Sexual Trauma: Interoception, Yoga & the Nuances of Embodiment

There is ample research available now that demonstrates that people with high levels of anxiety, which is common though not universal among sexual trauma survivors, in fact, feel everything inside of their bodies. They might even say they feel “too much“ and that this abundance of feeling contributes to states of anxiety. The relationship between trauma and interoception is not simple despite everyone wishing for a one-size-fits-all modality or solution to the complexities survivors navigate. Rather, it is always person specific.

Read more

Each Person is a Theory Unto Themselves

American Psychiatrist Milton Erickson once said, "The psychiatrist cannot afford the luxury of a theory, each patient is their own theory," and in my opinion, nor can the yoga teacher, as there is no such thing as one size fits all approach to teaching or practicing yoga. The heart of trauma-informed care, as it relates to yoga, recognizes that we cannot universally apply any of the 'recommendations' or 'techniques' to all students and expect the same outcome, let alone that all approaches or interventions - “best practices” included - will be experienced as therapeutic, or even helpful. One person's most liberating pose invokes another person's shame. One person craves consensual, healing touch from a gifted teacher and another defaults into freeze upon physical adjustments in a class setting. One person savors the spaciousness and exploration that meditation practice provides and another relies on the tangibility and precision of alignment-based teaching. And on and on...

The impacts of trauma are person specific and any two survivors may gravitate towards completely different styles of yoga practice based on their nervous system, the resources they've been able to access in their healing, their relationship to their body, movement, and contemplative practices, their personality, their abilities, and a countless variety of other factors related to identity, interest, and experience. Understandably, their responses to the same exact practice and their perception of the same teacher can be markedly distinct.

Perhaps the most basic principal in trauma-informed care is to adapt the practice to meet the specific needs of the person in front of you. That, along with your role and presence as the teacher (which I will mention later) is the foundation that makes everything else possible in the collaboration among teacher and student.

It would be convenient to have a single method, style, or universal theory for teaching yoga in this context, but it is impossible to simplify teaching (and yoga!) in this way since trauma survivors (people!) are diverse and have dramatically different lived experiences. There is no script or sequences that guarantees a trauma-informed yoga experience.

While trauma impacts a wide range of people across race, religion, gender, sexuality, ability, and age, it does so unevenly. This is due to a combination of systemic, social, historical, and political conditions/contexts that create a background of collective oppression, harm, and trauma surrounding the individual experience of surviving an event or series of traumatic events. This alone would indicate that our needs, vulnerabilities, and resources will vary from person to person and that no one style of yoga could address the nuances of our many experiences.

Prescriptive approaches to teaching trauma-informed yoga are delivered from the outside-in and they can reinforce the hierarchy and power imbalances that are often already associated with traumatic events/experiences/systems. The consequence of this is that the teacher risks re-creating a pattern of disempowerment, marginalization, and silencing of their student’s inner voice. We may be drawn to formulaic philosophies or sequences around trauma-informed yoga because they attempt to make something nebulous like trauma and working with trauma, feel somehow more predictable. They give us a sense of control that feels comfortable, yet what is a greater resource to our students, and what supports more authenticity in our teaching is embodied confidence. Still, many of us who are drawn to work with this community are also survivors ourselves, and survivors appreciate having a sense of control, so it makes sense that we may look for something tangible to anchor us in this space. This is one reason why supervision, mentorship, and consultation matter so deeply, though I digress.

It’s true that set styles, sequences, or approaches may work for some people: “do a, b, and c and don’t do x, y and z”, or even, for many people, however, it’s risky to assume they will work for all people and it invalidates the experience of those who seek very different things from their practice. I cannot tell you how many times I have been told that physically rigorous forms yoga were not ideal practices for healing trauma, when in my body and lived experience, the majority of my healing in yoga has unfolded through my vinyasa practice.

In an era where everything is packaged and branded for sale, it is no surprise we might start to expect that something like a “trauma-informed yoga training” would give us the method, the sequence, and the answers to all the many things that can arise for our students. The inconvenient truth is that one can deliver what might be considered a "trauma-informed sequence" however, if the teacher lacks presence, if their tone is commanding, if they position themselves as healer/healed and their students as wounded/victims, if they are disconnected from the people in the room or even from their own experience, if they are performing a script instead of bringing their authenticity to the practice - there will not be the necessary sense of safety required for the survivor to fully drop into the practice.

One of my main influences, Dr. Peter Levine, said that "we can only take our clients as far as we are ourselves have been willing to go in our own trauma healing work" and I agree. It seems to me that teachers who want to specialize in or be more sensitive to trauma will most benefit from inquiry into their own healing experiences and healing challenges through yoga and life, examining how past trauma already informs their practice/teaching, as well as how they can bring that into their consciousness in a way that is productive though not prescriptive. From here, they may more easily realize the importance of continually widening their lens for how they understand trauma and how they accommodate the range of vulnerabilities on the mat, while also amplifying each student’s inherent strength.

When we do this inner work (on our own time) and then step into our role of yoga teacher, we are better able to "get out of our students' way" as one of my yoga teachers often reminded me. In doing so, we trust and empower students to incrementally wade deeper into their own experience. By de-centering ourselves in the class setting, prioritizing the guidance of the student's inner teacher, and instilling messages that bolster compassionate self-exploration, we create the conditions where healing insights can emerge from within the survivor themselves. These organically emerging insights, or “embodied epiphanies” as I call them, are messages that arise without intentional mental effort. They are messages which can create huge shifts in how we experience, understand, and sense our whole selves. They are "a-ha" moments that we feel in our core in which suddenly, we make sense to ourselves, or something that was once murky becomes clear. Maybe it is something that pained us deeply has now lifted its weight from our heart and we have a visceral sense of its departure from our body. These epiphanies can leave a positive residue, an imprint that has a somatic quality to it which we can summon as a form of self-care when we find ourselves challenged in the ripples of trauma's wake. Experiences like this on our mat can create space, for something else, something new, or for something to move. These remarkably meaningful, although still sometimes very simple revelations, can come in the form of language, sensations, emotions, and images and they can take our breath away in the most stunning, life-affirming way. Maybe they give us our breath back - a deep spontaneous breath that is finally returned to us after so much holding. In an instant, these moments can change us, they can suture an old wound within us, and they can unburden us of something we no longer need to carry.

I would suggest that exploring and integrating trauma-informed teaching methods benefits teachers as much as it does students. For teachers, a prescriptive approach to teaching yoga in general, and specifically with the focus on trauma healing, can lack a degree of presence - we may feel a tension between what we've been told to do versus what feels most intuitive to us in the space, yet we remain bound to someone else's map of what constitutes a trauma-informed yoga class. Instead of being able to be with and respond to what is arising in that very moment, we may experience a sense of disconnect from the student/s, the room, and ourselves by being over-committed to set sequences and rules around what is/is not trauma-informed. We might draw a blank which can then create an inner panic, something that has the potential to escalate - especially for those of us with our own trauma history - and from there, we may dissociate as a management strategy either temporarily or for the remainder of class.  

Yet, in our own willingness to trust the language of our bodies and make decisions, changes, and choices in our teaching from our noticing of the moment, we have the possibility to actually model that possibility for our students. Of course it might feel risky, and it will likely come with some humbling foibles. Still, it is an opportunity to experience the validation of following intuition, or alternately, to learn via a gentle kind of repair or re-do process that might have to happen if our "intervention" or our teaching impulse in the moment doesn't land the way we intended. Again, this is a chance to embody the possibilities we have set out to teach: We can recover. We will survive. We can learn and do it differently, and better. Most importantly, our students will also survive. How else would we have all come this far already? Remember all the traumas and barriers and hurdles and heartaches that have crossed our paths prior to entering the yoga space? And still, here we are, in spite of it all. We find ways to keep getting through. This is the unparalleled tenacity of the survivor, this is the skill that catalyzes our capacity to rebound after something really hard happens again - whether a trigger, a flashback, or a new overwhelming life experience.

It’s good to recall, no one is born an expert in anything. Skill comes with practice, patience, and more practice. None of us are strangers to trial and error, and all of us, regardless of what we think we know and all the degrees and letters and certificates we accumulate - all of us - are all lifelong learners in the ways of humility. Remember what Dr. Erickson said? Each patient (student) is their own theory. Being trauma-informed requires a willingness to be surprised, to be wrong, and to be challenged to learn something new (or many things) from the person who originally sought you out for teaching.  

How do we keep learning? How do we keep growing? How do we continually refine our lens? One way is through our presence - presence to what is noticed both in the interior landscape of our body and in the surrounding landscape of the people and the world.

Presence requires that we as teachers slow down, that we are willing to pause, wait and see, and to allow something (sometimes unexpected) to unfold. This can be applied in the moment of teaching, and importantly, considered with a longer-term view like the way seasons rarely feel rushed. Presence lacks force and it supports ease in our body and in our mind. It is like a rebound of energy that comes naturally to us and through us. Presence is also integral to nurturing creativity, a creativity born of impulses from within our own body which is a beautiful component of building resilience after profound loss. As both students and teachers, we can practice amplifying our creativity from the soft, yet clear, boundaries of our mat. Creativity gives way to vulnerability, which gives way to authenticity, which gives way to safety - so presence as our primary foundation has quite a ripple effect.

If we seek to be trauma-informed in our teaching, we will meet people where they are at without over-laying our expectations or goals for their experience. We will commit to remaining flexible, responsive, and adaptive in our teaching. We can witness, sense, and gently bolster the space around our students' experience, while simultaneously remembering to notice ourselves as we move within our role of guiding and holding space. We can invite our students' embodied intelligence to come online because we've done our own work of looking within to discover that source of wisdom and therefore we can trust our students' capacity to tap this internal resource as well. Ongoing reflection - both alone and with a mentor/supervisor - on how we are showing up in this space and how showing up, specifically for trauma survivors, impacts us is fundamental to our integrity and sustainability as teachers. The safety of the space we hold for survivors is anchored by the fact that someone with great experience in the healing realm is holding space for us - a space that is brave, that fosters accountability, that honors the boundaries of our scope of practice, and that fortifies our own healing reserves. This process can be imperfect and sometimes we will go too long between consults, push ourselves beyond our threshold, and find ourselves overextended in the work. When that happens, we remember what we have forgotten and we seek out new supports, we look to our teachers/mentors/healers and we work intentionally with what has been stirred. We go deeper still in our own healing and this deepens the healing reservoir we hold for others.

As teachers, we are really co-creators of the yoga practice. Our plan is like a template that interacts with our students' internal cues. If we are the architect, they are the interior designer. Like waves meeting the shore, there is ebb and flow. It is reciprocal. We are attuning to their changing natures and we are also leaving space for spontaneity. We are honest with ourselves and those we serve that we don't in fact know what is best for them, yet, we can support the natural revealing of what they already know, whether consciously or unconsciously, will be best for them and their healing through the somatic practice of yoga.

It serves us to remind ourselves and our students that we are all practicing and practice is an ongoing, nonlinear process rather than a final destination.

Some of these ideas aren't solely about being trauma-informed in teaching yoga, they are fundamental elements of a yoga environment that is accessible, inclusive, and welcoming of a wide-range of experiences. They inform a space where we are all seen as the experts in our own embodiment. In yoga, we can grow an intimate relationship with our own unique “theory” - studying the one-of-a-kind biography of our lives which is held dynamically within our shape. In this environment, there is room for personalized healing and for collective healing, there is increased mutuality and pronounced equity, there is experiential resilience building and there is transformative somatic integration for both teachers and students alike.


Breathe. Live. Be. An Interview with Red Elephant Foundation

In this interview with Red Elephant Foundation, I was invited to share about what lead me to the work of anti-sexual violence advocacy, teaching yoga, the physiology of resilience and some of the risks and rewards of forming The Breathe Network. Here is a brief excerpt:

REF: Could you start by sharing your story, to the extent you are comfortable and deem relevant to the work you do?

MBH: I began exploring holistic healing modalities and trauma resilience theory in 2003 after being raped and sexual assaulted. It wasn’t the first time I had survived sexual violence, but for various personal reasons and the specific nature of the event, it was exponentially more traumatizing to me than past experiences. The rape created a total split and a sense of irreparable chaos within my physical body, my brain and my soul. It completely dismantled the view I had on the world and my sense of who I was in it, and it disrupted nearly every relationship in my life. At the same time, I started working with the trauma in a variety of ways, through yoga, holistic psychotherapy, acupuncture, massage and art therapy and within those sessions, I was uncovering not only my rage, my shame, my fear, and my grief, but also, tapping into resilience, power, beauty and a sense of inherent self-worth. I had not known those aspects of myself prior to the event of my rape, which made me incredibly curious about the process of addressing healing – and mental disturbance, physical pain, and psychic unrest in this holistic way, through all the various channels of the human system. How could it be that during the darkest time of my life I was beginning to tap into and cultivate a sense of compassion, purpose, love and faith?

Read the full interview here.

Freeze Leads to Survival

Over the last 12 years, billions of cells have cycled through my body – created, utilized and disintegrated – without any of my own intentional efforts. Most of my life I took these processes for granted. Yet, after I was raped, the mystery of this constant, internal process of birthing and dying happening inside my body became a fascination. It was a useful touchstone reminding me that on a cellular level, my body was shedding the residue of my perpetrator from the inside out. In a terrifying and also transcendent way, trauma ushered in a radical awakening to the brilliance of the human organism and its relentless pursuit to fulfill a single purpose: staying alive.

When my life was threatened, in an instant, all of my survival mechanisms came online. The shock of what was happening to me physically, mentally, and spiritually, drove me out of my own shape. I floated in a slow motion dream: sensations increasingly numb, language escaping my mouth with no thought, movements and gestures coming through my body with no control. If I was lucky, I would only be assaulted while stranded in the largest public park on the continent of South America. However, the anger from my attacker communicated something far more insidious. If I could survive this, what would he do next?

Unconditioned by ego, the primal responses of my body immediately conspired for my survival: I froze. My spirit exited my body. I watched my own undoing looking down from tree tops. Yet, a part of me was still trapped inside my shape. My body went numb. I don’t remember breathing. My tears stifled along the corners of my eyes. Everything was silent and slow, like a movie with no sound. My brain, though, picked up every detail of the forest, archiving this information for the future. The instinct of my nervous system memorizing all the ways I landed here so that it could attempt to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Meanwhile, this man is crushing every part of me – my body, mind and soul, with his violence. I am unbearably present though moving in and out of body. I remain frozen.

Suddenly, a stick breaking in the woods is enough to startle him. This attack will not end with death. Rather, this is the painful, yet precious re-birth into a post-rape reality where I escape. The story is just beginning.

Read the full post here.

Interview with The West Coast Trauma Project

"The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly, a memory may flow out in a stream." -Clarissa Pinkola Estes

I was honored to be invited by Guy Macpherson, the Founder of The Trauma Therapist Project to participate in his podcast. In our conversation we explore what lead me to embark on the work of addressing and healing sexual violence and various layers of personal and professional evolution in being part of the anti-sexual violence movement and the healing arts field. We also discusses how my yoga practice was impacted by sexual trauma and its evolution, working in the advocacy field and balancing personal sustainability, how Somatic Experiencing has been a resource, and we talk in depth about the vision for The Breathe Network and the people - survivors, supporters, clinicians and healers. 

You can listen to my interview here and I encourage you to explore The Trauma Therapist Project's website to listen to interviews with national experts in the fields of trauma and resilience.

 

 

Teaching Yoga with a Trauma Informed Lens Video

There are many reasons why someone who has survived trauma may have difficulty participating in yoga classes. In this video, I focus specifically on the challenges of savasana also known as "corpse pose" which is instructed nearly 100% of the time at the end of a yoga class. It is a posture whose length can vary from a few minutes up to 10 - 15 minutes and asks the practitioner to lay still in a state of relaxation that can border on sleep. Yet, for trauma survivors, it is uniquely challenging to rest deeply or to "let go" due to the nature of trauma and its impact on the physiology of the body, as well as the embodied imprint trauma can leave on the whole person. I recommend that yoga teachers provide alternate options/variations when they teach savasana in order to assist people in remaining grounded and connecting with some level of ease during what might be the most vulnerable component of class.

The insights I share here may also be useful for a survivor of trauma who is hoping to learn alternate ways to finish class with the rest of the group. Importantly, this video affirms survivors in knowing that their bodily responses and needs are very natural reactions to trauma and an innate internal attempt to manage the intensity of what they have survived. Savasana/Corpse pose can become increasingly accessible to trauma survivors over time, through practice, props, identifying variations that work, a yoga sequence that best prepares the nervous system for letting go, soothing music, etc. It is specific to the survivor and can be an interesting exploration to discover what shape and other supports can create the conditions where rest feels soothing. This is a wonderful practice to have in your self-care tool kit, as savasana, and other resting poses can restore the body, balance the nervous system and nourish the soul. This pose is a practice in and of itself, and an incredibly powerful one!


Beyond Language

I am increasingly invested in articulating a wider truth about sexual violence recovery – that it is not overnight, and it might be something we negotiate for life – not because I want to overwhelm or intimidate survivors, but rather to affirm and bring to the surface what so many of us already know to be true from our own experience. I share because resourcing more and more survivors with tools, practices, rituals, healers and possibilities for resilience that are not fixed but are ever-evolving, allows them become their own best expert - the authority on themselves and their lives. Through this simultaneously organic and intentional process they may be empowered to pave their own way, to recognize they are unique yet not alone in this dynamic struggle, and to fully own through post-trauma embodiment, their own truth about trauma, grief and pain. Having felt so much beyond what words alone can measure, we have glimpsed the self beyond ourself, the immeasurable breadth of who we are, the knowing that understands the unknown, and it seeps now – into our cells, our dreams and our laughter. I have highlighted four healing arts practices that have supported my journey to heal after sexual violence, acupuncture, yoga, massage and art therapy, in the hopes that survivors will have a clearer understanding of how these techniques might help them. Importantly, since talking about trauma can be triggering, survivors can feel confidence that these methods do not require having to tell their story in order to deliver healing and thereby have more options available to them.

Read more here

The Courage to Listen

Too often, we read about survivor’s stories as if they are something other, something outside of ourselves, or perhaps the survivors we learn about remain both nameless and faceless – held at such a distance from our own experience that we simply cannot connect. At times, the stories we read reflect far too intimately, like a mirror, the shadows of our own sexual traumas, and for the purposes of our own short-term self-preservation, we choose not to connect. Sharing that intimate space of the theater with survivors expressing the complex reality of their own experiences creates an atmosphere where those who do not know sexual violence intimately (as survivors themselves) have an unparalleled lens into what it looks like, feels like and sounds like. The injuries of sexual trauma and the capacity of resilience literally shows up in the way we carry our bodies, the way we move or do not move and the vast variety of facial expressions we develop to communicate our loss, our confusion, our anger and our power.

Read more here.

The Re-Wounding of Healing

It is early May and I am sitting with my best friend in an outdoor cafe in Cartagena, Colombia. I’ve dreamt of traveling to this city for years. It is hot and humid and even the 5pm sun can still bake the plaza bricks and deepen the color of our flesh. A disheveled hippie woman with an honest face approaches our table and asks if I would like a psychic reading. I am in South America, I am 26 and I am totally open to everything, so of course I reply with an enthusiastic “Sí.” The reading begins and almost immediately she becomes visibly upset. I am worried about my translation skills and what I might be missing when she explains in Spanish “Be careful! You are going to be terribly harmed by a man!” then runs away into the boisterous crowd. I don’t even remember if I paid her and I certainly cannot comprehend how to interpret her comments. How could I?

One week later I am back in the neighboring Andean country where I live and I have finalized a decision to place a tattoo on my sacrum representing my connection to and experience of the lush, green land I had lived in for nearly 3 years. Its texture and color held my developing identity as a woman, an explorer, a daughter, a sister and a lover of nature. It is beautiful and it is powerful, and one of my dearest friends will apply it. It is a Friday and this moment marks my continual merging with my adopted home and the incredible community I have connected with in this international city.

Two weeks later, the large tattoo is still very much a wound when I am attacked while running in a park, held at knifepoint and taken deep into the woods where I am raped by a stranger whose body, scent, hands – even the shape of his teeth – may never be forgotten. My identity is thrown into a state of limbo. My questioning of everything and everyone around me keeps me constantly dizzy, while the energetic and physical ache in my lower back now pulses in pain. My tattoo, however personally affirming the intentions behind it, soon becomes a daily reminder – a forced and remorseful pause in the mirror – of this tragic and life-altering event. These two separate wounds somehow fuse.

Read more here.

Travel and the Inner Compass of Healing Trauma

I spent a few years of my life working abroad and while that time held some of the most exhilarating experiences I’ve known, it also contained long phases of loneliness, confusion and an overwhelming doubt about where my path would lead. I became accustomed to the highs and the lows of my day to day, and when I was in the space between – not entirely inspired, not totally lost, I was in a bit of a dull fog. It was during those plateaus in my experience that I would long for then familiarity of home – but where was home? My mind would be restless, unable to fully land in my body – leaving a sense of disconnect from myself and the surrounding environment. Everything and everyone would become strange, and I would begin to feel a rising vulnerability much like a still open wound.

The new world perspective I was catalyzed into after sexual violence, the recovery and re-organization of the pieces of my life afterwards, reminds me of the roller coaster ride of my voyages abroad. Of course, the impact of trauma itself can stir up such a sense of foreignness both with yourself and the world around you – language escapes you, memory is out of order, things are not as they seemed. You sit on life’s periphery looking from the outside in, never finding connection through the images and faces around you and no longer sensing it on your own.

For someone who hasn’t both traveled extensively (or who hasn’t felt themselves a outsider in a world where others seemingly feel at home) and survived sexual violence, my sense that the two experiences are in some ways quite parallel may feel like an exaggeration. Yet, as a survivor, I look to any revelations I gain, however slight – on my yoga mat, in the woods, while playing a keyboard, from my dreams – and seek to weave them into the bigger picture of how I can experience and understand the fullness of my Self. I believe that my daily, seasonal and annual witnessing of the ongoing cycles of love and loss can teach me humility, compassion and strengthen my courage to keep going. When a metaphor for healing emerges, I fully dive in.

Read more here.