3This book is a user-friendly guide to learning about trauma sensitive yoga, who needs it, and how to implement the practice. This book provides easy to understand, applicable, and valuable information for many populations so anyone can embrace the gift of yoga. As our world grows smaller through technology, we can grow more distant and alone. Tragedy seems to present itself as pervasive and overwhelming, however armed with the many tools of yoga, we discover resiliency and hope.
Trauma is an emotional response to an event like an accident, rape, or natural disaster. Trauma is a subjective experience and represents a threat to personal safety physically, emotionally, or mentally. Trauma activates our sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which is necessary and important as a survival response. Trauma becomes a problem when it is chronic or so severe in perception that the SNS is never turned back off. When the sympathetic nervous system is continually activated, it rewires the nervous system and physical changes take place in the brain and the endocrine system that make healing more challenging. Chronic activation can turn into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition that can cause serious physical and mental illness. Whether or not a trauma becomes a chronic stress seems to be related to the intensity and severity of the incident and also to past trauma exposure. This book will explore these changes and just how trauma gets stored in the body as well as offer a trauma sensitive format of YOGAFIT as a body based program for healing.