If you feel disconnected from your body, numb, frozen, disembodied, or frightened of/gripped by unpredictable, uncontrollable feelings, sensations, or somatic experiences, then Trauma Sensitive Yoga could help.
Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TSY) is an intervention designed to treat those who identify as surviving a history of accumulative abuse or neglect (Complex PTSD), and is taught in a very different way to that of a normal yoga class. The most important difference is the focus is on interoception and the subjective experience of both facilitator and student/client, rather than what shape the form takes or the rhythm of those shapes. The student/client is invited to choose their own rhythm, and make their own choices based on what the yoga forms feel like for them.
TSY focuses on learning to become aware of your body though interoception: practising to recognise sensation, or lack of sensation, in the body. Every aspect of the practice is collaborative, invitational, and choice orientated, to facilitate in the client a sense of safety and autonomy.
The Yoga forms are offered as an option, not a given. This is a non-hierarchical, subjective endeavour where the teacher works alongside the client, experiencing the practise with them. It is about facilitating an opportunity to build experiences of interoception, while being able to make choices about what one does with one body during the practise. This has the potential to be healing because it invites an experience within the context of relational safety.
Different from Trauma Sensitive Yoga is Yoga. As I teach it, yoga is a functional, mobility based and progressive strength practice intertwined with the more classical yoga forms that focus on flexibility and playful expressions of yoga shapes, and/or relaxation (restorative yoga). The focus is on improving your movement patterns, and bodily awareness (an embodied mind), to feel better in your body.
The way I make use of Trauma Sensitive Yoga
1) Within the psychotherapy hour.
When it has been thought about together with the client, and I have made an assessment based on my clinical understanding, we may come to an agreement to include some time (a few minutes, or more) for TSY during the talking therapy.
2) TSY as a stand alone treatment, either privately one to one or within a 6-8 week group programme.
If you are interested in TSY as a stand alone treatment, I am available to talk with you on the phone to discuss this option further. It is helpful to think of TSY in this capacity as an adjunct to talking therapy, which would be with a different therapist than the one providing the TSY.
Sarai's Yoga Background
Before training as a psychotherapist, I taught yoga full time in London for 15 years (YAP accred. Senior Teacher). After training as a psychotherapist my interest in how I could use yoga therapeutically grew, and the research undertaken by Bessel van der Kolk and David Emerson at the Trauma Centre at JRI, Massechusetts has been the link that led me to The Yoga Clinic's 20 hr Trauma Sensitive Yoga training, and the use of Trauma Sensitive Yoga as an intervention for C-PTSD.
I have taught a culturally diverse range of people from various socio-economic backgrounds, including adults, children, the elderly and those with special needs, with many different somatic and psychological presentations. My interest lies in facilitating a safe space for growth and development.
Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TSY) is an intervention designed to treat those who identify as surviving a history of accumulative abuse or neglect (Complex PTSD), and is taught in a very different way to that of a normal yoga class. The most important difference is the focus is on interoception and the subjective experience of both facilitator and student/client, rather than what shape the form takes or the rhythm of those shapes. The student/client is invited to choose their own rhythm, and make their own choices based on what the yoga forms feel like for them.
TSY focuses on learning to become aware of your body though interoception: practising to recognise sensation, or lack of sensation, in the body. Every aspect of the practice is collaborative, invitational, and choice orientated, to facilitate in the client a sense of safety and autonomy.
The Yoga forms are offered as an option, not a given. This is a non-hierarchical, subjective endeavour where the teacher works alongside the client, experiencing the practise with them. It is about facilitating an opportunity to build experiences of interoception, while being able to make choices about what one does with one body during the practise. This has the potential to be healing because it invites an experience within the context of relational safety.
Different from Trauma Sensitive Yoga is Yoga. As I teach it, yoga is a functional, mobility based and progressive strength practice intertwined with the more classical yoga forms that focus on flexibility and playful expressions of yoga shapes, and/or relaxation (restorative yoga). The focus is on improving your movement patterns, and bodily awareness (an embodied mind), to feel better in your body.
The way I make use of Trauma Sensitive Yoga
1) Within the psychotherapy hour.
When it has been thought about together with the client, and I have made an assessment based on my clinical understanding, we may come to an agreement to include some time (a few minutes, or more) for TSY during the talking therapy.
2) TSY as a stand alone treatment, either privately one to one or within a 6-8 week group programme.
If you are interested in TSY as a stand alone treatment, I am available to talk with you on the phone to discuss this option further. It is helpful to think of TSY in this capacity as an adjunct to talking therapy, which would be with a different therapist than the one providing the TSY.
Sarai's Yoga Background
Before training as a psychotherapist, I taught yoga full time in London for 15 years (YAP accred. Senior Teacher). After training as a psychotherapist my interest in how I could use yoga therapeutically grew, and the research undertaken by Bessel van der Kolk and David Emerson at the Trauma Centre at JRI, Massechusetts has been the link that led me to The Yoga Clinic's 20 hr Trauma Sensitive Yoga training, and the use of Trauma Sensitive Yoga as an intervention for C-PTSD.
I have taught a culturally diverse range of people from various socio-economic backgrounds, including adults, children, the elderly and those with special needs, with many different somatic and psychological presentations. My interest lies in facilitating a safe space for growth and development.
