Healing from trauma invites you to befriend your body; and this needs to occur at a pace that honors your unique needs. Initially, this involves developing the resources to handle challenging emotions, disturbing symptoms, and distressing memories.
The goal is help you find your ground through a felt sense of stability and safety. Within applied polyvagal theory in yoga, you learn to trust the predictability of the support that your yoga mat provides.
Therapeutic yoga for trauma recovery is best supported when you have a calm, peaceful, and safe environment for your practice. You might find this within a class; however, if you are choosing to begin a home-based practice, I encourage you to take some time to create a space that feels nourishing to your body and mind.
I invite you to think of your yoga space as a sacred ground…and each time you return is a pilgrimage to your body, mind, heart, and soul.
Dr. Arielle Schwartz
One of the defining features of traumatic events is the loss of choice over what happened to you. They can leave you feeling trapped, helpless, or powerless. Therefore, recovery from trauma involves realizing that you do have choices available to you now (Emerson & West, 2015). A therapeutic approach to yoga involves recognizing that you have choice now. Throughout each practice, you can decide how to move and breathe. You can decide whether you want your eyes open or closed.
When we do not feel as though we have choices, we can begin to feel trapped our nervous system perceives a threat.
A sacred space, whether it is found in nature or created by humans, provides a sense of solace and respite from the unpredictable or chaotic aspects of life.
Ideally, your space feels safe enough for you to relax. This baseline of safety will then allow you to observe your body and mind for patterns of tension or changes in how you are breathing that are arise as you release trauma related emotions from your body. See if you can allow yourself the gift to feel held within your peaceful, calm space.
Applied polyvagal theory in yoga guides you to become a compassionate witness to your body and mind. This provides a powerful foundation for self-knowledge. At times, your body might react to a stressful event even before you are aware of the trigger. Even without conscious awareness, your brain and body have released a cascade of stress chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline. This is one reason why you cannot simply think your way out of the symptoms of trauma; rather, you must work with the body to maximize healing. Having a regular yoga practice can play an instrumental role in this process.
Dr. Stephen Porges coined the term neuroception to reflect the process by which the your vagus nerve is communicating internal and external cues about whether situations or people are safe, dangerous, or life threatening. Your nervous system will find these cues within the body, in our external environment, or in the body language, facial expressions, or voice tones or other people. For example, changes in heart rate or subtle shifts in muscle tone impact your sense of self but you might not be aware of these changes as they occur.
The vagus nerve plays a key role in neuroception because of the many extensions throughout your body. It is the tenth cranial nerve and can best be described as a bidirectional communication highway between your body and your brain. The term vagus is Latin for “wandering,” which is an apt descriptor for a nerve that extends from the brainstem into the stomach, intestines, heart, lungs, throat, and facial muscles. Approximately 85 to 90 percent of vagus nerve fibers are afferent which means that they bring sensory information from your body to your brain.
Read more about Vagus Nerve Yoga here
You can learn to pay attention to neuroceptive cues by consciously observing signs that your body is responding to a threat. For example, you furrow your brow, tighten you jaw, grip your hands, or clench your buttocks. You have an opportunity to engage in this practice awareness in any yoga practice whether you are moving in asana, resting in savasana, practicing pranayama, or seated in meditation.
The breath plays a key role in your health in part because the vagus nerve extends into the smooth muscle of the lungs and heart. The nerves connecting to the heart and lungs have both sympathetic and parasympathetic functions. The sympathetic nervous system is associated with quick, intense breaths into the upper lungs, a condition often referred to as over-breathing or hyperventilation. During times of stress, your nervous system initiates the release of cortisol via the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA-axis) to mobilize your self-protective defenses through an increase in heart rate and respiration. When this continues overtime, rapid upper chest breathing leads to over-breathing or hyperventilation which is associated with panic attacks and anxiety.
While changes in breathing happen automatically in response to stress, we also have the ability to alter our physiology through conscious, mindful changes in our breath rate. Long, slow exhalations engage the vagal break and the parasympathetic relaxation response slows down your heart rate.
The health of the autonomic nervous system is measured through vagal tone and vagal efficiency. Vagal tone is measured by changes in heart rate in relationship to the breath. The heart rate typically increases on each inhalation which reflects a subtle engagement of the sympathetic nervous system and decreases during each exhalation as the parasympathetic nervous system re-engages. The relationship between your breath and these changes in heart rate is referred to as heart rate variability (HRV). Having higher vagal tone means that you have greater variability between the number of heartbeats on the inhalation as compared to the number of heartbeats measured on the exhalation. Simply put, vagal tone is measured by your ability to move between stress and relaxation efficiently and easily. You can think of this as the physiological basis for resilience which allows you to flexibly respond to inevitable challenges of life.
Read more about Breathing for your Vagus Nerve Yoga here
This practice involves creating an even length of your inhalation and your exhalation with diaphragmatic or “belly” breathing. I encourage you to study the effect that a simple practice has on your body and mind.
Postural shifts also influences your vagal tone through blood pressure receptors called baroreceptors which send signals to your brainstem. These signals will either increase or decrease your vagal tone in order to regulate your heart rate. For example, sitting or standing up quickly will temporarily decrease vagal tone which will increase your heart rate and a visceral feeling of activation. Ideally, this is followed by re-engagement of your ventral vagal complex which allows you to return to a calm and relaxed state.
Tolerating postural changes such as moving from laying down, to sitting, to standing, can provide a good measure for resilience of your nervous system. Yoga practices often involve moving through postural transitions in a repeated, rhythmic manner that allow you to alternately increase and decrease your heart rate. You might think of this as strengthening the resilience of your nervous system in addition to the physical endurance required in these actions.
Focusing inward invites you to gently soften or close your eyes so that you can notice your internal sensations. For example, you can pause while reading this and bring your awareness to the sensations of your body as you make contact with your chair. Or you might notice the feeling of your belly rising and falling with your breath. From a yogic perspective, you can think of this process as directing your life force energy toward yourself. Ideally, this can be offered as a way to nourish yourself with self-awareness.
This next practice invites you to focus your attention inward while in a child’s pose. For some, the name “child’s pose” brings up discomfort because it evokes memories from a vulnerable time. If this is the case, you can choose to rename this pose giving it a new meaning for you. For example, you might call it “wisdom” or “resting” pose.
Eventually, you will develop the inner strength to attend to your suffering with greater compassion. With applied polyvagal theory in yoga, you can build your capacity to turn toward your emotions, sensations, and memories associated with traumatic events. As you sense the weight of traumatic events held in your body, you can begin to deepen your experience by following how your body wants to breathe or move in response to what you are feeling.
As you release burdens and grieve the past you will also begin to cultivate a new felt sense of freedom and possibility.
In collaboration with the Polyvagal Institute, I created a 4-hour training which provides 2 hours of on-demand recorded lectures sharing the application of the polyvagal theory to the practice of yoga. These lectures are accompanied by a 1-hour guided physical yoga practice in which you are invited to move and breathe allowing you to experientially embody and integrate the course material. This course concludes with a 1-hour recorded discussion between Dr. Schwartz and Dr. Porges which explores topics such as:
Through the lens of polyvagal theory, you will learn all about how the vagus nerve is a bi-directional information highway between mind and body—more importantly, you will learn to fine-tune your health with breath, movement, and awareness practices that become the building blocks of a life-changing daily practice.
This post has excerpts from the book, Therapeutic Yoga for Trauma Recovery,
This book introduces you to the power of the yogic philosophy and offers a variety of accessible yoga poses and breathing practices that will allow you to:
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, is a psychologist, internationally sought-out teacher, yoga instructor, and leading voice in the healing of PTSD and complex trauma. She is the author of five books, including The Complex PTSD Workbook, EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology, and The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook. Dr. Schwartz is an accomplished teacher who guides therapists in the application of EMDR, somatic psychology, parts work therapy, and mindfulness-based interventions for the treatment of trauma and complex PTSD. She has a depth of understanding, passion, kindness, compassion, joy, and a succinct way of speaking about very complex topics. She is the founder of the Center for Resilience Informed Therapy in Boulder, Colorado where she maintains a private practice providing psychotherapy, supervision, and consultation. Dr. Schwartz believes that that the journey of trauma recovery is an awakening of the spiritual heart.
Arielle Schwartz, PhD, is a psychologist, internationally sought-out teacher, yoga instructor, and leading voice in the healing of PTSD and complex trauma. She is the author of five books, including The Complex PTSD Workbook, EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology, and The Post Traumatic Growth Guidebook.
Dr. Schwartz is an accomplished teacher who guides therapists in the application of EMDR, somatic psychology, parts work therapy, and mindfulness-based interventions for the treatment of trauma and complex PTSD. She guides you through a personal journey of healing in her Sounds True audio program, Trauma Recovery.
She has a depth of understanding, passion, kindness, compassion, joy, and a succinct way of speaking about very complex topics. She is the founder of the Center for Resilience Informed Therapy in Boulder, Colorado where she maintains a private practice providing psychotherapy, supervision, and consultation. Dr. Schwartz believes that that the journey of trauma recovery is an awakening of the spiritual heart.
