Your body remembers things your mind tries to forget. That tight feeling in your chest when someone raises their voice. The way your shoulders creep up toward your ears in crowded spaces. These aren’t random quirks-they’re your nervous system holding onto experiences it never fully processed.
Trauma lives in the body. And increasingly, researchers are finding that healing needs to happen there too.
What Makes Yoga “Trauma-Informed” Anyway?
Regular yoga classes can actually be triggering for trauma survivors. Dimmed lights, physical adjustments from instructors, closed eyes, being told to “let go”-all of these well-meaning elements can send someone with PTSD straight into a flashback.
Trauma-informed yoga flips the script. Instructors never touch students without explicit permission. The lights stay on. You keep your eyes open if that feels safer. And instead of commands like “do this pose,” teachers offer invitations: “You might explore lifting your arms, or you might keep them where they are.
The whole approach centers on one thing: giving you back control over your body.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, who literally wrote the book on trauma (“The Body Keeps the Score”), has been studying this for decades. His research at the Trauma Center in Boston found something remarkable: after just 10 weeks of trauma-informed yoga, 52% of participants no longer met the clinical criteria for PTSD.
Fifty-two percent. That’s higher than many pharmaceutical interventions.
Why Your Body Needs to Be Part of the Conversation
Here’s what traditional talk therapy sometimes misses: trauma responses don’t originate in the thinking part of your brain. They come from deeper, more primal regions-the amygdala, the brain stem. Places that don’t really care about your logical understanding of why you shouldn’t feel threatened.
You can know intellectually that you’re safe. Your nervous system might disagree.
This is where body-based approaches shine. When you consciously slow your breathing, hold a warrior pose, or feel your feet pressing into the mat, you’re sending safety signals directly to those primitive brain areas. You’re teaching your nervous system that you have agency over your physical experience.
One study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that yoga activates the parasympathetic nervous system-that’s your “rest. Digest” mode-more effectively than other forms of exercise. For someone whose nervous system has been stuck in fight-or-flight for months or years, this is huge.
What Actually Happens in a Trauma-Informed Yoga Session
Forget Instagram yoga - there are no handstands here. No complicated sequences to memorize. No pressure to “deepen your practice.
A typical session might look like this:
You start seated or lying down, whatever feels right. The instructor guides you to notice-just notice-what’s happening in your body. Maybe your jaw is clenched. Maybe your hands are making fists. No judgment, no fixing - just awareness.
Then come simple movements - gentle stretches. Standing poses that emphasize grounding through your feet. Throughout, the teacher reminds you that you’re in charge. You can modify anything - you can stop anytime. You can leave the room if you need to.
Sounds basic, right - that’s the point.
For someone who’s experienced trauma-especially interpersonal trauma like abuse or assault-being in a space where their boundaries are consistently respected can be revolutionary. Many survivors have spent years ignoring their body’s signals, either because they had to for survival or because those signals felt too overwhelming to acknowledge.
Trauma-informed yoga creates a container for reconnecting with those signals safely.
The Research Keeps Piling Up
Van der Kolk’s 52% finding wasn’t a fluke. Multiple studies have replicated similar results:
- A 2014 study in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry found significant reductions in PTSD symptoms after yoga intervention, with benefits maintained at follow-up
- Research with military veterans showed decreased hyperarousal symptoms and improved sleep quality
- Studies with survivors of intimate partner violence demonstrated reduced depression and anxiety alongside PTSD improvements
What’s particularly interesting is that these benefits seem to compound with traditional therapy. Yoga doesn’t replace trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy or EMDR-it enhances them. When you’re less activated in your body, you can engage more fully in the cognitive work.
Some treatment centers have started integrating yoga into their standard protocols. The VA has yoga programs at multiple facilities. Trauma-informed yoga training for instructors has become its own certification specialty.
Finding the Right Class (Because Not All Yoga Is Created Equal)
If you’re considering trauma-informed yoga, a few things to look for:
**Ask about training. ** Instructors should have specific trauma-informed certification, not just general yoga teaching credentials. Organizations like the Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) program and Yoga Warriors International offer legitimate training.
**Start with a conversation. ** Good trauma-informed instructors will want to know a bit about your experience before you attend. Not details of your trauma-just what might feel triggering and what accommodations help you feel safe.
**Trust your gut. ** If something feels off about a class or instructor, honor that. The whole point is learning to trust your body’s signals again.
Online options exist too. During the pandemic, many trauma-informed yoga teachers pivoted to virtual sessions. Some survivors actually prefer this-there’s something about being in your own space, able to turn off the camera whenever you want, that feels particularly safe.
The Limitations (Let’s Be Honest)
Yoga isn’t a magic cure. That 52% statistic is impressive, but it also means 48% of participants still met PTSD criteria after the intervention. Some people don’t connect with body-based approaches at all. Others find that yoga brings up more than they’re ready to handle and need to pause.
There’s also an accessibility issue. Trauma-informed yoga classes aren’t available everywhere, and when they are, they’re often expensive. Insurance rarely covers them. This creates a situation where a potentially helpful treatment remains out of reach for many who could benefit most.
And let’s address the elephant in the room: the wellness industry has a way of taking legitimate therapeutic approaches and turning them into commercialized, watered-down versions of themselves. Not every studio offering “healing yoga” actually has trauma-informed training. Do your homework.
Where This Fits in Your Healing Journey
Recovery from trauma isn’t linear. It’s more like a spiral-you might revisit the same issues from different angles, finding new layers each time. Body-based practices like trauma-informed yoga offer one path through that spiral.
They work particularly well for people who’ve hit a wall with talk therapy alone. When you’ve analyzed your trauma from every angle but still can’t shake the physical activation, it might be time to approach healing from a different direction.
They’re also helpful early in recovery, before someone is ready to verbally process what happened. You can begin releasing tension from your body without ever describing your experience out loud.
The goal isn’t to become a yoga person or achieve enlightenment or post perfect poses on social media. The goal is simpler: to feel at home in your own body again. To trust the signals it sends you. To know, deep in your bones, that you have the power to keep yourself safe.
That kind of embodied safety - it changes everything.