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Reclaiming Safety in Your Body
Reclaiming Safety in Your Body
Our Yoga for Trauma class isn’t about perfect poses or pushing limits. It’s about coming home, to your body, your breath, your sense of safety.
For many of us, trauma disrupts not just our emotional world, but our physical one too. The body remembers what the mind can’t always say. Tension builds, breath shortens, and even resting can feel like a risk. This class is here to change that. Together, we create a space where safety is rebuilt from the inside out, slowly, gently, and with deep respect for each person’s unique experience.
Why We Lead with Safety
Why We Lead with Safety
Trauma puts the nervous system on high alert, always bracing, always scanning for what might go wrong. In this constant state of survival, it’s nearly impossible to relax, connect, or heal. That’s why everything in this class is built around one core principle: you have to feel safe to heal.
We don’t just say that. Research backs it up.
Renowned trauma expert Dr. Bessel van der Kolk states, “Safety and terror are incompatible.” 2 The nervous system cannot regulate itself unless it senses safety. Without this foundation, trauma responses like anxiety, dissociation, or hypervigilance, remain activated. 8
Neuroscience confirms that only when we feel safe can the ventral vagal pathway of the autonomic nervous system activate. This is the part responsible for calm, connection, and healing.3, 4
Why We Focus on Trauma
Why We Focus on Trauma
Trauma isn’t just the event, it’s the lasting impact it has on your nervous system, memory, sense of self, and ability to feel safe. As Dr. Gabor Maté explains, trauma is “not what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”1
Whether your trauma stems from childhood experiences, chronic stress, medical trauma, or something else entirely, the body can carry its imprint for years. This imprint may show up as chronic tension, emotional overwhelm, numbness, or a constant feeling of being on edge.
Trauma-informed yoga offers a gentle way to address these embodied responses by creating space for movement, stillness, and self-awareness in a safe, grounded environment.
Why We Work Through the Body
Why We Work Through the Body
Modern neuroscience and somatic psychology agree: trauma is held in the body. Bessel van der Kolk, in The Body Keeps the Score, writes that traumatic stress literally reshapes both body and brain and that healing requires working with the body.2
In trauma-informed yoga, we don’t need to revisit painful memories or tell our story out loud. We simply begin to move in ways that promote safety, choice, and reconnection. This helps gently re-pattern the nervous system and begin to shift the internal sense of threat toward a sense of safety.
Why We Go Slow
Why We Go Slow
A dysregulated nervous system often can’t handle fast-paced or overly stimulating environments. Many survivors experience chronic fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. So in this class, we choose slowness and stillness as our medicine.
Dr. Stephen Porges, creator of Polyvagal Theory, explains that the nervous system needs signals of safety in order to come out of protective states and into connection.3 That’s why our classes are paced intentionally to help shift you from hyperarousal (anxiety, panic, overwhelm) or hypoarousal (numbness, shutdown, dissociation) into a more regulated window of tolerance.
Slowness is not a lack of strength, it’s a trauma-sensitive strategy rooted in neuroscience.
Why We Include the Subconscious
Why We Include the Subconscious
Trauma is stored not just in the body, but in the subconscious mind. Our protective patterns, core beliefs, and emotional habits are often encoded beneath conscious awareness.
By slowing down and using mindful practices that encourage presence and integration, we help create conditions for the subconscious mind to release stored stress. Practices that engage the parasympathetic nervous system, especially the ventral vagal branch, can help bring us out of survival mode and into a state of grounded awareness.4
We’re not just stretching the body, we’re creating space for the nervous system to reorganize itself.
Why We Emphasize Choice
Why We Emphasize Choice
One of the most painful aspects of trauma is the experience of powerlessness. That’s why offering choice is essential in a trauma-informed space. You’re always invited to make decisions that feel right for your body, whether that means trying a movement, modifying it, or skipping it entirely.
As trauma expert Judith Herman notes in Trauma and Recovery, healing happens when survivors are able to reclaim control over their bodies and their lives.5 Every invitation in our class is an opportunity to practice this reclamation.
Why We Include Rest
Why We Include Rest
In a culture that prizes productivity and urgency, rest can feel foreign, especially to trauma survivors who have learned to survive by staying busy, alert, or hyper-independent.
Yet true healing requires rest. When the body is supported and allowed to relax, it enters the parasympathetic state where repair and integration can occur. Long-held tension can begin to melt, and the emotional body can start to soften.
Research from Harvard Medical School has shown that practices activating the relaxation response can reduce the harmful effects of chronic stress and improve overall emotional regulation.6
We end each class with at least 5-10 minutes of savasana or extended rest, not to “wind down,” but because rest is a vital part of trauma recovery.
Why We Hold Space for Emotions
Why We Hold Space for Emotions
In trauma, emotions often get suppressed or stored. Whether it’s grief, anger, shame, or even joy, many people have learned to disconnect from emotional experience in order to survive.
Our class doesn’t aim to provoke emotion, but it does create a safe space where feelings can emerge and be met with compassion. As Peter Levine, founder of Somatic Experiencing, teaches: “Trauma is about loss of connection, to ourselves, our bodies, to others, and to the world around us.”7 We rebuild that connection slowly, gently, and with great care.
Why We Believe in This Practice
Why We Believe in This Practice
Over time, trauma-informed yoga can help:
Restore a sense of safety in the body
Increase nervous system flexibility
Support emotional regulation
Build self-compassion and self-trust
Offer new ways to experience presence, calm, and connection
This is not a quick fix. It’s a gentle, ongoing practice of re-inhabiting your body and your life. Of learning to be with yourself, without needing to be “better” or “healed” first.
A Note About Our Class
A Note About Our Class
We offer this class the first week of every month, both in person and online, to make it as accessible as possible. Whether you're brand new to yoga or have practiced for years, you're welcome just as you are. No experience is necessary. Your story is honored here.
This Class May Resonate With You If:
This Class May Resonate With You If:
You feel stuck in a cycle of overwhelm, burnout, or people-pleasing
You’re working through trauma or chronic stress
You feel disconnected from your body or emotions
You crave a sense of grounding and internal safety
You want tools for nervous system regulation
You Are Not Alone
You Are Not Alone
Healing doesn’t happen in isolation, it happens in safe, supported space. And sometimes, it begins with a single hour of showing up, breathing gently, and letting your body remember: I am safe now. I am allowed to rest. I get to choose what healing looks like.
We’re here to support you, one breath at a time.
We’re here to support you, one breath at a time.
Yoga for Trauma – Reclaiming Safety
First Week of Every Month
In Person & Zoom Options
Sources:
Sources:
Maté, Gabor. The Myth of Normal, 2022.
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score, 2014.
Porges, Stephen. The Pocket Guide to Polyvagal Theory, 2017.
Dana, Deb. Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory, 2021.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery, 1992.
Benson, Herbert. “Relaxation Response.” Harvard Health Publishing, 1975 onward.
Levine, Peter. Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma, 1997.
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/post-traumatic-stress-disorder-ptsd
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