Your Trauma-Informed Yoga Probably Doesn’t Look Like Mine

Every time I read the news, it seems that someone who looks like me or loves like me has had a right stripped or experienced harm simply for existing.

As a yoga teacher and educator, I recall the meditations I’ve guided others and myself through. I think of the tools that I’ve offered and used myself. I consider how I consistently say that the answers exist within.

Yet I am not impervious to the sociopolitical environment outside of me that constantly crafts stories about queer people and Black people—the communities with which I identify.

Am I safe in South Carolina? Am I still married in Panama? Which African countries can I visit without being afraid of imprisonment—or worse—with a wife? So I travel without her or pose as friends when we go through customs. I make sure that I drive through sundown towns in East Texas while the sun is still up. I smile sweetly as I apologize profusely to the officer so they know I’m not a threat. I do all of the things to protect my peace and myself.

Then I read the news and learn a former student was gunned down in a McDonald’s parking lot. She was number 44 of all trans and gender-nonconforming people murdered in the U.S. that year. I introduced her to yoga when she was in the ninth grade. I recall that she befriended leaning into questions and releasing the need to know answers or be perfect.

Her death happened almost one year to the day after the murder of George Floyd, who was buried two miles from my house. I watched the parade of cars going down the street that day. I was frustrated with the amount of time it took to pass because I wanted Starbucks.

That day in 2020, somewhere in between impatience and sleepiness, I felt another emotion—despair. I didn’t stay there long. But I let myself feel it for a moment.

Systemic Trauma and its Effects

I don’t exist in a vacuum. Social and personal traumatic experiences influence me equally. They happen to people I know and those I’ve only read about.

I wish a vacuum existed so traditionally marginalized people could distance ourselves from the collective experience. Existing in a bubble would allow everyone to age in the same way through loss of jobs, income, status, relationships, loved ones, and the regular life stuff that humans endure on any given day.

We know that’s not the case. Perhaps if there were systems working to protect or serve me, collective healing and liberation would be an opportunity. But working toward this requires honesty around the fact that BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people have lived experiences of being subject to persistent trauma.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) describe systemic trauma as “environments and institutions that give rise to trauma, maintain it, and impact posttraumatic responses.” Essentially, when the systems and structures that are meant to protect humans fail, they instead create or sustain harm.

Schools, religious gathering spaces, governments, healthcare systems, courtrooms, and more are failing people—and, in so doing, harming specific groups. For those who are intersectionally marginalized, such as me, there can be a relentless feeling of generally being unsafe.

In her seminal book Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma, Dr. Gail Parker explained that in a society obsessed with having it all together, Black women die earlier than their non-Black counterparts because of Sojourner Syndrome, a coping mechanism that involves saying we’re fine when we’re not.

According to the NIH, “Research on the Superwoman Schema and Sojourner’s Syndrome, for instance, shows how Black women are compelled to portray strength and resilience while suffering internally and experiencing poor health outcomes.”

Essentially, it’s important for us to say when we’re not okay. We literally die sooner than our non-Black counterparts when we don’t.

Dr. Parker also explained the phenomenon of race-based traumatic stress injury (RBTSI), the psychological and emotional harm caused by external race-related events of racism and discrimination.

“RBTSI is regarded as a specific form of emotional injury caused by an external race related event that is recurring, ongoing, and cumulative resulting in understandable responses to something painful. The response is not regarded as or addressed as pathological. It is not regarded as a medical condition that needs to be healed,” she wrote.

High-effort coping mechanisms in response to trauma—including masking, code-switching, outperforming, fawning, and nervous system responses such as anxiety and sadness—are situation dependent. There is potential for these to change if the environment were to change. But the environment persists.

It’s important not to pathologize or attempt to diagnose the way traditionally marginalized people process grief and are working to cope with structural harm. It’s also imperative not to view this situation as being hopeless.

Is Trauma-Informed Yoga Accessible and Effective for Everyone?

It is no surprise that physicians recommend yoga and yoga therapy as a management tool for anxiety and even auto-immune disease. Vanika Chawla, MD, a psychiatrist at Stanford, explains that “yoga facilitates bi-directional communication between brain and body.” That means it works to regulate the body’s autonomic nervous system and its responses to psychological stress.

Bessel van der Kolk famously coined the phrase “the body keeps the score.” The book of the same name has sold more than 3 million copies, spent several years on The New York Times bestseller list, and become an essential text for many of us who work to help others and ourselves work through stress and trauma.

The problem, however, is the singular baseline from which trauma is examined, which is largely through a white lens. This reductive research fails to consider the structural harm that is acting upon marginalized communities, including BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people, alongside all of the other traumatic experiences that occur as a part of the human experience.

“Standard trauma-informed yoga is not culturally informed and does not address race-based traumatic stress injury (RBTSI),” states Dr. Parker. She explains that RBTSI can lead to PTSD and manifest in similar ways, but it is not the same.

Because of this, we cannot approach trauma-informed yoga with a one-size-fits-all mentality. “Addressing [RBTSI] skillfully requires an understanding of culture, and context, and appropriate interventions,” explains Dr. Parker.

This is the ongoing problem with the science and discourse in this area. It’s also the missing piece from most trauma-informed yoga teacher trainings.

Where Trauma-Informed Yoga Teachers Get It Wrong

“Trauma-informed yoga is people-informed yoga,” explains yoga teacher and clinician Hala Khouri. Along with Kyra Haglund and RW Alves, Khouri founded Collective Resilience, a program that seeks to help yoga teachers navigate their understanding of how to hold space for people with myriad lived experiences.

This approach to training provides practical tools for teachers who find themselves in the uncomfortable situation of not knowing how to emotionally accommodate a student who has a different lived experience.

Just as understanding how to make yoga more physically accessible is necessary if one desires to teach poses, programs such as this are essential to to help expand awareness and understanding among trauma-informed yoga teachers of all that they aren’t even aware of that they don’t know.

Being an effective trauma-sensitive teacher requires consistent examination of our own biases and constantly asking ourselves, “Who is this for?” This simple question arose from my own culturally informed training. It allows teachers to bring what the class needs in that moment. Teachers especially need to be equipped to answer the unasked question, when someone walks into a space in which no one looks like them, “Am I safe with you?”

What we can do is remind people of their yoga tools that they may call on as a support system when they navigate whatever is going on in their lives, bodies, and minds. “You can be right or in relationship,” says Dr. Parker. We’re not always going to get it right, but if we work toward cultivating understanding, belonging, and relationships, we’ll get close.