Dear reader: This blog contains mentions of mental health difficulties including suicidality, depression, anxiety, and PTSD which some may find triggering or discomforting. Please proceed with care.
Hello Our Wave readers! I wanted to provide a special blog for you all to show how I explore healing in my life outside of creating social media content for Our Wave. I interviewed my yoga teacher, Aline Marie of Newtown Yoga Center because her trauma-informed practice was evident from the first day I took a class there. Aside from yoga feeling like a safe way to come back into my body, I learned through Aline’s teaching that not all yoga practices are created equal. There are ways to accommodate yourself in somatic practices, one way being to explore trauma-informed yoga. Read below to hear Aline’s amazing story.
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Brooke: I’m interested in what drew you to yoga during a difficult time in your life. What made it feel like a safe place for you to go?
Aline: There’s a bit of a layered answer. In 1998 I had taken yoga in college as a gym elective and I had no idea what I was doing. It was in a group of like 70 people in a gymnasium and I felt I didn't understand any of it. They would teach us poses, but not really explain why we were doing it. I just knew it felt good. We even had a yoga test at the end where we were supposed to memorize the sequence of a Sun Salutation but I was out that day. So I failed the test part, but I passed the class because I showed up.
Fast forward to 2003, and I was in a situation where I had a lot of traumatic things going on. I was living out of my truck. I was in over my head and experiencing depression, anxiety, and panic attacks with almost no support. There was very little mental health awareness at the time. I ended up taking a yoga class on what may have been my last day on Earth, with the little money I had.
I muddled through the class and did my best to keep up and we ended with Savasana, or final resting pose. I was lying on the ground and the instructor put her hands on my feet in a very loving and gentle way. It caused a release in me. I ugly cried.
I thanked her and began to do yoga with the few poses I knew and a towel as a mat, day by day not knowing if it would be my last. But little by little, I kept putting it off. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was changing my nervous system. I was regulating how my brain and body responded to the world.
Brooke: That’s amazing, thank you for sharing. As simple as it sounds, doing a few poses over and over gave you that thread to continue. Were you getting back into your body?
Aline: Yeah, a hundred percent the body became not a place of punishment, but a place of discovery. It stopped being like a prison that trapped me here on earth and it started to become this like, wow, what is going on here?
Like the ability to feel sensations in the body just more awareness of hands and feet, how my body moved, how my muscles worked.
There was empowerment in knowing that my back was bothering me, and that now I had a tool set to know what to do or not to do to make my back feel better. If I was agitated how to come down off that agitation, if I was stressed out, now I have a tool to not be stressed out.
As a classically trained illustrator and painter, being able to express the way I’m feeling visually in yoga poses was meaningful. This was especially important having grown up in a generation that was not as mental-health-aware as we are now.
Brooke: Yoga was that first step to trusting yourself and the ways you felt. I think that is very important in the context of Our Wave, too. Survivors of sexual harm can struggle with the ways their body naturally reacted in a traumatic situation, and yoga is a way to find the tools to handle the ways your body responds with compassion. I’ve found that for myself, too.
Aline: As a survivor myself, I think the power of choice is very meaningful too. At first, that choice was to continue living or not, but yoga helped me translate choice into the body. Do I put my foot here, or do I put it there? Do I use a block as a prop, or do I not?
And then those small choices on the mat translated into choices in daily life. I could better discern who I wanted to associate with, what I wanted to say or keep to myself, and what places I wanted to go.
It made me realize I am not fatally flawed. I can help myself with compassion.
Brooke: There are so many good pieces to what you are saying. It reminds me of trauma-informed principles–the sense of safety created by being free to choose. I notice how you offer that as a teacher as well. I want to know how you eventually came to teach trauma-informed Yoga.
Aline: During that difficult time in my life, I was working at a restaurant and one of my regular customers was the human resources director at a residential rehabilitation center for kids. She knew some of my yoga story so she offered that I teach a class there. I had nothing to lose so I tried it. I taught them some simple poses and sang them Sarah McLaughlan songs and guided them to rest with some eye pillows. These girls were very traumatized. It was wonderful to see them come out of Savasana so relaxed. It was like rainbows were pouring out of them.
I continued to teach like this, with different groups of kids and eventually got my training at the Kripalu Institute. I began teaching in studios from there and really enjoyed incorporating the invitational, interoceptive Yoga teaching I learned there. What do you feel? What do you notice?
This style also doesn’t incorporate much physical touch from the instructor either, which feels trauma-informed. There isn’t that unpredictability factor that survivors may be sensitive to.
I took additional trainings in trauma-informed yoga and restorative yoga which was also so powerful.
Brooke: What did you learn there?
Aline: I learned a lot from Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk about trauma-sensitive language and interrelating with others. Jillian Pransky also offered powerful teachings about releasing the psoas, or the muscle at the bottom of the diaphragm. This happens through restorative poses and can help us take fuller breaths progressively, which lends itself to new baselines of emotional regulation. The more oxygen in the body, the lower the heart rate, and the less activation in the amygdala, which is a brain region responsible for hyper-vigilance or anxiety.
Brooke: Having been your student, these teachings are evident and I really appreciate learning from you. Did some of these trauma informed principles come naturally to you after what you experienced in life?
Aline: Absolutely. Learning them formally gave me the language to understand them more deeply. And now I want to tell everyone about it! It’s very exploratory, and it doesn’t have to be expensive.
Brooke: That education is so important. There are only so many ways to talk about trauma, so being in the body can be so valuable.
Aline: Yes it’s very helpful. So many mental disorders can have roots in the body too, so I try to be mindful of my diet and how I treat it. Lately, it’s been monitoring which foods raise histamine levels, which I’ve learned can figure into things like ADHD and PTSD when they are too high. Understanding how the body works and being mindful has really helped me.
Brooke: How would you define healing from trauma?
Aline: Wow, that’s a beautiful question. In my younger years, I always thought that healing had an endpoint. But I’ve come to learn that healing is an adaptive response to situations that used to destroy me or collapse me. It’s having a strong ability to stay in my center. It’s recovering my nervous system and being able to file away the distress I once experienced. I’ve recognized that as a command of the prefrontal cortex.
Brooke: If someone were having a really terrible day in their healing, what advice, would you, as a yoga teacher, give them?
Aline: Everybody's terrible is a little different, right? Sometimes you may need to burn off energy and sometimes you may need to rest. If you’re caught in a thought spiral I would say it’s most beneficial to move forward. Do a down dog if you’re able, or a forward fold, or a mountain pose, or just stand on your mat and swing your arms. Whatever feels good.
If you’re deeply depleted and exhausted, lay down and put your legs over a couch cushion, a pillow, or something just to elevate them. This helps release the psoas muscle, which we talked about earlier.
Brooke: Thank you so much for your words, and for being a wonderful Yoga teacher. I really appreciate the time you took today.
Aline: Thank you so much for asking me to do this. It has been a pleasure.
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Thank you so much for reading this interview! And how impactful it was. If you feel disconnected from yourself and your body, trauma-informed yoga can be a place that welcomes you. Learn more about Aline and her yoga studio here.
