What is Trauma Sensitive Yoga?

Through movement, breathing and meditation exercises, body awareness is trained. Movement exercises are performed in a perception-oriented way, not performance-oriented. The attention of the practitioner is directed inwards. Self-efficacy and the ability to self-regulate can develop on the basis of a stable self-perception. By adopting certain postures and consciously perceiving the body, limits can be experienced, which in turn strengthens the practitioner's self-awareness. Traumas lead to immobility and rigidity. Gentle movements, shaking, stretching, bouncing can help to release from this rigidity.
 

 

 

For whom is Trauma Sensitive Yoga suitable?

Trauma is a strong psychological shock or "mental wounding" that poses a threat to the life or physical or psychological integrity of the person affected and therefore requires medical or psychotherapeutic treatment. According to the biophysicist, psychologist, psychotraumatologist and author Peter Levine, trauma is the biologically incomplete response of the body to a situation experienced as life-threatening. The result is a regulatory disturbance in the autonomic nervous system, which calls for a physical completion of the interrupted cycle, and a harmonisation of the autonomic nervous system. Since practising trauma-sensitive yoga can cause strong emotional reactions, it is important that those affected are stabilised beforehand. Traumatised persons who come into contact with trauma-sensitive yoga exercises in yoga therapy or also in Polarity therapy are therefore ideally undergoing or have completed psychotherapy. The effectiveness of therapy is largely influenced by the quality of the relationship between client and therapist.
 

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