Do you feel connected to your body?
You move through your day and something feels off, hard to name, harder to place. Maybe for you, that feels like silence, a body gone quiet. It can feel like you don't even have a body, like it's just something dragged along while you go through your days. The small signals your body sends like hunger, thirst, comfort, and even deeper signals like wanting, go unnoticed, because somewhere along the way, you learned it's safer to stop listening for them.
Or maybe for you it's the opposite. Your body holds and feels everything, all at once, all the time. People say "just feel what you need to feel," like it's simple. But what happens when feeling that much catapults you into fear and overwhelm and can make you feel like you're drowning in your own skin?
Maybe, underneath it, your body has never quite felt like a place you could stay. A place you could trust. Tired, and unable to rest. Angry, and unable to say it. Feeling a boundary you can't actually hold. Not even knowing if you have a choice in how you experience your life. Maybe no one ever showed you. Maybe you were never allowed to.
Somewhere beneath all of it, you have a sense that your entire system organized itself around the painful things that happened to you. Your trauma became part of who you are without your choosing it, shaping how you see the world, how you move through it.
What
is trauma?
"Any event that overwhelms the ordinary human adaptations to life, leaving us powerless or helpless with losses of control, dignity, connection, sense of belonging, or meaning."
- Trauma researcher Judith Herman
Those “ordinary human adaptations to life” are things like a basic sense of safety, the ability to trust that your choices and actions can protect you, real connection to other people, and a mind that can process daily stress without it overwhelming you. These things enable you to move through something hard and come back to yourself, still understanding who you are, still feeling capable of responding to what happened.
Trauma is what happens when that capacity gets stripped away, whether by something that happened to you, or by something you needed and never received.
When your system is overwhelmed like this your brain can’t process what's happening the way it normally would and your body does what it can to protect you. Instead of the traumatic event becoming a memory you can recall and describe, much of the experience can get stored as raw body sensations. It might be a racing heart, a tightening in your chest, or a clenching stomach, without the story that would logically explain it.
That is the trauma response. Everything your body did to keep you safe when the event was more than you could stop.
The energy and intelligence of your body
The human body, your body that you're inhabiting right now, is intelligent and wise beyond measure. How miraculous is it that your body knows how to survive in the face of something traumatic that you could not stop from happening, that you could not escape from? Its deep intelligence found a way to carry you through, to protect you as best as it could. That life force is within every single cell in your body.
What you're feeling now is that same intelligent protection still switched on. Maybe you don't even have a body because you don't feel it. Pulling away from feeling your body became a way you were able to survive and keep going day after day. Maybe you feel too much in your body because your nervous system stays alert, hyper-vigilant even, constantly scanning for the thing that might hurt you, so you're feeling everything all the time. Both of these are reasons your body can become hard to trust.
It makes sense that a smell, a feeling in your chest, a sound can bring that old trauma response right back instantly, before you've had a chance to think. It's the innate wisdom of your body.
How
this practice works
These conditions come from my training in trauma-sensitive yoga at the Center for Trauma and Embodiment. They are the pillars of this modality, and they get built deliberately to create the opposite experience of trauma.
Invitational language. Every movement offered to you is an invitation, and you'll be reminded of that every step of the way. It isn't a command to perform. It's an invitation to feel and to choose.
Choice making. In a traumatic experience, you have no choice. Here you're invited to make choices about your body throughout. You might choose to stay in a shape longer than the facilitator. You might choose to move faster or slower. You might choose to skip a shape altogether, or choose an entirely different shape. You get to decide, and every choice is welcome without explanation.
Non-coercion. A traumatic experience means your own experience is overridden. Here there's no goal the facilitator is asking you to achieve, no shape to create a certain way, no feeling to arrive at, no state to attain. Your experience is your experience, and the facilitator won't try to move it toward anything other than what's authentic to you.
Shared authentic experience. The facilitator is also practicing being in their body and making choices. The facilitator isn't someone outside the experience. The facilitator is practicing with you, and you're practicing together, sharing an authentic experience of feeling your bodies in your own ways and making your own choices.
Interoception. Through the first four pillars, you might begin to learn that your attention doesn't have to be pulled outward, scanning for danger at the facilitator. You might have a felt sense that it's safe enough to turn toward what you're feeling. That's interoception, the capacity to feel the present-moment sensations happening within your body. Those sensations can guide you. Muscle contracting or lengthening, how fast your heart is beating, the rhythm of your breathing, muscle tension, maybe that intuitive gut feeling. At your own pace and in your own time, you build the capacity to feel these sensations and let them guide how you want to move through your practice. This is what helps you feel a fundamental sense of self beneath the trauma responses you've been carrying.
Meet Lena
Certified Trauma Informed Yoga Instructor
With twenty years of yoga practice and extensive trauma-informed training, I understand how trauma can turn even healing spaces into places of performance. I help people discover gentle power beneath their own skin and learn to move with themselves instead of against themselves. I create space for you to reclaim your relationship with your body and discover the strength that's always been yours.
"Exploring trauma-informed yoga with Lena was a wonderful exercise in asking my body questions with her gentle direction, and listening to the physical sensations that hold the wisdom to guide me forward. She struck a beautiful balance of providing the space and freedom to move my body how it most needed to in the moment, while simultaneously extending invitations to move through poses along with her at my own pace."
- Nicole D.
“Participating in Lena’s trauma informed yoga classes has been so enjoyable. It was a much more satisfying practice being able to honor my body with what I was feeling instead of the internal high pressure I was unconsciously setting for myself. Her non-judgement and empathy were something I felt through the screen which was new for me as I had never done an online interaction as ours.”
- Breanna M.
“There are so many things I love about working with Lena. Every time I work with her, I genuinely feel my body and the space it occupies. It’s amazing how in one hour, with Lena’s guidance, I go from active mind to mindful body. Her class is a safe space for me to explore what I’m feeling and how to move or be still with it, and I gain autonomy by being encouraged to make my own choices with every prompt. ”
- Mitia G.
Healing Moments
