Thursday, March 29
“Be still, and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10a
Many of you know that on Monday evenings I help with the veteran’s yoga program. This has been an amazing experience. Men, from different branches of services, from different wars all seeking peace from a shared experience of trauma. A veteran with chronic nightly nightmares and flashback since his return from World War II. Another man losing control of his physical body from Parkinson’s believed to have developed from exposure to Agent Orange in the war. Men seeking reprieve from experiences I cannot even begin to imagine.
As some of you may not know, I also work as a trauma therapist at MCI Framingham, this state’s only women’s correctional facility. Here I helped facilitate a program called yogaHOPE- a gender responsive trauma informed yoga and mindfulness curriculum. In an environment often laden with extreme despair and hopelessness, it can seem that there is little hope for transformation and healing. Women come to us in the throes of addiction, in family turmoil. Many have been torn away from their children. Some never have the hope of leaving the prison walls.
This is a population with disproportional rates of serious mental illness. Many women are prisoners of their own minds. The women have experienced an almost unfathomable rate of trauma in their histories. 90 percent of the women participating in the yoga program had experienced domestic violence. A majority of the women are survivors of sexual abuse.
These two populations, in many ways could not be more different. But in so many ways, they are very much the same. Both the women of MCI Framingham and the men of the vet yoga class are warriors. They are brave souls willing to risk discomfort and potential ridicule to ease the long term effects of trauma.
However, I have seen the power of belief. The effectiveness of mindfulness. The power of human connection. I have witnessed the healing and empowering effect of yoga.
Healing is not always a cure. In fact, frequently it is not a cure at all- at least not in the way we might expect. Sometimes healing is simply radical acceptance , finding a way to be okay with where we are in any given moment. Healing is finding mindfulness and peace, even in moments of the greatest chaos. Healing is finding calm in the storm.
We store traumatic memories in our physical bodies. Chronic trauma or distress triggers a basic fight of flight or freeze stress response that becomes automatic and is very toxic. Sometimes the simple act of movement – of controlling body and controlling breath allows us to break the cycle of trauma response, allowing us to be mindfully in any movement. To have radical acceptance without suffering. Yoga, medication, and mindfulness practices allow for this radical acceptance.
Breath can help put space between what you FEEL and what you DO.
Yoga can help you notice what you really FEEL.
Meditation can help you know what it feels like to be peaceful.
And yoga does work to bring calm in times of chaos. I can attest to this from my own life. But even more I know this is true from the stories men and women so willingly share with me.
A veteran plagued by nightmares who gets a restful night’s sleep after yoga class.
A women who slept through the night after the yoga group for the first time since coming to prison.
A women with chronic physical pain, who through yoga is able to have a pain free day. . . the first in 15 years.
A women in prison, about to get into a physical altercation which will end in her going to segregation as she has done so many times before, who stops and says to herself “you have choice. Use your breath”, and avoids the fight completely.
A vet who says he comes to yoga, so that he does not have to rely on psychiatric medication to manage symptoms of trauma.
A new vet who nervously says “I have never done this before” to the response of another vet who states “Four weeks ago I had never done this before either. And now I love it. It has saved me.”
These are but a few of the many healing testaments I have been lucky enough to witness.
As Sue Jones the founder of yogaHOPE said in one session, “The decision to be kind to ourselves if often the hardest decision to make.”
In order to become healthy, it is important to acknowledge the difficult sensations and emotions in our body but not to judge ourselves for them. Instead we will work on noticing them and begin to introduce new ways of thinking that can help empower us.
I recently read a quote that stated “sometimes God calms the storm. . .but sometimes he lets the storm rage and he calms his child.”
The healing of yoga can often be that calm. –Danielle Rousseau
Calm the storm, we pray. Or when the storm needs to rage, O God, calm your child. Amen.