Is it even Yoga?
Is it even Yoga, if it's not trauma-informed?
No, it's not. It's a fad. A hobby. A feel-good experience. A watered down version of a profound system of health and healing. Face it as soon as you can: Yoga’s premise is that so much of life can and will cause us to suffer; however, we can also process, evolve and liberate ourselves.
Yoga Foundation is a place for practice, sanga, experiential learning and healing. Yoga Foundation is a place for practice, sanga, experiential learning and healing. Once you find the Yoga that heals you, you stay connected to it, and for many of you to us and the Krishnamacharya lineage, for life. That’s what happened from about five minutes from my first Krishnamacharya lineage practice in Chennai. I cried, out of nowhere. I was not sad. I was not happy. I was finally processing, rather than pretending I had it all together. Hatching out of a shell I erected to stay safe from life’s unknowns, only to remain frozen, internally. Other dimensions of my being that I knew existed, yearned for, and frankly only accessed in altered states, began emerging.
So much happens inside of us. The very process via which we can offload the havoc that life may leave within us is Yoga itself. Duhkha samyoga viyoga yogah, Krishna states plainly as one of the most profound definitions of Yoga. Yoga means union, it’s well-known definition. Krishna proposes a seeming oxymoron, Yoga is the opposite of joining: severing. Severing what? How? As always, we need context, commentary and teachers, practice and reflection for it all to make sense.
When an experience affects us emotionally, it often becomes a part of us, embedded in our unconscious memory. Memory informs our thoughts and behaviors. Things have happened. I was lactose intolerant and suffered digestively as a newborn. I saw a monstrous woman physically abuse my Mom as a young child. I’ve been called a C--- by someone I had a crush on in high school. Some bored guy who wanted attention spied on my and my high school boyfriend and told the whole school. A group of girls at camp in elementary school shunned me because I wasn’t cool. I cut myself experimenting with a razor in the shower in first grade. I did some things I am embarrassed about, like telling my brother I’d get my friends after him if he didn’t stop bothering me in middle school. A guy made fun of the weight I gained after freshman year in college. My college boyfriend serially cheated on me, sometimes in front of me, and denied it, like Shaggy did in his song “it wasn’t me.”
I may be talking to you. It may be 2026. But I am seeing you through a lens of innumerable experiences that inform this moment. Contingent upon each of our unique life experiences, singular and serial difficulties exist, as life is replete with challenges. That’s how we shrink. And that’s how we grow. Unwanted and deeply rooted attachments within, unconscious, sticky and seemingly permanent can be uncovered. We do not have to know everything that impacted us. We do not have to linger on these things, although they linger in us. Loosening trauma's hold requires our own somatic acknowledgement that we constricted, in duhkham. Severing ties with the emotional pain we hold is Yoga. Healing comes within reach. Severing ties with our strong connection to our pain liberates us from being beholden to it. We are what we don’t process. From that strong link we have to our suffering, delink. Heal. Liberate.