Subjects

Key Objectives

1. What is Trauma:

How it Interrupts and impacts Our Ability to Relax, React and Respond

• To understand why and how everyone walking into a yoga class/retreat has unresolved trauma and the symptoms: addiction, anxiety, depression, repressed or overt expression and anger, disembodiment, dissociation, de-regulation and potential issues with maintaining healthy boundaries or sabotaging behaviours.
• To fully understand the neurophysiology of the autonomic nervous system — the fight/flight/freeze/fawn response — and how each one impacts the ability to relax, react or respond, and what this means within the context of a yoga class.
• To understand the dangers of working with unresolved trauma: risk of rage, dissociation, flashbacks, emotional flooding, and how, particularly where personal boundaries have previously been violated, an inability to state personal needs can result in further physical, mental or emotional suffering.
• To explore where, as teachers, our own unresolved trauma and lack of self-regulation impacts our ability to cultivate or sustain therapeutic presence, and hold a grounded, safe space for others, while learning simple somatic practices for our own self-care.
• To know the difference between a ‘normal’ yoga class, and how this might fail to support a trauma survivor, versus a trauma-informed yoga class, and what the key fundamental differences are, both for students and teachers.

2. Signs of Trauma:

How to Spot and Safely Support Any Body That’s Holding Trauma

• To explore in detail where and why core areas of the body typically store unresolved trauma and through attuning our observational skills, learn to recognise the visual, verbal and physiological cues in students to assist them in befriending the body.
• To further explore and develop our own relationship to bodily sensation — interoception — to cultivate embodied awareness and learn to listen to, track, and respond to what our own bodies are really saying to us.
• To learn somatic skills that will enable you to guide others in hearing what their bodies are really saying, rather than encouraging over-ride, which can de-regulate, cause injury, trigger flashbacks or further develop bracing or armouring, rather than soften it.
• To understand specific asana, pranayama and meditation techniques for safely supporting trauma bound energy in key areas of the body and chakras — root/solar plexus/heart/throat — so as to teach and safely tailor classes according to the underlying physical, energetic or physiological patterns that we ‘see’ in class.
• To practice teach yoga sequences that target specific areas of trauma bound energy, incorporating cues that cultivate students awareness of bodily sensation, to safely speak to and respond to signs of dissociation, ungroundedness, hypo-arousal or hyper-arousal and aid any body that shows signs of armouring, inflexibility or injury.

3. TIY Class Content: Appropriate Touch, Asana,

Cues, Communication, Container and Presence

• To further examine how to create safe containers, and how the wrong language, music, tone, cues, touch and presence can trigger dissociation, constriction or fear, rather than trust and relaxation, in those who’ve previously experienced being bodily shamed, inapropriate or violent touch, verbal assault or bullying, and experiment with appropriate content to support this unique group.
• To develop our therapeutic presence, communication style and listening ability so that we can provide co-regulation, allowing students to feel heard and held. To explore the ethics of teaching TIY and how we can stay within our scope of practice rather than cross into the realms of being ‘healer’ or ‘therapist’.
• To practice teach a dynamic sequence while remaining self-regulated, using appropriate class content — music, tone, sequencing and cues — that safely transitions students between asana’s, encourages choice and self-adjustments, while using yourtherapeutic presence or touch, where needed, to support students accordingly.
• To explore methods for gaining student feedback regarding our TIY teaching to continuously improve and adapt the content to meet the group’s needs: whether it’s a private session, regular class, special needs group, or those going in deep on retreat.

4. Resourcing, Regulation and Resilience:

How to Offer Safety, Consent, Choice and Grounding

• To explore the terms ‘felt sense of safety’ and ‘boundaries’ in an experiental way, so that as teachers, we can learn to first establish safety for ourselves, so we can then cultivate safe space for our students. And, to understand how our own, or lack of boundaries, impacts our capacity to protect not only ourselves, but also our students.
• To understand how and why trauma from violent or inappropriate touch impacts boundaries, the capacity for self-protection, choice and ability to ask for needs to be met. Exploring how this creates ‘hot-spots’ in the body, causing freeze in the ‘avenue of expression,’ often pushing us into ‘putting-up’ with touch that can be uncomfortable, and what this means in relation to teaching a TIY class.
• To gain awareness of why poviding choice is essential in trauma-informed yoga, and that achieving the ‘asana’ is not the goal, but cultivating ‘agency’ is. Learning the importance of specific somatic practices that will ground ourselves and others, to counter the trauma responses of dissociation, de-regulation and dis-embodiment that frequently happen for survivors during a yoga class.
• To practice teach from a place of self-regulation, creating a container of safety with clearly established non-verbal consent, consistently encouraging choice, providing grounding and self-regulation practices to cultivate trust in the student-teacher relationship and towards our own bodies and its sensations.

5. Cross-Cultural Sensitivity:

Taking Your Trauma-informed Yoga to the World

• To gain an understanding of what cross cultural sensitivity means and to explore our own culture, ethics, beliefs, problems, morals, religious principles, standards and how, as a teacher, we would feel if these were not considered or honored by others.
• To uncover hidden stereotypes, ethnocentric beliefs and biases that we may have in working with people who are different to us. Exploring self-awareness around perceptions of body-type, clothing, touch, etiquette and communication so we can develop culturally appropriate classes that build trust, authenticity, safety, openness, and community within traumatised populations.
• To learn how to adapt teaching style, particularly where language barriers exist, so as to be able to maintain therapeutic presence, engagement and still effectively deliver a safe and supportive class.
• To understand the difficulties of adapting trauma-informed yoga to specific cultural groups, to role-play solutions, and practice teach sequences and class set-up’s that are tailored to such sensitivities. To teach to an individual or group where cross-cultural sensitivity is required, seeking student feedback and self-evaluation, to define areas of accomplishment, improvement and how to incorporate changes.

6. Teaching TIY:

Integrating, Evaluating and Creating Programs for Specific Communities.

• To develop your ability to successfully sequence and lead a TIY class: having established non-verbal consent, self-regulation and a ‘felt sense of safety’, cultivating choice, encouraging embodied awareness and self-adjustments, while observing signs of trauma in students bodies and using relevant cues, language, music, touch, and therapeutic presence during the class.
• To learn how to design a TIY program for a specific population, and present it to a clinical team using their language, and demonstrating how you will monitor and evaluate the efficiacy and benefits of the program via feedback loops. And, how to handle inter-departmental communications with management of care organisations.
• To begin integrating TIY at home within your community, through self-practice and exploring where and how the theories presented during the training contact-hours show-up within various styles of yoga and classes.
• To practice teach three TIY classes to fellow students, an individual, and a small group of a traumatised population, to establish confidence, give space to make mistakes, gain supervised feedback, and evaluate your teaching experiences to identify areas of strength and weakness, to determine how to continue advancing and improving.