Trigger Warning: Discussion of trauma types and fictional examples of traumatic experiences.

One of my favorite books is The Body Keeps The Score. This book entered my life years ago and it was mind-boggling. As someone who lived through extreme trauma in childhood that carried over for another couple of decades into adulthood, I know quite well how trauma is stored in the body. It affected the way I interacted with people socially and romantically. It affected how I processed my reality, every damn day.

Anyone who has experienced a form of trauma understands that you could be enjoying your day, living in the moment, then BAM!, you’re back in that place. In that moment. In that emotion. It’s jarring and often alarming, because you could literally just be sipping some coffee and noshing on a cupcake. The brain doesn’t care—it apologizes for nothing.

Damn brains.

It goes further than that though. Trauma seeps into the nervous system, invading every nook and cranny of your body. It tightens your muscles and knots your neck. Your heart never stops racing and gods forbid you get a good night’s rest. Sometimes, it feels unbearable and confusing.

So how does this work into the experience of yoga?

How The Body Processes Trauma

Let’s imagine for a moment a very mild experience. You’re at work, meeting a new coworker. They go to shake your hand and their grip is so tight, it hurts. You hide the wince and shake it off when they aren’t looking, but going forward, you’ll probably avoid shaking their hand. But what if it happens again, with someone else?

You might just begin avoiding shaking hands. When you have to shake a hand instead of looking rude, there’s a moment of hesitation or apprehension. Could this hurt, too? Your future handshakes might avoid a certain grip to protect your wrist. You might not even realize you’re doing it. Maybe you’ll just become downright standoffish, refusing to shake hands. Everyone’s response to a negative experience varies.

A bad handshake doesn’t necessarily qualify as trauma (I suppose this really depends on the experience, eh?), but it goes to show how something even “mild” pain can snowball into something bigger.

The same goes for trauma. Every activation of pain sensors or nervous system inside your body can be computed as trauma. This isn’t something you can necessarily control, either. It’s why I like to say, “Trauma isn’t an Olympic sport,” because no one is winning gold medals based on how their body decides to process an experience.

Your body and brain are wired to protect you. Most of it’s instincts, theoretically from a time where cultivated instincts kept us alive from what went bump in the night. Your lizard brain can’t tell the difference between the stress of being late to a meeting and being chased down by a lion. To the subconscious brain, it’s all the same.

When The Trauma Becomes Stored In The Nervous System

Our bodies are miraculous things, truly. Not just the way it all functions together, but in the way it protects us. The brain can adapt to situations and experiences, literally by rewiring itself. When you learn a new skillset, your brain begins to redirect or create new neural pathways. Think of your brain as a city and the neural pathways as streets and sideways. Learning a new skill is like creating new roads or even creating a metaphorical transit line.

Unfortunately, thanks to trauma, said roads can develop potholes or perpetual construction with roadblocks. Your conscious experience is essentially breezing through traffic or being stuck in a gridlock. After a traumatic moment, your brain can struggle to communicate within itself, making it difficult to process real world experiences.

For example, imagine your have a neural pathway straight from the pleasure center of your brain to a love of ice cream. Every time you’ve had ice cream, this neural pathway to the Medial Prefrontal Cortex is traffic-free. It lights up, confirming that you’re a Rocky Road Girl for life.

Except, what if one day, you have a very negative experience with Chocolate Chip ice cream? Maybe you’re enjoying an ice cream cone and witness something severely traumatic like an accident or attack. It could be a first-hand experience that is so negative, the taste of Chocolate Chip ice cream becomes sour. Suddenly, that traffic-free neural pathway is a crumbling road, almost impossible to traverse. You have to choose whether repairing the metaphorical road is worth it, or you just never go down that road ever again.

Our brains are filled with these kinds of pathways. It’s the way our brain not only excels at things over time, but also how we seem to run into road blocks of the brain. The good news is that neural pathways are elastic and changeable! You can enjoy Chocolate Chip ice cream again, one day, with some awareness and inner self-work!

So Why Do You Cry In Yoga?

If the idea of an emotional release during yoga asanas sounds as enjoyable as sitting in a tub filled with snakes, you’re not alone. Western society has a long way to go when it comes to accepting and understanding mental health, especially uncomfortable expressions of it.

Let me share a quick personal anecdote: Years ago, I started seeing my first chiropractor. He specialized in clinical kinesiology, which just boils down to figuring out musculoskeletal imbalances. This could be finding out if the elbow pain is connected to back pain. It can also help figure out whether or not your brain is manifesting an experience into the physical body.

There was a knot in my back that never wanted to go away. Even vigorous massage was useless. So one day, he decided to do what’s called Neuro Emotional Technique. (NET). Through muscle testing, we quickly discovered this stubborn knot was tied to my fear of turning into my mother.

Yes. I’m serious.

As he rubbed this knot out, he told me to focus on this fear. As I cried, because I definitely don’t want to become my mother, he rubbed into the knot. As I processed it, the knot loosened. And never came back. Thankfully, I’ve also come to realize I could never be like my mother, but that’s a story for another day.

While yoga isn’t quite like NET, you can still activate an emotion held inside a space in the body. The hips are really big emotion holders, which is why with trauma-informed yoga, we avoid jumping into hip openers. So much happens near and in our hips, from digestion to recreational physical connection. What makes us human mostly happens in the hips, so it would make sense for our hips to carry said human experiences and emotions, too.

If you’re unaware of this, you might find yourself utterly bewildered when the tears fall during Child’s Pose or Happy Baby (a pose that makes most adults uncomfortably giggle). But know that it’s completely natural! In fact, it’s my personal belief that it just means your brain is eager and ready to release these emotions when it happens. Your brain recognizes you’re safe enough to let it go, so it’s a good idea to explore what comes up—if you’re able. Maybe it’s time to clean up some mental roadblocks, eh?

Wrapping Up

Everyone in this earth experiences trauma. While some are incomparable (I think of my ex, who thought his parents divorcing when he was a kid was comparable to my horrific childhood), experiencing trauma is one of the most human experiences possible, outside of procreation and eating.

Yoga can help facilitate reconnecting you to your body after trauma, clearing up some of those mental roadblocks, making your neural streets easier to traverse.

Now that I’ve tired out the road metaphors, I leave you with this: It’s okay to cry. It’s also okay to not want to cry. It’s all valid and it’s all real.

Namaste.