trauma

A Free Book from Richy K. Chandler and Singing Dragon

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During these troubling times, our mental health remains just as key as our physical well-being. Therefore, Singing Dragon is pleased to share the full contents of the latest book by Richy K. Chandler: What the Hell Just Happened?! – Comfort and Wisdom for When Your World Falls Apart.

This inspirational book helps readers overcome troubling times in their lives through vivid illustrations and positive affirmations. The book shows how you can face your past and embrace your future, and provides thoughtful tips to remind you of what you can be at your emotionally strongest and smartest. Continue reading →

Georgia Keal: Guided Meditation for Reducing Anxiety – Day Two

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This guided meditation helps with reducing anxiety by releasing deep held tension that is created when we get anxious and our body tenses. It does this by shifting the energy from a anxious state to a relaxed one, using guided imagery of the chakras with a compassionate attention, using a focus of loving kindness towards the self. This meditation creates a deep sense of relaxation and reduces held tension to bring about a sense of inner peace and calm.

The Guided Meditation Handbook
Advice, Meditation Scripts and Hasta Mudra for Yoga Teachers
Georgia Keal

Help yoga students to access a deep state of relaxation with this guided meditation handbook. Offering yoga teachers scripts for guided meditations, students can learn how to cultivate positive emotions and let go of negative ones. Including practical information on how to set the scene for meditation in a yoga class, using music, lighting and props, the book also advises on how to introduce a meditation practice to yoga students. It explores the benefits of meditation for people from all walks of life, including sleep-deprived parents and those suffering from post-traumatic stress. Read more

 

Beth Spindler: Yoga Therapy Techniques for Trauma

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Beth has over four decades’ experience in utilizing yoga as a healing modality, plus the highest certification in the field. Her book, Yoga Therapy for Fear: Treating Anxiety, Depression and Rage with the Vagus nerve and Other Techniques (Singing Dragon, 2018) is recognized in the yoga therapy community as a text for those studying in the field. She is a frequently featured writer and presenter for Yoga International and leads retreats worldwide.

In this video, Beth shares some tips and techniques to use with clients that are dealing with trauma.

Please note that while our summit is open to absolutely everyone from all corners of the world, despite our best efforts we won’t be able to ensure safe, comfortable practice for every attendee nor take responsibility for your own practice. If you have any injuries or are dealing with any conditions that you would normally flag to your yoga teacher or therapist, please seek advice before taking part or following along with any of our classes or sequences.

 

Yoga Therapy for Fear
Treating Anxiety, Depression and Rage with the Vagus Nerve and Other Techniques
Beth Spindler

Understand how to help clients relieve symptoms of fear and anxiety through yoga therapy. This book explains how to weave feelings of security into daily living, by helping the body to unlearn habit patterns from stored trauma. It features dynamic postures, calming breathing exercises and meditations alongside the latest fascia research. Read more

Charlotte Watts: Yoga, Trauma and the Digestive System

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Charlotte Watts is a Senior Yoga Teacher and Teacher Trainer (with Yoga Alliance Professionals) and has been teaching since 2010. She is also the author of Yoga Therapy for Digestive Health, published by Singing Dragon just last year.

In this podcast, we talk about positivity, connecting with your body, teaching yoga teachers, helping students open up in class as well as touching on social prescribing and what the future might hold.

Yoga Therapy for Digestive Health
Charlotte Watts

Yoga is an increasingly popular way of treating the digestive issues which have become common in the western world, and now affect one in five people in the UK. By combining scientific evidence with traditional yogic practices, Charlotte Watts reveals how yoga can be used to alleviate digestive problems such as IBS, IBD and more. Read more

Dagmar Härle: Trauma-sensitive Yoga

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 This extract was adapted for the Virtual Yoga Summit from Trauma-Sensitive Yoga by Dagmar Härle. 

Since primeval times, people have tried to cope with the adversities of life. There have always been upsetting and traumatizing events, but the methods for confronting the consequences of these shocks have varied greatly. They range from shamanic rituals such as soul retrieval to physical forms of expression such as singing and dancing to cognitive and narrative forms. Many of our contemporary therapeutic approaches in the West are based on cognitive considerations. However, traumatization is not just shown in a change of convictions. Due to the lasting stress response, it is also displayed in the somatic effects that affect posture, physical reactions, and bodily sensations—phenomena that were the focus of treatment at other times and by other cultures. Feelings of numbness and being separated from one’s own body often alternate with strong, overwhelming reactions to triggers, and in many cases make an efficient therapeutic approach more difficult. Instead of introducing a new method, I see body-oriented work as a basis and supplement to the tried and tested techniques of trauma treatment.

 

WHY I WORK WITH YOGA IN TRAUMA THERAPY

The idea of integrating yoga asanas (postures), pranayama (breathing exercises), and mindfulness into trauma therapy arose while working with my clients. When I completed my training in Somatic Experiencing and received my Master’s degree in Psychotraumatology, I was convinced that exposure therapy combined with a body-oriented approach is expedient in treating complex post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSDs). I am still convinced of this, although it has become apparent to me that progress is not possible with every client when using this approach. For some people with complex trauma, the exposure of traumatic contents was simply not tolerable—relating to their own bodies was so disturbing to them that it triggered a response of panic and dissociation. Continue reading →

Lisa Sanfilippo: Yoga for Sleep and Insomnia – Considering trauma

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Author, yoga teacher and psychotherapist Lisa Sanfillippo has been teaching yoga for over 20 years, and now teaches at London’s premier studios, triyoga and the Life Centre. She runs yoga for sleep workshops around the world. Lisa’s work has been featured by various newspapers and magazines, and she has helped hundreds of people through her yoga for sleep workshops. She is regarded as the UK’s leading yoga for insomnia expert.

Lisa is the author of Yoga Therapy for Insomnia and Sleep Recovery (Singing Dragon, 2019).

In this video, Lisa discusses the benefits of yoga therapy for insomnia and trauma-related loss of sleep; the five-step approach to insomnia; how to approach teaching a trauma-sensitive group yoga class and more.

 

 Yoga Therapy for Insomnia and Sleep Recovery
An Integrated Approach to Supporting Healthy Sleep and Sustaining Energy All Day
Lisa Sanfilippo

Examining the ways that the body, trauma and emotional issues, and lifestyle can impact sleep, this book shows how to apply yoga holistically to tackle insomnia. Learn how to reset the delicate body-mind balance by moving through the koshas. This approach will put clients on the path to good quality sleep, with increasing effect over time. Read more

Georgia Keal: Guided Meditation for Reducing Anxiety – Day one

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Georgia Keal is a British Wheel of Yoga trained yoga teacher and author of The Guided Meditation Handbook: Advice, Scripts and Hasta Mudras for Yoga Teachers (Singing Dragon, 2019). Georgia loves sharing the positive benefits of yoga and guided meditation with her students in her classes in East Sussex. Georgia is also a freelance travel and yoga writer and has contributed to many publications, including regularly to YOGA Magazine.

In this guided meditation you will learn a simple, calming breathing technique designed to reduce any feelings of anxiety by stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system. This is the bodies natural de stress button. We then move on to guided imagery of being on a beach and uses the waves of the sea to help with the sensations of the waves of anxiety that may arise in your everyday life.

The Guided Meditation Handbook

Advice, Meditation Scripts and Hasta Mudra for Yoga Teachers
Georgia Keal
For yoga teachers who want to add a meditation element to their classes, this collection of guided meditations is the perfect resource. It also includes tips on setting the scene for a truly relaxed environment, alongside advice for on how to create your own meditations that can be tailored to the needs of yoga students. Read more

Max Strom: Is Yoga a Women’s World?

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Born with severe clubbed feet, Max Strom spent much of the first six years of his life with his feet confined in plaster casts and braces. Today, he is known for inspiring and impacting the lives of people from all walks of life, teaching breathing patterns and personal transformation worldwide. His method, Inner Axis, is known to produce immediate results in alleviating stress, anxiety, burnout, and depression, impacting the internal and emotional aspects of our life, as well as physical healing. His TEDx talk, Breathe to Heal, is approaching one million views on Youtube. Many know him for his two inspiring books: There is No APP for Happiness, addressing the challenge of finding meaning in the digital age, and A Life Worth Breathing.

In this video, Max discusses men in yoga: why they might feel excluded, the importance of connecting with emotions, and the benefits for men in joining the yoga community.

 

Anneke Sips: Labels and Love – Let’s Connect!

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Anneke is a Svastha Yoga Teacher/ Therapist and Registered Nurse (RN) who has worked in psychiatry since 1998. She is one of the first accredited yoga therapists in the Netherlands (C-IAYT) and the founder of Network Yoga Therapy and The Yoga Therapy Conference in Amsterdam.

In this video, she talks about labels we are given and that we give ourselves, taking a mindful approach to our everyday lives, and what we can do to connect with each other.

 

Jess Glenny: Finding My Body’s Voice

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Supportive Teaching for People with Developmental Trauma in the Yoga Class

This article is adapted from The Yoga Teacher Mentor: A Reflective Guide to Holding Spaces, Maintaining Boundaries, and Creating Inclusive Classes, which will be published by Singing Dragon in January 2019.

Developmental trauma (also known as complex trauma) is more common than is generally assumed and often undisclosed at yoga classes, even where it’s asked about on student intake forms. Most often, you will gradually become aware of the signs of developmental trauma through observing how your student is (or isn’t) in their body, the kinds of connection they are able to make and sustain with you as teacher, and how they relate to the group at large.

Developmental trauma generally begins very early in life, sometimes before birth and often prior to the development of language and cognitive thought, and is a response to childhood experiences such as neglect, abandonment, and/or physical or sexual abuse. The severity of the consequent trauma response depends to a large extent upon whether any trustworthy and caring adult – teacher, grandparent, older sibling, foster-parent – was available to the child. Recovery is generally much harder for those with whom no one formed a genuine, altruistic and nurturing bond.

Successfully resolving developmental trauma is a slow and challenging process, but it is possible, given appropriate forms of therapy (these are different from the types of therapy useful for working with PTSD or one-off trauma). Without therapeutic intervention, the effects of developmental trauma usually persevere into adulthood, profoundly affecting the person’s physical and mental well-being, cognition, capacity for meaningful relationship, and ability to live in and from their present-moment embodied experience. Continue reading →