When I first began practicing yoga in the winter of 1999 I would often say “I love yoga! It’s just like therapy!”

Granted, I endured savasana, wide-eyed and tense, waiting for it to end. But, after a practice I always felt physically and emotionally lighter, less anxious, and more serene. In yoga I released the tension and strain I carried. While I had undergone years of psychotherapy prior to yoga, I understood the benefit of finding new and better ways to understand myself, even if I couldn’t understand the burden of the traumas I carried. Making my way from the therapists couch and onto a yoga mat didn’t seem like a natural transition until I tried it.

In our post-enlightenment world we tend to see the mind and body separate. The mind is the domain of our thoughts, emotions, and intellect, while the body is merely the meat suit the mind pilots. The reality is that there is no separation between the mind and body. It is part of one organism with overlapping systems. Our mind is created and influenced by our nervous system, endocrine system, and the bacteria that exists in our digestive tract. Is there more at play? Certainly, and as a yogi I believe in the Atman, but the soul gets funneled and filtered through our biology. And our experiences shape our biology.

Trauma changes our biology, and changes us.

Trauma is formed when events are so distressing they overwhelm our ability to cope with what happened. When we feel trapped, threatened, or deeply violated, and alone, our nervous system becomes stuck in survival mode. This is trauma – when the body and brain keep acting as if the danger is still present, even long after it’s over. It is the body’s response when the event exceeds what we can handle.

It rewires our brain. It changes our breathing. It tenses our muscles. We vacillate between panic and anger, and numbness and collapse. Trauma is as much a physical malady as it is a mental one, where the original traumatic experience is encoded throughout our body.

While any physical exercise can help release tension and endorphins, yoga is particularly well suited to help those living with trauma. While most other forms of exercise rely on tensing the body, in yoga we must consciously relax into poses (you can’t tense your way into flexibility). Also, the emphasis on matching breath and movement help improve our interoception – our ability to be aware of and also interpret signals within our body. This can be as simple as knowing we are hungry or thirsty, but also allows us to better recognize a racing heart means we are anxious or a heavy heart means we are sad.

Yoga, through breath, movement, and concentration, helps restore the balance between our sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) systems. This can activate the body’s calm state and help make us feel safe. Yoga also helps us release the physical tension we are holding in our bodies while improving our emotional regulation, which helps us become less reactive to stressors.

It’s no great wonder why yoga felt like therapy to me when I first started practicing. Like in therapy, I came away from each session understanding and even liking myself a little better. Each breath softened my heart, each pose released the tension I had been holding tightly. Both yoga and psychotherapy helped me reconnect to myself, and heal the wounds I carried, and I don’t believe I could have resolved them without both practices.

I still don’t close my eyes in savasana and I may never be able to, but that’s ok. My healing is still ongoing, and with every practice (on the mat or on the couch) brings me closer to peace.

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