How can trauma informed movement programs support peacebuilding?

By Samara Andrade

Samara is a yoga teacher & movement educator, co-founder of Feet on the Ground and the Aid Worker Wellness Directory and currently works for the United Nations in New York. Along with Emily Pantalone and Nathalie Bittar, she will be presenting yoga workshops and classes at Build Peace 2016, which takes place September 9–11 at ETH Zürich, in Switzerland. For more, see our conference programs.

At first glance you might wonder what yoga and peacebuilding have to do with one another. Part of that may depend on what your perception of yoga is, and what your understanding of peacebuilding is. Working in development, crisis and post-conflict countries over the last 10 years, I have always found myself working on peacebuilding and social cohesion in some way, shape or form. Whether the program was actually called peacebuilding or not, the softer side of programming often spoke to me, specifically, how to hold space for, how to foster those intangibles, those elements of society that exist or don’t exist, or hang by thin threads.

Working with communities affected by conflict, with women associated with armed forces and groups with ex-combatants in Sudan, I saw how important not only those intangibles are at a societal or community level, but also those intangibles in interpersonal relationships and in each individual in terms of how they cope with and recover from the trauma of war and how they re-build. Understanding the depth of those intangibles in relationships, of that transition back home or back to living together, when one or both people, and their children, has experienced war. How can they re-knit the foundation of their relationship, of their family unit, so that not only they can move forward but so that their community and the society where they live can have the best chance to move forward? So much of that often starts at the individual level, in coming to terms with, in coping with, our experiences.

As peacebuilding practitioners we may seek to jump straight into community peacebuilding and recovery programs, not always recognizing that often before an individual can effectively engage in these community projects or structures, they need to find ways to constructively deal with their experiences of conflict. With limited human and financial resources for psychosocial support, how can we still find ways to effectively support individuals and communities recover from conflict?

For decades cultures around the world have been using their own indigenous methods to do this, be it through dance, movement, community healing ceremonies, etc. In South Kordofan, after aerial bombings, communities often celebrate with dancing and traditions around a fire. It is some way a modality to work through the experience individually and collectively with movement and voice, and some way to connect with one another. In recent years western medicine has begun to recognize the importance of complementary therapies to more traditional approaches to therapy and counseling to deal with individual and collective experiences. Art therapy and new research in trauma-informed yoga based movement methods have demonstrated the impact on the brain, particularly on parts of the brain which are affected by trauma. And yet all too often these softer projects, like peacebuilding, are undervalued and underfunded where it comes to supporting individuals, families and communities recover from conflict and disaster.

Over the years, I also saw how my work colleagues, national and international staff, and myself, also worked at those intangibles but from a different angle: how to cope with the contexts where we lived or worked. How did one work through constructively the frustrations, the injustice around them, the heartbreak, and also the beautifully rewarding moments of truly supporting and holding space for communities and individuals to re-knit the social and individual fabric of their lives? How does one straddle the life we have at work, with the person our family and friends expect to see in our personal lives? How can we share a piece of that world with them in a way that is authentic, genuine, and in a way they can relate to? These were all struggles I found myself working with as I moved from one country to another over the years.

I developed a more committed and focused yoga practice before I entered this career field and what I appreciated the most was that it was the only constant in my life no matter where I was in the world. My yoga mat became a place for me to return to me, to process things, to reconnect, and allow me to then better express and communicate with those in my life about my experiences. I became a yoga teacher in 2011 and began teaching in every country I worked because I believe in the amazing benefits that self- care practices like movement, breath, meditation, etc. could offer. Learning the science behind what happens to brain in high stress environments where our fight and flight systems are consistently activated, and what practical things I can do regularly to stimulate the Vagus nerve and activate my rest and digest system, allowed me to take self-care into my own hands.

The western world is also beginning to recognize the importance of self-care and wellness programs as something essential for organizations to invest in to support the wellbeing of staff. Such programs can support staff to deal with stress, they can increase resilience, and combat burnout. But just as the softer parts of peacebuilding programs, they are often underfunded and under supported by organizations and donors even though we know how important those intangibles are. Just as we value the individuals, the people at the center of the programs we work on, shouldn’t we also value the people who are running these programs?

We invite you to join us and explore these topics and more during the yoga segment of the Build peace conference this year in Zurich.

During Build Peace, join us at the:

• Yoga & Trauma workshop: Friday September 9th from 16:00–18:00
• Health & Wellness for Peacebuilders workshop: Saturday September 10th from 14:00–16:00
• Morning yoga classes: Saturday September 10th & Sunday September 11th from 7:30–8:30