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YOGA TO HEAL TRAUMA Soothing Poses Calm the Nervous System
by Marlaina Donato
and Iraq that participated in a one- hour vinyasa-style yoga session for six weeks showed significantly lowered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, as well as less insomnia, depression and anxiety.
Trauma-Intelligent Fitness Yoga performed with trauma sensitivity can pick up where talk therapy leaves off, targeting the amygdala, the danger detector in the brain, and the vagus nerve that runs from the brain to the abdomen, which plays a
stress-buster that lowers blood pressure and excessive cortisol, but yoga can offer an added boon for those living with the lasting effects of traumatic events. Trauma-informed yoga (also called trauma-sensitive yoga) is a promising therapeutic branch of the yogic system designed to quell the body’s programmed “fight-or-flight” responses. Founded on yoga, psychology and neurobiology principles,
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the approach is in harmony with the ancient yogic concept of samskaras, or memories imprinted on our cellular consciousness. People from many walks of life can benefit from trauma-sensitive yoga including bullied teens, women rebounding from abuse and anyone impacted by pandemic turmoil. Research published in the journal Military Medicine in 2018 reports that U.S. veterans of the wars in Afghanistan
etting on the yoga mat can be a powerful
vital role in processing trauma. “Somatic processing and treatment methodologies like yoga are now being used to help repair and rebuild distressed nervous systems, which in turn helps the brain integrate and ‘file’ distressing memories,” says Beth Shaw, founder of
YogaFit Training Systems Worldwide, the largest yoga teacher training school in North America, and the author of Healing Trauma with Yoga: Go From Surviving to Triving with Mind- Body Techniques. Te Fort Lauderdale-based yoga therapist and entrepreneur highlights the body’s role in trauma and stress. “Te brain rewires itself around the traumatic event and memories stored in the tissues throughout the body. Yoga can help to free those memories, alleviating troubling emotions and thought patterns, as well as chronic somatic tension and hypervigilance.” Shaw draws upon new psychological and neurological discoveries, including polyvagal theory, that help explain the full impact of trauma and most importantly, how and why yoga helps to lessen these impacts. Trauma-informed yoga keeps the nervous system in mind, excluding poses and breathing techniques that might provoke
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