Yoga and Inhabiting the Body

Post by Mary Smith

Our discussion started with our first impressions around yoga: “You have to bend in weird places”, and “you have to be able to stand on your head” also, “I think of leotards”, and “naked yoga — goes with culture”. It seemed that once we voiced our own anxieties about doing yoga that our group could enter into more in-depth subject matter involving trauma and how it affects the body.
In the “Yoga” chapter in The Body Keeps The Score, Van Der Kolk writes of a woman, Annie, who was abused in her childhood by both parents, so that she was initially unable to identify feelings or speak at all about her trauma. So, Van Der Kolk had Annie do some deep breathing and Qigong exercises until she raised her eyes from the floor and even smiled. Van Der Kolk went on to work with Annie as she started to regularly do yoga to get in touch with her body.
According to Van Der Kolk, through yoga, one can start to identify muscles that are active at different times, notice emotions that come up in certain poses, and begin to befriend any sensation without judgment, and this produces changes in the mind. Yoga cultivates mindfulness as a person pays attention to what is happening in her body, and she may eventually begin to translate sensations into language. This happened in Annie’s case, after a few years, she could talk somewhat freely about her experienced abuse. Although yoga seems intimidating, it’s meant to cultivate mindfulness, help regulate emotions, and help us identify trauma stored in our bodies.
As women, we tend to store trauma in our bodies, and our group began to wonder what trauma we carry from our ancestors, particularly from the women in our individual family trees. We speculated that women in our generational line hadn’t voiced harm done to their own bodies due to past oppression through societal norms. So, as a group we wondered how we could break the generational curses and resolve trauma in our own bodies passed down that has no verbal narrative. However, after reading this chapter, I wonder if yoga is another way women who hold unknown trauma in their bodies can begin to get to resolve pain in some way, even if this part of our history may not translate into a verbal and coherent part of our stories.