Trauma-Informed Yoga
In May 2019, I completed classroom coursework for Healing Techniques for Trauma and Chronic Pain, a continuing education training course for advanced yoga instructors and energy healers. The trauma-informed teaching methodology course was collaboratively created by Nancy Candea, founding director of Yoga Impact Institute, and Juanita Martin, founding director of Your Reiki Relief. This course combined science with relatable real-world content that helped me to understand my personal experience with terrible traumatic events. I learned how to support students that show up carrying their trauma to the mat. This course was a catalyst for me to dig deeper into the experiences that shape the soft spots in us. The places made tender by trauma and those that are easily triggered. Traumatic events played on repeat in my mind before a decade worth of mindfulness work made clear the spaces in me that still needed healing. Two years of talk therapy and three years of trauma-informed training transformed my healing journey and inspired me to teach tangible tools to help people cope with stress and trauma.
Understanding Trauma
Some of the common known traumas are child abuse, physical and sexual violence, fires, and other natural disasters. Covert forms of trauma are subversive to the human psyche and subconscious. Examples of subtle and seldom understood traumas are psychological and emotional abuse, poverty, and witnessing a traumatic event happen to someone else. The brain registers stress, trauma, and danger the same whether they witness a terrible event or if the person experiences it directly. Shock and denial are typical trauma responses. Alternate reactions are depression, anxiety, and other mental health implications. Unchecked carry-on baggage can lead to:
· Feeling disconnected from ones' self
· Continuous connection and communication problems others
· Sleep issues like insomnia
· Learning difficulties
· Addiction and substance abuse
· Self-harm and other unhealthy coping skills
Unpacking the things that weigh on us frees us up to fly with ease and soar to our highest heights. The staggering statistics on traumatic experiences are only the tip of reported instances. Millions more suffer in silence though we don’t always look like what we’ve been through. This reality inspired me to create programming that supports people through the things that trigger us. Part of my purpose work is to teach trauma-informed techniques and healthy coping tools. I enjoy using my skills to serve my community and connect us through collective healing. My lived experience through four types of traumas influences my wellness workshops and programs outlined below.
Chronic Illness Trauma
I am one of the 23.5 million Americans living with an autoimmune disease. The prevalence of lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis are rising. Most autoimmune illnesses disproportionately impact women of color. I’ve been living with lupus and other comorbidities for nearly three decades. Allies, holistic wellness, and mindfulness practices were my keys to managing my mental health and the physical symptoms of my illnesses. The natural progression of my work was to create communities to teach people the tools that have been transformational on my healing journey.
I got the opportunity to create a trauma-informed care program early in my career when I connected with Mesha Allen, the Fibro Youth Advocate Coordinator at the Fibromyalgia Care Society of America and one-third of the Fibro Friends Podcast. Mesha advocated for me to meet Milly Velez, the director of the FCSA; Milly trusted me to curate and coordinate a digital wellness curriculum for the fibro community. I was inspired to create Move + Meditate, a guided gentle movement and meditation practice designed for people living with chronic pain and auto-immune illness. That partnership blossomed throughout the pandemic. More than seven thousand people with chronic illness and their allies participated in our series that ran for forty-two weeks. The series is now in its third year and has expanded to my participation in the FCSA Center of Excellence, and writing monthly contributions to the Mi Voz Blog, a bilingual wellness resource for the fibromyalgia community.
In May 2020, I hosted a virtual meditation and conversation circles for BIPOC women living with Lupus. I shared video footage from that conversation on social media platforms to raise awareness about BIPOC women’s experience living with a severe chronic illness. The Amplify Black Women with Auto-Immune Illness project has evolved from a video project to include interviews on my Yoga Wit the Ohmies podcast. A portion of my preparation process includes reading pain science research, and other women’s stories like Lupus: The Battle Within by Valerie Horn. I am continuing to compile the stories of BIPOC women living with Lupus and other autoimmune illnesses such as fibromyalgia and M.S.
Childhood Trauma
I witnessed domestic violence in my household growing up, experienced multiple family members' deaths, and developed lupus all before the age of twelve years old. I was afraid of dying, and my journals document my disconnection and depression. My lived reality touched on a takeaway from the Children and Trauma Workshop at the 2019 Yoga Accessibility Conference in NYC. Children are resilient to trauma, but that doesn't mean that stressful situations don’t affect them. I combined brain science, my personal experience with childhood trauma, and my 25 years of professional experience working with young people to create two wellness series with discourse as the cornerstone to cope with stress. I incorporated other stress management activities for students such as somatic movement, meditation, trauma-informed yoga, and therapeutic art.
Many forms of trauma can cause difficulties with concentration and impair memory. The COVID crisis has not been the expectation. Social isolation exacerbated anxiety, depression, and feeling disconnected. The first opportunity I had to work with young people post-pandemic was with Peace Thru Culture’s Spring series in 2021. I engaged the children from mental, emotional, and physical planes. I offered them space to talk and express themselves freely and then move and meditate through everything that came up.
I expanded on that curriculum in a 5-week Summer series centered on movement, meditation, and therapeutic art. I worked with youth participating in the Center for Pre-College Upward Bound Program at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Inner-city children are exposed to a unique set of stressors including neighborhoods overwhelmed with violence, poverty, and addiction. Environments like this can cause children to feel emotionally numb, depressed, or hopeless. Young people may be hyper-aroused, easily angered, startled, or stressed. I left my students with a mindfulness toolbox video archive when the summer series ended. Teaching tools to cope is vital to youth’s survival and sets them up for success.
Intergenerational Trauma
Intergenerational trauma is the wounds that travel with us through generations. It's the trauma that seeped in through our mother and grandmothers’ wombs and father’s and grandfather’s sperm to embed in our DNA. Sound far-fetched? The work of Dr. Joy DeGruy and other genetic researchers has found evidence that a traumatic experience can survive in cells for seven generations.
All four of my grandparents are descendants of enslaved Africans. Their lineages are all linked to intimate partner violence, poverty, and addiction. Some branches of my family remained on the same land their ancestors were enslaved and were closely connected to their oppressors. They were subject to re-experiencing the traumatic event in thoughts, dreams, and
during daily routines. They continued the cycle of accepting abuse, mistreatment, the lesser.
Some wanted more and chose an alternate path. They avoided the areas, events, and objects that triggered traumatic ruminations. For my family that looked like the Great Migration generations. They escaped extreme poverty, sharecropping slavery, daily threats of death, and overwhelming fear. In some cases, they exchanged the south for more subversive racial stress and segregation in the north. They buried the memories they couldn’t bear and bottled up the grief before it burst.
I highlight the healing through podcast conversations and my creative work. I create family documentaries and oral history projects to trace my family’s lineage and legacy as well as to celebrate their accomplishments and resilience. I challenge the taboo of talking in the Black community by hosting the Yoga Wit the Ohmies Podcast. The podcast is a place to practice presence and participate in healing conversation. The topics include generational healing, treating inherited illnesses with nutrition, and other holistic healing tools such as meditation, yoga, and womb wellness care.
Collective Trauma
On top of my childhood traumatic incidents, I vividly remember living through the AIDs crisis, the Rodney King beating, and the Gulf War. There hasn’t been much relief in adulthood. The past few years we’ve been inundated with vigilante videos snuffing out Black Lives that America continues to show us don’t matter. Coupled with the capital riots, kids in the killing field, and all the other civil unrest that is resonating through this world. It's hard not to feel emotionally numb, depressed, or disconnected.
My first ambition attempt to address the collective trauma was to develop Mind Your Mental Health, a digital database of resources intended to increase awareness of the mental health field within the Black community and provide access to tangible tools that reduce chronic stress. I partnered with licensed mental health care providers and certified holistic wellness advocates to create an online library of mental health educational videos, mindful eating, guided meditation, and movement practices. The library also features downloadable resource pages for mental health care provider directories, podcasts, and recommended readings.
In response to the Capitol Riots, I created a live stream trauma-informed yoga class to calm down. I adapted my art journaling series called Coloring to Cope for Newark First Friday’s and Newark Center for Meditative to teach people alternative mindfulness techniques like coloring meditations and emotional freedom techniques. If you feel you need supporting coping through childhood, chronic illness, collective or intergenerational trauma please reach out for a free consultation to see if our public programs or private classes could be a right fit for you.
Stay Safe and Be Well!
