Key Takeways
If you have ever tried a yoga class and walked out feeling worse than when you went in, more dissociated, more aware of your body in a way that didn't help, more conscious of being looked at, more pulled into someone else's idea of how you should move, this post is for you.
Trauma-sensitive yoga in therapy isn't that. It isn't a class. It isn't on a stage. It isn't built around the teacher's eye. It is a slow, careful way of moving alongside someone who has been trained to follow your lead, in a small set of forms that ask almost nothing of you except your own attention to what you feel.
Laura Hoge, RSW, is the trauma-sensitive yoga therapy facilitator in our practice, working with clients across Canada. She is certified through the Center for Trauma and Embodiment, where the method was developed. I'm Clayre, working alongside her. This post describes what the work actually looks like with us, online, in your own room. We have written it for the person who has done some reading and is wondering whether this is the next step.
What we mean when we say trauma-sensitive yoga
Trauma-sensitive yoga, often referred to in the research as TCTSY, was developed at the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Bessel van der Kolk and David Emerson. It is currently the only yoga intervention on the United States Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices for complex trauma. None of that is the reason it tends to help. It is the reason there is a name for what helps.
The work itself is built on four elements: interoception, choice making, present-moment focus, and shared authentic experience. In plain language, those four are: the practice of feeling what the body is doing right now; the steady invitation to choose what to do with the body in any given moment; staying in this moment rather than the past or the future; and the facilitator doing the same forms alongside you, having her own real experience, instead of standing outside the work and watching you.
What that looks like in session is mostly quiet. The forms are simple. Most of them are done seated in a chair or on the floor, fully clothed. There is no flow. There are no Sanskrit names. There is no instruction to push through anything. There is no goal you are reaching for that someone else can see.
The forms we use
In trauma-sensitive yoga, the postural exercises are called forms rather than poses. The change in language matters. Pose implies an external eye, something to be seen and judged. Form points back to the inside, to what the shape feels like from within. The forms we work with are gentle: a small spinal twist while seated, a slow lift of the arms, a soft fold forward over the legs, a turn of the head from one side to the other. They are within reach of almost any body, in almost any state, on almost any day.
The forms themselves are not the point. They are an opportunity to feel something. A muscle lengthening. A sit bone settling on a chair. The slight pressure of a hand on a thigh. The breath moving across the inside of the ribs. The point is the noticing, not the position. If a form doesn't feel feel-able, we try a different one. If nothing feels feel-able today, that is information too, and we work with that.
Choice as the spine of the work
The most distinctive thing about trauma-sensitive yoga in our practice is that you are in charge of your body the whole time. Laura uses what's called invitatory language. If you like, you might try lifting one arm. When you are ready, you may want to fold forward a little bit. You're welcome to do this with me, or watch, or pause for a moment, or change to something else. Each form is an invitation, never an instruction. Saying no, saying not yet, saying I'd like to try something else, are all completely fine and don't disrupt the work. They are the work.
This matters because complex trauma is, in a deep way, a long experience of having had little choice about what was happening to your body. The pattern of being told what to do, what to feel, where to go, when to be quiet, gets laid down in the nervous system early. The simplest most powerful thing trauma-sensitive yoga does is offer choice back. Repeatedly. About small things. Do you want to lift your arm or keep it down? Do you want to turn your head or not? Do you want to stay with this or try something else? Over time, the body relearns that it is the one in charge.
What present-moment, body-felt attention can offer
Some of what we know about why this kind of work tends to help has come out of research. A 2017 qualitative study interviewed thirty-one women who had completed a ten-week trauma-sensitive yoga programme as part of treatment for complex post-traumatic stress related to chronic childhood abuse. Five themes came through their accounts: gratitude, relatedness, acceptance, centeredness, and a renewed sense of being in charge of their own life. None of those themes were because of the yoga forms. They were because of what happened when those forms were practised in a context that gave choice back, that didn't ask for anything, and that let the body lead its own way to what it could tolerate.
That is what we are doing, more slowly and more relationally, in a session with you. Trauma-sensitive yoga shares a family with the other experiential and somatic approaches we work with, and we often weave them together when it serves a session. What sets trauma-sensitive yoga apart is that it works very specifically through the body's own movements, rather than through conversation or imagery, and it is one of the few body-based approaches built from the ground up around the politics of choice and consent.
Why it works online, often better than in person
People are sometimes surprised that this work translates to a screen, but it tends to translate well, and for some people online is the only way they would do it at all.
Online sessions take place in your own room, on your own floor or chair, with your own light, your own clothes, your own privacy. There is no walk past other people in a studio, no shared changing room, no stranger's hand offering an adjustment, no being looked at from the front of a class. The screen creates a frame around the work that some bodies find easier to settle into than a shared space.
What is different online is that we cannot be in the same room together. What we can do is work with what is there. We follow your face, your shoulders, your breath, your pacing. We invite you to notice what your body is doing in your own chair or on your own mat. We move alongside you, slowly, in our own rooms, having our own real experiences, so that what you feel isn't being directed from outside. The form is shared. The experience belongs to you.
For many of the people we work with, this is the version that fits. A quiet room of one's own. A facilitator who never tells you what to feel. A small set of forms you come to know well. The slow building of a different relationship to the body that has been carrying a great deal for a long time.
If something here resonates, the door is open whenever you are ready.
A note on history, and on the long arc of this work
Laura and I first met in the spring of 2005 at Satchidananda Ashram in Yogaville, Virginia, where we lived and studied yoga together for a season. We were both bodyworkers then, in our early twenties, trying to figure out what we were going to do with our lives. Twenty-one years later, we are in practice together as psychotherapists in Vancouver. The road from a teacher training in central Virginia to evidence-based trauma-sensitive yoga in our online therapy practice has been long, and not straight, and shaped by both of us coming back, again and again, to the same quiet conviction: that the body knows things, that it has been carrying things, and that the way we listen to it matters as much as anything else we can offer.
If something in you is curious about whether this is a fit, that is a good place to start.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to know yoga, or be flexible, or have any equipment?
No. The forms are simple, almost all of them are seated, and there is nothing to learn ahead of time. You don't need a mat. You don't need yoga clothes. A chair you can sit in comfortably is plenty. We start with where your body actually is, not where some idea of yoga thinks it should be.
How is this different from a trauma-informed yoga class at a studio?
Trauma-informed yoga at a studio usually means a teacher who has done some additional training to make a group class less likely to be triggering. That is genuinely useful. Trauma-sensitive yoga in therapy is something different. It is a one-on-one (or sometimes small-group) clinical intervention done within a therapy frame, not a class. It is built specifically for complex trauma, the work moves slowly, and the relational context is the work as much as the forms are.
Can we do this if I have a history of dissociation?
Yes, often very well. Dissociation is one of the patterns trauma-sensitive yoga was built to work with carefully. The pacing is slow, the forms are small, and the attention to your present-moment experience is paced to what your nervous system can hold. If at any point a form feels like too much, you can stop, change, or pause. If interoception itself feels difficult, we have ways to work with that too.
Will we do this for the whole session, or alongside talk therapy?
Both are possible. Some clients use the whole session for trauma-sensitive yoga. Others spend ten to fifteen minutes on the forms at the start of a session and the rest in conversation. Some weeks call for one shape, other weeks call for another. Laura is a clinical social worker, so the work happens within a full therapy frame, and how we use the time within that is decided together.
Is this only for people with significant trauma histories?
Trauma-sensitive yoga was developed for people with complex trauma, and that is who it serves most precisely. That said, the principles, choice, present-moment attention, gentle interoception, are useful for many bodies that have spent a long time on alert for any reason. If you're not sure whether this is the right fit, a consultation can help us think it through together.
