Trauma Release Yoga
mindful movement + freedom of choice + empowered nervous system + guided meditation.
The past as prologue
Your body remembers every trauma in the form of tension in the muscles, tissues and fascia. Even experiences that you have no conscious memory of can be held in the tension and habitual movement patterns. Your nervous system has only one job and that’s to keep you alive. It doesn’t have to be pretty or socially acceptable to do it.
Our job if we want to rediscover resilience is to recognize that anything has the potential to be trauma. A childhood accident, chronic illness, elective surgery, war, assault, long term abuse, exposure to addiction...even stories about other traumatic experiences and repressed emotions can create the necessary environment for a stress response in the body.
Because stress tension and trauma live in the body, it makes sense that we can alleviate it through the body. Many people use all kinds of exercise to keep a lid on their stress levels without understanding that some forms of exercise can actually increase the stress response. High impact, high intensity exercise, with its “no pan, no gain” mentality, can push the nervous system into a high functioning freeze state by dissociating the mind from the body.
Movement as medicine
Yoga takes the opposite approach,“no pain, ever...” and most styles have a strong focus on connecting the breath to movement, keeping the mind in the body, staying present in the body without judgement, competition or expectation. This provides the perfect foundation to release stored tension and rebuild mind body resilience.
Stress and trauma is unavoidable even if you make a conscious effort to reduce your exposure While a yoga practice alone may offer relief from physical and mental tension, it doesn’t go deep enough. Traditional yoga keeps you present. When trauma gets stuck in the body it feels like there’s always clear and present danger. It doesn’t have the keys to unlock years of past stress injury by itself.
That’s where the tremor mechanism comes in. Trauma release exercise (TRE®) is a series of exercises that open pathways to the autonomic nervous system and allows the body to tremor. This involuntary (neurogenic) tremor signals the brain that the body has moved out of danger.
More than the sum of it’s parts
Trauma release yoga uses specific pose sequencing with a focus on releasing the hip flexors and neck muscles to open those pathways and then allows space for the body to tremor. Students are encouraged to stop and rest throughout the process, learning to keep their effort level low and find a deeper connection to their body. Each practice includes an extended guided meditation after the tremor to allow time to integrate their process.
Trauma Release Yoga combines the mindful movement of a traditional yoga flow with freedom of choice, options and action, empowered nervous system communication with the tremor mechanism, and guided meditation. It offers a way to integrate the best of both worlds to support students in their path to self recovery from all forms of stress injury.
My name is Ericka Thomas. I’m a certified TRE® provider, trauma informed yoga instructor and health coach.
I offer private trauma release exercise sessions and group live stream trauma release yoga classes inside Kinetic Grace - a yearlong resilience program designed for people looking for relief from stress, tension and trauma.
Copyright© 2020 Elemental Kinetics LLC. All rights reserved.