Rates of Trauma and Addiction Are Skyrocketing. Yoga Can Help
If you re struggling right now, you re not alone. Trauma-informed yoga can regulate your nervous system and elicit a sense of safety.
July 26, 2021
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As a mental health professional working in the Acute Rehabilitation Addiction Recovery Center at Hoag Hospital, the past 18 months have been some of the most challenging in my career. In this time, I’ve witnessed an alarming increase in trauma and suffering related to addiction.
I’ve seen firsthand the debilitating effects that the pandemic has had on people with mental health issues, a history of trauma, or who suffer from diseases of despair those related to substance abuse, alcohol dependency, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. I’ve also seen how yoga practices can help them heal.
Leslie Rangel loved her job as an on-air reporter at a television station in Oklahoma City. But covering devastating fracking-related earthquakes, chasing tornadoes, and interviewing people on their worst days started to take a toll on her.
Rangel found some balance in the yoga classes she’d taken since her days as a student at the University of Texas at Austin back in 2008. Then, in 2015, she started a 200-hour yoga teacher training at Ashtanga Yoga Studio in Norman, Oklahoma, and something clicked.
“The big question posed to us as students was, ‘How are you living your yoga off the mat?’ ” says Rangel, who is now a morning anchor for a television station in Austin. The training led her to completely reevaluate her life. “I knew that there was a way to continue in this mission of journalism, but to have it be different.” She began applying yogic principles to her reporting life: meditating and using pranayama techniques like
Image zoom Credit: Stígur Már Karlsson/Heimsmyndir/Getty
No matter what happened (or when), experiencing trauma can have lasting effects that interfere with your daily life. And while healing can help ease lingering symptoms (typically the result of post-traumatic stress disorder) the remedy is not one-size-fits-all. Some trauma survivors might find success with cognitive behavioral therapy, whereas others might find somatic experiencing a special type of trauma therapy that focuses on the body more helpful, according to Elizabeth Cohen, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in New York City.
One way survivors can engage in somatic experiencing is through trauma-informed yoga. (Other examples include meditation and tai chi.) The practice is based on the idea that people hold trauma in their bodies, says Cohen. “So when something traumatic or challenging happens, we have a biological tendency to go into