5 Skills Towards Making Your Class Trauma Sensitive

I’ve been thinking a lot about trauma for various reasons: my experience as a yoga teacher has led me to believe that a lot of practitioners come to yoga and a stress management technique. Heck, it’s why I started. Throughout my career and my evolution as a yoga therapist, I’ve become more acutely aware of the myriads of students that come to Yoga via doctor’s suggestions, suggestions from therapists and other medical professionals.

Who is this blog post for:

• fragile high self-esteem
• yoga teachers that are looking for practical solutions for being more trauma-sensitive and sensitive to diversity.

Fragile High Self-Esteem

While yoga can be an incredibly beneficial practice for the maintenance of wellbeing, it can also be harmful. This harm can be unintentional and reinforced by the dynamic between the students and teachers. Often teachers are pedestalled– reinforcing, at times, fragile high self-esteem, if they do not have a strong self-compassion practice or high self-esteem to begin with. Fragile high self-esteem happens often when a person has gone through a great amount of childhood stress and as a means to cope with it, they often try to take control, be in positions of power and deal poorly with criticism or rejection. As yoga teachers this is not uncommon. A lot of people view yoga teachers as “powerful” and “exotic”. If you have fragile high self-esteem, being pedestalled the way yoga teachers can be, can feel empowering. However, I reckon that if you notice this in yourself, in the long run it may be more difficult to maintain your status and your relationships with some of your students . Thus I have offered five tips down below. They are for you.

Wanting to Improve/ additional training

Teacher Trainings are often used to keep studios afloat. Some are done in as little as 40 hours, others 200  or 300 depending on the country of origin and their  unique specifications. There simply isn’t the time to give trainees everything they need to embody yoga. If you feel that you did your training, then returned to home to struggle in maintaining your practice. This is common. You are not alone. I hope this blog can be used as a resource for you to give you some ideas of what you can do to be more sensitive to others.

 

Becoming Trauma-sensitive: responsibility and inclusivity

Becoming trauma-sensitive is one method in advancing our practice of Ahimsa. Saint Bernard’s words, reiterated by astounding minds such as Charlotte Bronte and Samuel Johnson (the writer) have agreed, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It is sometimes not enough to mean well. How our actions are received is more important than the intent behind them…hmm, that wasn’t well stated. Okay, let’s try that again. A lot of times we do things because it feels good for us. Adjusting people, over-engaging with a student we like, while ignoring others who would like to ask questions– little things. We don’t mean harm by them. Sometimes they even help to balance us out chemically (dopamine, oxytocin). That stated, it can be harmful to a student you find difficult or incapable of flexibility to be regularly ignored. Thus learning how to take feedback, synthesize it and move forward with attention to growth is vital to creating safer spaces. 

For example: stating like “see if you can touch your face to your shins, is unintentionally fatphobic or fat-exclusive.”  If a yoga teacher tells you this, or a fat person says that they always feel “weird” when people say that…adjust your speech. Make mistakes if you do, forgive yourself and keep practicing. If the amount of times you make a mistake is too much for that person, don’t make a dispositional judgment against them. They are setting a boundary. For people who are marginalized for various reasons, they will deal with more stress and considerable more amounts of oppression and trauma. Affirm the goodness of their choice.

 

Understanding Trauma and Emotional Regulation as Privilege

As mentioned, many practitioners come to yoga due to stress and/or trauma. Trauma is defined by The Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:
a :  an injury (as a wound) to living tissue caused by an extrinsic agent
b :  a disordered psychic or behavioral state resulting from severe mental or emotional stress or physical injury

This is the case, the majority of practitioners come to yoga hoping to ‘get better’ in some way. This might be an issue of stress, self-esteem, body-image.  We can’t expect that all our students are in a place of mental and emotional privilege where they’ll be able or have the desire to constantly interpret us with the highest regards. We should expect that some people may feel off-put by a comment we make, controlled by the rigidity of our flows.  We cannot ask our students to interpret us as being well-intended, well we can, but that deflect from their experience and they might not even be capable of doing this. However, this doesn’t stop them from being able to benefit from yoga. It does then becomes our prerogative to ensure a healthy and safe environment. To do this, there are steps we can take.

First of all, if you are reading this, that is awesome! It means that you care. With this in mind here are 5 skills we can develop to make our classes more sensitive to trauma.

1.Swadyaya or Self-study (be introspective).

-Acknowledge privilege. If we are teaching, we have it. People are allowing us to tell them what to do with their bodies. This is a HUGE privilege. Let’s acknowledge it.
Sometimes a person’s energy will rub us the wrong way. This does happen; mind you, we still have the upper-hand. It’s not for the student to not take us personally, it is our job not to take our students as a personal tally of success or failure, but to take them as human beings that are here for a purpose that is none of our business, yet worthy of respect. If we recount the negative feedback we get as an opportunity to self-reflect there is never a need to tally failures, as negative feedback becomes an opportunity to excel.

– Work on yourself and yourself-esteem. I recommend that most Yoga teachers see a compatible therapist or at least engage in some kind of activity where they are receiving non-biased feedback. Journal about these things. It’s important we learn to meet our needs in a healthy and progressive method. We all have our patterns and our tendencies. The more self-aware, the more we can create a non-biased environment for our students to grow and to learn. If you have low self-esteem or fragile high self-esteem, self-compassion can be beneficial. Kelly McGonigal has some meditations available through Audibles.com that may be to your benefit.

–We need to own our behaviors. We make mistakes. We are human. We sometimes act out of line. If this happens, we need to own it. Our students should never have to meet us more than 50% of the way. On the occasion, our lives have drama, if and when this happens and it affects our work, we need to own it. On the occasion we might accidentally give a poor adjustment or swipe a boob. If this happens, own it and apologize. Ignorance may be bliss, but not if 50% of a relationship (student/teacher) is hyper-aware of what just happened. Then that’s not bliss, that’s just ignorance.

2. Learn to Listen

-I’m not talking about active listening, though that is something to acquire. I’m talking about learning to listen deeply to bodily cues. The breath changes when a person is stressed. It becomes shallow, and limited to the chest.  Their is body language such as shoulder’s tensing, clenched jaws and furrowed brows. Diving deeper, you may even see the pupil contract. These are some of the signs of stress. The more we teach ourselves to read bodies, the more responsive we can be.

– Listen to verbal in conjunction with body cues. Once upon a time, as I was healing from a back injury, I used to flinch whenever someone put their hand on my spine. My teacher asked for someone who could forward fold easily so that he could show the adjustment. I offered to. As he did the adjustment, I flinched a little. Mind you, it was those types of experiences that retrained my body to let go of trauma in my spine. Our students come from different places, if they are asking for the opportunity to grow, yes we need to make judgement calls, but we also need to endorse their desires to progress. Without the many times my requests were respected, I wouldn’t have been able to heal to the extent that I did.

3. Openness

-Be open to feedback. Be open to asking how to interpret feedback. We may all use the same vocabulary and speak the same language, but it’s uncommon that two people mean exactly the same thing. If you are uncertain what someone means by what they are saying, ask. If you think you are 100% certain about what they mean, ask.

– Know that there are the things you know you don’t know and there are things you don’t know that you don’t know. This allows us to remain humble. It gives us the opportunity to learn from our students. It gives our students the opportunity to feel heard. It allows us the opportunity to feel young. It is just an all-around awesome thing to practice!!

4. Holding Space

– When we are meeting our own needs through swadyaya, holding space becomes more available. Holding space includes: using suggestive language, offering alternatives asanas so students can be where they are at, and learning to yield to a  student’s need to feel what they need to feel in order to grow. Holding space is about allowing people to make their practice personal and not taking that personally. We often teach hoping students will leech onto this particular sutra or that particular pose. Holding space is about sharing what we love and being able to let them take what they want.

5.  Kindness and Compassion

-We don’t know where people are coming from. It doesn’t serve us to hate the difficult students. It doesn’t serve us to make jokes at the expense of others. It doesn’t serve us to single out those that we envy, favor or dislike. The room picks up on these things. If we’ve taken the initiative to notice our biases through introspection, we can start applying kindness and compassion to the way we teach. Again, the way that we are received should be important. Create a safer space by asking for consent to touch, and offering forgiveness to ourselves and to others. If we have difficulties forgiving ourselves for our mistakes, it can be really hard to own up to them, so we need to learn to be kind and compassionate with ourselves. We can’t assure that anyone else will be.

I hope this was helpful. Wishing you well, Jocelyn!