance and thus improve our ability to self-regulate.
In practicing mindful resilience, we aim to breathe easy, focus clearly, move freely, rest deeply, and to be grateful. If you need any of these things, please join us. Resiliency isn’t about not falling—it’s about getting up. It’s not about forgetting, it’s about honoring. And it’s not about burying, it’s about letting go.
Join us. Our journey together begins with our next breath.
Inhale deep.