Like Oliver Stacks - we want to make our students are the hero of their own lives.

While it will always be necessary to have a categorical (i.e. depression vs anxiety) and continuum lens (i.e. we are all along a continuum and there is room to move), the pieces here help bridge the gap between Psychology and Wisdom Traditions, notions of sanity and insanity, professional and patient, injustice and trauma and oppressor and oppressed:

A common humanity (i.e. reality) is essential for personal, social and political change (i.e. world peace).

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

Five world views – Free Will (i.e. you are weak willed), Religion (i.e. you are a sinner), the Law (i.e. you are a criminal), the Disease Model (i.e. you are powerless with a disease) and Neuroplasticity (i.e. you are a changing human being in becoming).

Neuroplasticity led to Trauma Informed Care (i.e. safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration and empowerment), which led to the Power Threat Meaning Framework (i.e. while each injustice differs, all stories share the same trauma: the negative operation of power; a call for social and political change). What makes Neuroplasticity trauma informed?

“It can sometimes seem as if one person will not be very effective. However, change in the world always begins with an individual who shares what he or she has learned and passes it on to others.” The Dalai Lama

The purpose of Trauma Informed Yoga is to highlight despite our best efforts, most of our current systems (i.e. families, education, employment, criminal justice system, immigration system, government, religious institutions, etc) are still largely traumatizing (i.e. silence or judgement, blame, punishment, shame and stigma).

The good news is this is easier to change than we were once taught. Throughout history, the vast majority of people did the best they could with the knowledge they had. Today, neuroscience and wisdom traditions converge. So this is our turn to step up and step in. This requires being trauma informed.

Suicide is #1 death for young people around the world. Violence is #1 death and disability for young women around the world. We have an explosion of mental illness, addiction, pandemic, climate crisis and a plethora of human rights abuses while the gap between the rich and the poor widens.

A person who is trauma informed does not see someone as weak willed, a sinner, a criminal, or powerless with a disease. They see a human being in a situation that is dangerous vs safe, grounded in reality vs imagination and beliefs and behaviours that are helpful vs harmful.

A trauma informed person does not wish to silence or judge, blame, punish, shame, or stigmatize. They do not require endless division and pathology. The focus is to get the person safe, with clarity, grounded in reality with a variety of choices more helpful than harmful.

This requires drawing on life’s protectors for survival and wellbeing: body, mind, social connection, culture, country and spirituality. This fundamentally requires human rights. This is already a trauma informed framework to turn into a mindset for personal, social and political change.

Other trauma informed mindsets are:
Threat System (i.e. fight, flight, freeze, collapse) vs Social Engagement System, or what I like to call the Peace System (i.e. peace, joy, love, compassion, blissfulness, ecstasy).

Window of Tolerance (i.e. I am safe enough and okay enough vs too much or not enough).

Self-Esteem (i.e. the need to be “special and above average”; more/less, never enough; competition via a “Survival of the Fittest” mindset leaving others behind to die) vs Self-Compassion (i.e. kindness, common humanity, mindfulness; you are enough; collaboration via “Enlightenment” #YouBelong).

“With guns you can kill terrorists,
with education you can kill terrorism.
If one man can destroy everything,
why can’t one girl change it?”
Malala Yousafzai, often referred to mononymously as Malala, is a Pakistani activist for female education and the youngest Nobel Prize laureate

Personal peace on the other hand is within our reach. The byproduct of clarity is peace. Joy is peace dancing (i.e. a higher intensity of arousal). Trauma is disconnection. Empathy fuels connection. Love is the absence of judgment (i.e. Mindfulness: nonjudgmental acceptance of the present with openness and curiosity). Humanity fuels life. Life is vulnerability.

Trauma Informed Yoga works because it is about survival – in this reality – and wellbeing, which comes naturally once our needs are met and we drop harmful beliefs that fuel division and conflict, keeping us “stuck” in intergenerational trauma. Children and animals have the healthiest emotional systems on the planet.

This is not a one person job. It takes a village to raise a child. Trauma Informed Yoga goes beneath our name, age, gender, skin colour, privilege, culture, religion, government, nationhood: All humans need safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration and empowerment. We can all keep our names, but they must be understood as secondary.

Life is primary.

Trauma Informed Care returns to the basics: Integrity. 

I am optimistic. I see this done every day. I do it myself. I share my lived experience so that you can see, yes, I must do this too. I believe once this trauma informed framework becomes a mindset the system will naturally reform to science and compassion. It will also converge with First Nations cultures.

Now you know the power of Trauma Informed YOga. Let’s turn this framework into a mindset for personal, social and political change. If you are unable to, you might need help first, to get safe or become ‘unstuck’ from trauma. Reach out for trauma informed care. #YouBelong

With Love,

Denise Davis-Gains, (she/her) CYA-E-RYTGold, C-IAYT
Founder and Director, Atlas Yoga Studio and School CYA-RYSGold
@atlasyoga

www.atlasstudio.com
[email protected]
519.240.9642

We acknowledge that our studio started out on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes ten kilometers on each side of the Grand River. We acknowledge and thank the history and legacy of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and Attawandaron (Neutral) peoples, and extend our thanks for being able to gather, learn and grow as a community here. 

We stand with Black, Indigenous, people of colour, the disabled and neurodiverse in solidarity, collaboration, mutual support and resilience. We commit ourselves to confronting, challenging, and uprooting the powers of racism and colonialism at all levels of our personal, social, and collective spaces.