What trauma informed actually means in a yoga training, and what it does not

Written by Sean Goldberg, physiotherapist, clinical Pilates instructor and lead teacher at Samasti Yoga.

Trauma informed teaching does not mean soft teaching. It is clear teaching with the student’s inner experience being honoured. A trauma informed teacher still leads, still gives direction and still holds the room. It may actually make it more difficult for a student to let go when nothing is asked of them clearly. The teacher directs the pose, the sequence and where the student’s attention should go in the body to keep them safe. The teacher also remembers that an asana is expressed by the individual rather than being a gold standard the student has to fit into. The teacher never tells a student what they are feeling or what they ought to be feeling.

I should say at the start that some of what follows is my own position and not the published standard. The published standard says something different from what I am saying here, and I will say so when it is the case.

The short answer. What I would teach comes down to five things.

1. The teacher leads clearly. In my view vagueness is not safety. Variations are ordinary in yoga and they are not the problem. The problem is the hedged, permission seeking language that gets wrapped around them, which leaves nobody knowing what is being asked.
2. Nobody is touched without knowing it is coming. Consent is either established before the class begins or asked for as the hands arrive, and it is never unseen and never sudden.
3. The teacher directs attention rather than prescribing feeling. The job is to guide where the attention goes in the body to keep the student safe. It is not to tell a student what the pose will make them feel.
4. There is a real alternative safe pose available, built into the class before anybody needs it.
5. A group class is the wrong room for somebody in acute distress, and knowing that is part of the job.

The rest of this article is the reasoning behind those five, and the difference between a training that teaches them and one that only advertises them.

What does trauma informed yoga mean?

It means the teacher assumes somebody in the room carries a history they have not disclosed, and runs the class so that nothing in it requires them to disclose it. The word informed is doing the work. The teacher is informed by how a nervous system behaves under threat, and teaches accordingly. The teacher is not treating anybody.

The usual physiological account comes from Stephen Porges and polyvagal theory. It describes the nervous system as moving down a ladder rather than switching stress on and off. At the top is ease, where a person can be with other people and take things in. Below that is mobilisation, which is fight and then flight. Below that again, when neither of those is available and neither works, is shutdown, where the system stops fighting and goes numb. The practical consequence for a teacher is narrower than most people assume. It is not that the class must be gentle. It is that the class must be clear. The student needs to know what is happening, what is coming, and that they can step out of it at any point.

Where I part company with the published standard

The formal version of this work is Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga, developed by David Emerson and Jenn Turner with Dr Bessel van der Kolk at the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusetts. It is a real clinical protocol, it is the only version of this with a randomised controlled trial behind it, and its published method puts two things at the centre: invitational language, and repeated opportunities to make choices. In that setting I have no argument with it. It is delivered by a certified facilitator, to a small group of people with a diagnosis, alongside other treatment, and the choice making is the point of the intervention rather than a style of speaking.

My disagreement is with the copy of it that has spread into ordinary studio teaching, where the clinical container is gone and only the vocabulary survived. That version says trauma informed means speaking softly and turning every instruction into an invitation. I think that reading is mistaken and that it makes classes worse rather than safer. This is my opinion, formed from teaching and from clinical work, and I have not found it argued anywhere in the yoga literature, so weigh it as an opinion rather than as a finding.

Why soft language is not the same as safety

This is the most common mistake in the field, and it comes from good intentions. A teacher learns that commands can be triggering, so they hedge everything. “Maybe you might like to perhaps explore bringing the foot somewhere forward, if that feels okay for you today.” Nobody in that room knows what they are being asked to do.

Two things go wrong, and this is the part I hold as my own reading rather than as established fact. The first is that a student cannot let go around a teacher who is not leading. Letting go in a practice is a handover of vigilance. The student stops scanning the room because somebody else is holding the structure. If nobody is holding it, they keep scanning, and the class never gets below the surface. Clarity is what makes the handover possible.

The second is that the hedging is doing the harm, and not the variations. Offering a variation is ordinary teaching and always has been. A teacher who says take the bent knee version if the hamstrings are tight has given clear direction and a second option in the same breath, and nobody in the room is confused. What creates the problem is the language wrapped around it, the inviting and the perhaps and the if that feels okay for you, because it hands the decision back without ever saying what the decision is. Agency is knowing that you can stop. It is not being asked, repeatedly and vaguely, what you would like.

I should be honest about how strong that claim is. Post traumatic stress is known to impair working memory, and unclear instruction is known to cost a learner more attention than it looks like it should. Nobody has joined those two findings together and tested them on a yoga class, so what I have given you is an argument and not a result.

So the instructions stay firm and clear. Describe the pose, say where the class is going, and say where the attention should go to keep the body safe. What gets removed is not the leadership. What gets removed is the claim on the student’s inner reality.

The two errors hiding in one instruction

Take child’s pose. A teacher settles the room into it and says, “as you rest here you will feel a sense of turning inward, and the body will begin to relax.”

For most people in the room that will be broadly true, which is exactly why the sentence is often said. But consider the student who cannot relax when their head is on the floor and they cannot see what is behind them. For them the pose is not restful, it is vulnerable, and the instruction has just done two separate things to them.

It told them how they should feel. Now their actual experience is wrong. They are the one person in a room of calm people who is not calm, and they will assume the fault is theirs. Prescribing the inner experience of a pose turns a private difficulty into a public failure, and it is the most common way a well meaning class does harm.

It left them nowhere to go. The instruction assumed one position. Nobody has been shown a version of this with the head lifted, or the eyes open, or the back to a wall, so the student’s only real options are to stay in something that is escalating them or to break the pose in front of everybody. That is not a choice, it is a bind.

The fix is not softer language. The fix is to stop narrating the student’s inner reality, and to have built the alternative into the class before anybody needs it. Teach the second position as part of the pose rather than as a concession. Describe what the pose does mechanically, direct the attention to where it needs to go for the body to be safe, and then let the student report the rest. “Notice what happens to the breath here” is a real instruction with an open answer. “You will feel calm here” is a script that the student either passes or fails.

The body expresses the pose, the pose is not a mould

The same principle can be applied to the approach of the teacher. Not every body fits every pose, and willingness does not change the shape of a hip socket. The useful version of that idea is not that some poses are off limits. It is that the body should be an expression of the pose rather than something forced into a fixed picture of it.

That reframing matters more than it sounds. A student trying to reach a position will override sensation to get there, because there is an idealised way the posture should be and the body is the obstacle. A student performing the asana according to their body in that moment is working from what their structure actually allows, and the pose becomes an expression of their inner experience.

This is also the clearest way to describe what a teacher is for. The job is to guide where the attention should go in the body to keep the student safe. It is not to hand out feelings, and it is not to leave them alone in the pose either. In a standing forward fold, telling the room to feel where the weight sits through the feet and whether the knees are locked is direction, and it is direction with an open answer. It points the attention somewhere useful without deciding in advance what they will find there. You are leading, and you are not narrating their inner reality.

This is where interoception belongs in a class. It is the working skill of reading your own structure while you move, and it is developed by being repeatedly shown where to look. Trauma tends to blunt exactly that signal, and rebuilding it is most of the benefit.

It is also where clinical anatomy stops being theory. A teacher who understands that roughly one in five people cannot safely load a headstand because of arm length against head to neck height, or that a comfortable lotus needs about 115 degrees of hip external rotation, does not need to guess and does not need to hedge. They can be direct, because they know what they are looking at.

The standard on hands on adjustment

The rule is simpler than the debate around it. Nobody is touched without knowing it is coming. There are two workable ways to get there, and they solve different problems.

You can ask before the class starts. A single question to the room, whether anybody would prefer not to be adjusted, settles it for everyone at once and does not interrupt the practice later, which makes it the better option in a flowing class. Or you can ask as the hands arrive, every time, which is slower but works when you did not get to ask at the start.

What both of them protect against is the thing that actually causes harm, which is unseen sudden touch. It is the hand that lands on a body that did not know it was coming, from behind, in a forward fold, with the eyes closed. That is the moment a nervous system reacts before any thinking happens, and no amount of good intention in the adjustment changes what the body just did. Everything else about adjustment policy is a preference. This part is not.

Notice that neither version requires softness. You can be a firm, direct, hands on teacher and meet this standard completely. It is a question of what the student knows in advance, and not of how much you touch or how gently you speak.

When a group class is the wrong room

There is a limit to all of this, and I think it gets skipped because it is bad for business to say it. If somebody is in an acute state, meaning their post traumatic symptoms are active right now or they are sitting in sympathetic arousal that will not settle, then a group yoga class is probably not the place for them, and that holds whether the class is gentle, whether it calls itself trauma informed, and whether the teacher is very good. A group class has other bodies in it, a fixed sequence, a shared pace and a teacher whose attention is divided twenty ways. None of that can be adjusted around one person in real time, and the attempt usually makes that person conspicuous, which is its own harm.

What that person needs is an individual setting, where the pace belongs to them, where nothing has to be negotiated in front of anybody, and where the person guiding it is trained in therapeutics rather than in teaching group classes. A 200 hour training does not produce that person and it should not claim to.

So the skill I want a graduate to have is not the ability to handle acute distress. It is the ability to notice it, to stop, and to say that they know somebody better suited to this. That takes some nerve, and it is worth more than a weekend of vocabulary.

Does any of this actually work?

Yes, and less strongly than the field usually claims.

Two good trials have tested this way of teaching on women living with long standing post traumatic stress. In the first, from 2014, about half the women in the yoga group no longer met the criteria for PTSD after ten weekly classes, against about a fifth of the women in the comparison group. In the second, from 2023, trauma sensitive yoga did as well as one of the standard talking therapies, and far more people finished the yoga than finished the therapy. People stayed, and that matters more than it looks.

Set against that, two reviews of the wider research were not impressed, and one of them found the improvement showing up when people rated themselves but not when a clinician assessed them. I am telling you that because I would rather you heard it from a school than from somebody arguing against one.

What I take from it is that the effect is real enough to work with and nowhere near strong enough to build a claim of clinical competence on. Both of the good trials gave a structured programme to people with a diagnosis, alongside other treatment. They are evidence that this way of teaching helps. They are not a licence for a yoga teacher to call themselves a trauma practitioner.

What trauma informed yoga is not

Four distinctions, and the first is the one that matters most.

It is not therapy. A trauma informed yoga teacher does not process a person’s history, does not invite disclosure, and does not work with the content of what happened. Clinical work of that kind belongs to a licensed therapist. The formal exception is Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga, which is delivered as a clinical intervention by people certified specifically in it. That is a separate credential, and a 200 hour training does not confer it.

It is not a gentle class. Trauma informed describes how the room is run and not how hard the practice is. A strong, demanding class can be entirely trauma informed. A slow restorative class can fail the test completely if the teacher is adjusting people without asking and telling them what they ought to be feeling.

It is not a module. A weekend can teach the vocabulary. It cannot change the reflexes a teacher built over years of cueing, and the reflexes are where this actually lives. Habits of language are rebuilt by practising them daily for weeks with somebody watching and correcting.

It is not a diagnosis. The teacher never decides who in the room is traumatised. The approach is applied to everybody, precisely because the teacher cannot know, and because none of it makes the class worse for the people who do not need it.

Where trauma informed teaching and somatic work meet

They share a premise, which is that the body is where the work happens rather than a place the work is applied to. Somatic movement adds a mechanism to it. Slow, deliberate contraction and release retrains the loop between the brain and the muscle that holds chronic protective tension, which is how a body carries a bracing pattern for years without the person knowing it is there. Trauma informed teaching creates the conditions in which that release is tolerable. One of them is the room and the other is the method, and a training that teaches both gives a new teacher something to do as well as a way to be.

What to ask a training that calls itself trauma informed

Four questions, and they are fair to ask of any school including this one.

1. Who teaches it, and what is their clinical qualification? A physiotherapist, a psychologist or a certified trauma yoga facilitator is a different answer from a yoga teacher who read a book.
2. How many hours does it actually occupy, and is it woven through the practice or bolted on as a module?
3. Do they teach the boundary, meaning what a graduate should refer on rather than handle?
4. What do they claim graduates can do afterwards? A school that promises you will be qualified to work clinically with trauma survivors after 200 hours is overselling, and that answer tells you what you need to know.

What we teach, and what we do not

At Samasti this is not a module and it is not a block of hours either. About twenty hours of the 260 go directly on teaching craft, meaning cueing, variations, adjustments and the practicums with feedback from the third week onwards, and those hours are woven through the training rather than gathered into one place. The standard is applied in every session, so a trainee meets it in the morning practice, in the anatomy room and in the afternoon lab. That is where a trainee’s language actually changes, because it is the only way somebody is listening to how they cue often enough to tell them what it did.

The standard on touch and the standard on language are the ones above, and the anatomy that makes both of them possible is taught by a practising physiotherapist across the whole training rather than by a visiting lecturer for two days, which is why the direction can be specific instead of hedged.

What we do not do is sell it as a clinical qualification. A graduate leaves able to hold a room without doing harm, able to notice when somebody is out of their depth, and able to say so and refer on. That is a real and useful thing to be, and it is not the same as being a trauma therapist. Any school that tells you otherwise in a month has told you something important about the school.

If that is the kind of depth you are after, our yoga teacher training in Bali runs one cohort at a time in Canggu, capped at 20, with clinical anatomy taught by a practising physiotherapist across all 260 contact hours. Ask us the hard questions before you apply. We enjoy them.

Related reading: how to choose a yoga teacher training in Bali, and the four most common yoga injuries and how to avoid them.