By Teresa Bennett Pasquale, LCSW

Trauma Therapist & Yoga Teacher

When we experience trauma the world shifts in a seismic way. Everything--mind, body, and spirit--looks and feels different. Beyond all else, we lose our breath. Breathing amid pain, terror, and fear becomes a liability and so to survive breath dissipates into containment and silence. Like a deer caught in headlights we becomes frozen and incapacitated by our traumatic experience - sometimes for a moment, sometimes for much longer.

Traumatic experience can strip away all of a person’s innate abilities to cope and deal with the world around them. Trauma also makes it difficult to handle one’s own mental, emotional, and physiological experiences. I know this as a trauma therapist and a trauma survivor. Since trauma makes it difficult to tolerate one’s own emotions, body, and mind and in that process it distorts a person’s perception of the world.

Yoga is a mind/body approach to finding wellness after traumatic experience that can restore some of the relationship with one’s body, regulation of one’s thoughts and mental landscape. Yoga is a practice that teaches self-soothing, empowerment, and restores a sense of safety and trust to a person who has survived traumatic experience. I know this from experience as a trauma survivor, impassioned yoga practitioner, and advocate of yoga for trauma survivors. I have also seen the rewarding impact of yoga on trauma survivors as a trauma therapist who has implemented yoga as a treatment approach, in tandem with “talk therapy”, in psychotherapy settings.

It all comes back to breath. Life begins and ends with breath. Emotional pain is replicated in breath. We embody our pain in breath. In times of acute emotional distress our breath becomes heavier than heavy or shallower than shallow. In traumatic experience often the first thing that we lose is the ability to regulate our breathing and in that we lose the capacity to soothe emotional stress, dispel anxiety, and decrease aggression. In yoga we learn to restore breath through ourselves, how to breathe in nasally and fully, and how to connect motion with breath.

In the“Yoga for Trauma Survivors” program at Yoga & Inner Peace in Lake Worth, I try to create a safe space for yoga practice. I also try to cultivate a yoga practice environment that is attentive and sensitive to many of the issues and needs of trauma survivors. Yoga has a natural capacity to teach trauma survivors skills for relaxation, calming, and finding safety in a world that, for many who have suffered through trauma, feels acutely dangerous and painful. If we can find a way to give people a small sense of safety in a traumatized world view then this is some small way yoga can give back what it does best to those who need it most--finding and restoring breath to those who have lost the capacity to breathe in life in healthful and joyful way.

Yoga for Trauma Survivors is held on Saturdays from 1–2:30 PM.

For more about Teresa and her wonderful work, go to www.embodymentalhealth.com

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