Survivor and facilitator voices from the practice of trauma-sensitive yoga, Jenn Turner, 2020, North Atlantic Books.
About Reviewers
Brenisen Wheeler is the Education and Outreach Coordinator at Women's Advocates, a domestic violence shelter and non-profit in St. Paul, Minnesota, a post-baccalaureate research assistant for the Mind-Body Trauma Care Lab at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, and a certified 235-hour yoga teacher with trauma-informed training. e-mail: linde720@umn.edu
Marie MokossoNutter is a Pediatric Operating Room Registered Nurse at M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Masonic Children's Hospital, a 200-hour Registered Yoga Teacher with trauma-informed training, and author of The Human Healing Project: Finding Hope and Connection One Story at a Time. E-mail:mlmokosso@aol.com
Book Review
In a balanced blend of compelling scientific evidence and personal narrative, Embodied Healing details what Trauma Center Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) is and how it is implemented in the real world. This collection of essays, edited by Jenn Turner, details how numerous people from various backgrounds, identities, and walks of life came to experience trauma-sensitive yoga for the first time.
Actively noticing pinching pain in one’s shoulders and feeling safe enough to make the choice of leaving the arms down by the sides, instead of overhead with the rest of the class, can be a catalyst for freedom and transformation off the yoga mat and into the world. Similarly, bearing witness to other people’s stories of embodied healing can be a catalyst for us to look inward and find ourselves positioned one step closer to understanding what wholeness means and feels like for us.
Turner’s book was published in 2020 when many people were faced with new barriers to accessing trauma treatment due to the global pandemic, making us curious about the adaptability of trauma-sensitive yoga to virtual settings. Embodied Healing is not only a thoughtfully written book for survivors of complex trauma to realistically envision how TCTSY might look and feel if practiced, but it also serves as a felt guide to potential and current facilitators and participants as to how much work may be needed to leave your expectations of this practice at the door. Because of this, readers would benefit from intentional engagement with this content while being mindful of how these trauma narratives might interact with their own.
Variousfacilitators and clients within this book take us on a plethora of journeys across the globe and across the lifespan. From a Zen center in Japan to a residential care center for teens north of Boston, we witness the power of letting go of the outcomes and how having a space for feeling peace can be a catalyst for wanting to find other sources of peace off of the yoga mat. As either survivor or facilitator shared each story, it became increasingly apparent that embodied healing created a life of its own within both parties when both were ready to connect to the gift of the present moment.
While acknowledging the breadth of identities already represented, one pivotal voice that was missing and could have connected TCTSY to the origins of yoga would belong to Southeast Asian individuals. We would like to know more about Southeast Asian perspectives on the application of yoga to treat complex trauma and how yoga can be both honored and personalized throughout this process. Further, we are interested in knowing more about the founders of TCTSY and if the conceptualization of TCTSY was informed by Southeast Asian practitioners more closely connected to the roots of yoga's creation and tradition.
Additionally, the lack of narratives from people who do not identify as women (e.g. men, non-binary, gender non-conforming individuals) promotes us to contemplate the applicability of TCTSY for people who are not women. The lack of representation of non-dominant cultural perspectives and experience with trauma-sensitive yoga is reflective of a trend in Westernized yoga spaces to be predominantly White, able-bodied, financially well-off cis-gendered women. However, the TCTSY approach does work to offer alternatives to this trend through the integration of the following pillars: invitational language, present-moment experiences, choice-making, shared authentic experience, and non-coercion. Various stories within Embodied Healing demonstrate how these TCTSY principles, especially non-coercion, can be readily applied to meet marginalized groups' needs that mainstream yoga may not cater to or adapt to.
Embodied Healing is an enriching addition to the existing body of work on mind-body interventions for healing complex trauma. The facilitators and clients in this book share the premise that body-based healing modalities are effective for treating complex trauma with other authors. To provide some examples, van der Kolk (2014) focuses on the physiological damage of trauma on the brain, mind, and body and Levine (1997) discusses releasing trauma from the body through Somatic Experiencing; however, both are cis-gendered White male leaders in medicine. Thus, Embodied Healing bestows a unique approach in elevating novel, diverse voices of complex trauma survivors and their first-hand journeys into and through acknowledging and reclaiming their body and self as their own (experiences that may not have had the opportunity to make it into mainstream discourse prior to this book).
Other work bolsters the idea of befriending the body and includes and uplifts gender diverse experiences like body dysmorphia and how body-based self-love is intertwined with acknowledging systems of oppression that cause direct harm, particularly to marginalized individuals (Taylor, 2018). Related to this, we would like to know how the principles of trauma-sensitive yoga could set the groundwork for how body-based practices can relate to dismantling overarching systems of oppression, taking it a step beyond the dynamics between facilitator and survivor or provider and client. While reclaiming personal agency with a trauma-sensitive yoga facilitator can feel empowering, we would benefit from knowing more about how these tools could help participants navigate the broader systems of oppression that they interact with and can be harmed by.
While addressing these systems of oppression and our own healing journey can be daunting, Turner encourages us to start where we are and with what we have: our bodies. While research has found that trauma is stored in the body, it would be crucial for us to know more about how to navigate when trauma-sensitive yoga may trigger clients and how to address trauma-related or even accessibility barriers (e.g. being deaf, hard of hearing, physically impaired, blind) to body-based interventions.
We would like to know more about the considerations for whom trauma-sensitive yoga would not be recommended and how modifications to the unique needs of participants can be integrated. Illustrating this individualization process includes Turner’s emphasis on the importance of adjusting the frequency of cues that invite clients to focus on their bodily sensations and that minimizing these cues would be paramount to avoid overwhelming children and youths.
As this practice has grown over the years in becoming an intervention supported by continual research, Turner is able to clearly communicate the purpose of this practice, its approach, and the four themes (shared authentic experience, making choices, present moment, effective action) of thought that embody the healing practice of TCTSY and created the outline of this book. Interception, our capacity and ability to tune into our bodily sensations, is a key concept of TCTSY. This concept has implications for clinicians and yoga facilitators as a pathway to restoring negative impacts of trauma such as severing the mind and body connection, loss of identity or sense of self, and compromising capacity for growth.
Building upon this, the stories embedded within this book allow us to further understand the role of trauma-sensitive yoga in a survivor’s internal relationship (e.g. increased abilities to engage in following their internal compass) and in deepening a survivor’s bi-directional connection with others (e.g. ability to voice their opinions and set boundaries). Turner emphasizes the importance of utilizing invitational language as a way to authentically connect with clients by prioritizing clients’ ability to choose what is best for them within any given moment. This gives us insight into the role that trauma-sensitive yoga facilitators play in creating a conducive environment that makes it safe and empowering for survivors to come into their own sense of personal agency.
As reviewers of Turner’s book, our experiences, perspectives, and expertise shape the way in which we interact with and are impacted by Embodied Healing. We write this review as women of color, 200-hour yoga teachers with trauma-informed training and prospective TCTSY facilitator applicants (B.W. and M.M.N.), an education and outreach coordinator at a domestic violence shelter (B.W.), a domestic and sexual violence survivor (B.W.), a post-bac research assistant in a mind-body trauma care lab (B.W.), a pediatric operating room registered nurse (M.M.N.), and an author of a book on “The Human Healing Project” (M.M.N.). Embodied Healing has profound implications for the fields of psychology, advocacy, medicine, yoga, healing, and many others. Embodied Healing is just the beginning of uplifting diverse voices, robust mind-body interventions, and effective approaches to healing complex trauma impacts.
