After a decade of teaching and practicing yoga, I finally understood and felt, what it was like to, 'come home to my body', via a Trauma Informed Yoga Practice. Until that point, I hadn't quite realised the impact on my nervous system of being hyper vigilant, the impact off constantly orienting my personal space, my work environment, and the community I lived and grew up in. My former occupation in NI left me with the feelings of constant fear for my personal safety, and the safety of my family. As a result of these experiences I would suffer flashbacks, paralysing night terrors and hyper vigilance.
It's been three years now since I became a Trauma Resilience Embodied Yoga (TREY) & Social Impact Teacher. Not only did my own yoga practice change but how I taught and teach yoga has changed dramatically.
My previous experiences have shaped my career as both an Intuitive Energy Healer, a BodyWorker, and a Trauma Informed Yoga Teacher. My role as a therapist was to support and help individuals, families and groups who had experienced high levels of stress, depression, anxiety and trauma, by helping them reconnect to their body as a whole, through healing modalities such as Trauma Touch Massage, and Intuitive Energy Healing.
My role as Trauma Informed Yoga Teacher is to provide a safe space, and to respect your physical and emotional boundaries, while helping you rebuild your sense of self. We reconnect mind and body, who aren't seperate, through breath awareness and mindful, embodied movement. Thus enabling you to experience your whole body together, your body as a whole.
In this bringing the whole body together I'm sharing the three qualities we use in class and invite you to try them for yourself.
Curiosity
Curiosity is our door into the present moment. Cultivating a quality of curiosity allows us to arrive in the present moment. We begin to shift our focus from the expected or wanted outcome into a more embodied experience. We experience and sense what is present and what is possible for us in this moment. Without curiosity we can end up focusing on what the pose looks like, rather than how it feels.
When you cultivate curiosity in your practice, you can allow yourself to connect with your own rhythm, your own breath cycle and then move forward at the right pace for you. You begin to notice which poses feel nourishing and which poses cause you to feel uneasy or disconnected. This enables you to practice the poses that help you feel more connected, calmer and the feeling of stability.
Openness
Cultivating a quality of openness creates space for, 'noticing what we notice'. Often we are either unaware of what is present, which is mostly the case, or we reject/deny what is already here. We do this because it feels uncomfortable and we feel uneasy. Quite often it is without the words to match our experience. We try to fix that unwanted experience by looking to external factors, or by forcing and making it into something different. This creates an inner struggle, a feeling of competitiveness and inner conflict. Not only does this take us away from the present moment and ourselves it can lead to feelings of not being good enough. By creating more space to notice what we notice, we can show up to our practice however we are. That may be happy, sad, energised, hyper, tired, calm, anxious or depressed. That's okay. There is space for the whole of you. There is no seperation between mind and body and the whole of you is welcome, just as you are.
Kindness/Compassion
Cultivating a quality of kindness allows us to bring a gentler approach into our whole experience. It can soften the edges of our awareness because awareness without compassion can be painful. Compassion softens the impact of our harsh critical inner parts. Kindness and compassion allows us to acknowledge our shared human experience and the need for more compassion. Compassion for ourselves and others. Cultivating compassion helps us stay grounded, stable and connected with ourselves, connected with our needs, and others.
Begin to notice when you embody these three qualities - curiosity, openness and compassion, how
you move towards inner stability, more connection and a sense of safety.
If this is not your current experience, remember you have a choice. Give yourself permission to choose a safe nurturing space in which to practice coming home to your body.
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