Creating Safety: The Foundation of Trauma-informed & Trauma-preventative Yoga
Safety isn't just the absence of danger—it's the presence of deep knowing that you belong exactly where you are, exactly as you are.
When I first stepped into a yoga class nearly fifteen years ago, I thought I was looking for phsyical ease and stress relief. What I found instead was a panic attack so intense I walked out before the class was halfway through. The invitation to "be present" and “find my edges” felt like a threat to a nervous system that had learned survival meant staying disconnected, staying vigilant, staying small, and most importantly- not being present within my body.
I had no language then for what I know now: my body didn't feel safe to be felt.
For those of us who've experienced trauma—whether the acute shock of a single incident or the slow erosion of chronic stress, neglect, or abuse—the body becomes both sanctuary and battleground. We learn to leave it to survive, yet we must return to it to heal. This is the sacred paradox at the heart of trauma-informed yoga: we must create safety to access the very place where safety was lost.
What Safety Actually Means in the Body
Safety in trauma-informed yoga isn't about creating a space free from all discomfort or challenge. It's about creating conditions where your nervous system can begin to remember its innate capacity for regulation, connection, integration, and wholeness.
Dr. Stephen Porges' polyvagal theory teaches us that our nervous system is constantly scanning our environment for cues of safety or danger—a process called neuroception that happens below the level of conscious awareness. When we feel safe, our ventral vagal system comes online, allowing for connection, curiosity, and growth. When we perceive threat, we move into sympathetic activation (fight or flight) or dorsal vagal shutdown (freeze or collapse).
For trauma survivors, this threat detection system often becomes hypervigilant, reading danger where none exists, or numbed out entirely, missing important information about actual boundaries and needs. The yoga space—with its emphasis on surrender, vulnerability, and letting go—can paradoxically trigger these very survival responses we're hoping to heal.
This is why creating safety isn't just about calmness or avoiding triggers, although those matter deeply. It's about understanding how trauma lives in the body and designing our practice to gradually restore the nervous system's capacity for safety, choice, and embodied presence.
The Nervous System's Intelligence
Your nervous system isn't broken—it's brilliant. Every response, every protection, every pattern of holding or hiding served you once. The hypervigilance that exhausts you now once kept you alive & functioning. The numbness that frustrates you once provided necessary refuge from overwhelming pain.
In trauma-informed yoga, we begin with honoring this intelligence instead of asking ourselves to change. We approach the body not as something to fix or override, but as our most intimate teacher and ally.
Before I end every class I remind my students: " Take a moment to let your practice settle in the body. Invite a sense of gratitude for everything your body has carried you through to this moment. All of the millions of miracles of life and breath that have brought you hereHonor the dualities of you that make you whole."
This shift in perspective—from adversary to ally—is often the first step toward creating internal safety.
The Elements of Safety in Trauma-Informed Practice
Choice and Agency
Perhaps the most crucial element of safety is the restoration of choice. Trauma, by definition, involves a loss of agency—moments when our ability to choose our response was overwhelmed or taken away. Every invitation in trauma-informed yoga is truly optional.
"Notice if you'd like to close your eyes, or perhaps keep them open today." "Explore this shape in whatever way feels right for your body." "Take a rest whenever you need one, for as long as you need."
These aren't empty platitudes—they're invitations to practice sovereignty over your own experience.
Predictability and Transparency
When we've experienced trauma, the unknown can feel threatening even when it's benign. In trauma-informed yoga, we create safety through clear communication about what's coming next.
I describe poses before we move into them. I explain the purpose behind breathing practices. I'm transparent about my own teaching choices and invite students to modify or opt out of anything that doesn't serve them. This predictability allows the nervous system to relax into presence rather than staying alert for potential threats.
Connection to Internal Resources
Before we explore edges or venture into challenging territory, we establish connection to what feels stable and supportive within. These might be:
The felt sense of your feet connecting with the earth
The rhythm of your natural breath
A place in your body that feels neutral or pleasant
An internal sense of strength or groundedness
Connection to something larger than yourself—nature, spirit, love
When we have these resources available, we can approach difficulty from a place of resilience rather than depletion.
Titration and Pacing
In trauma therapy, titration refers to working with small, manageable doses of intensity rather than overwhelming the system. In yoga, this might look like:
Holding poses for shorter periods and building gradually
Exploring sensation in small increments
Moving slowly enough that students can track their internal responses
Balancing challenge with restoration
The goal isn't to avoid all activation or discomfort—it's to stay within what trauma therapist Pat Ogden calls the "window of tolerance," where we can experience sensation without becoming overwhelmed or shut down.
Creating Safety for Different Bodies, Different Traumas
Safety isn't one-size-fits-all. What feels supportive to one nervous system might feel threatening to another. This is why trauma-informed yoga requires us to hold space for multiple experiences simultaneously.
Some students need to keep their eyes open and their backs to the wall. Others find safety in closing their eyes and turning inward. Some heal through stillness and gentle restorative poses. Others need dynamic movement to discharge trapped energy.
The art of trauma-informed teaching lies in creating space wide enough to hold all of these needs without making anyone wrong for what they require.
When Trauma Lives in Movement Itself
For some survivors, particularly those who've experienced physical or sexual violence, the very act of moving the body can feel threatening. Yoga poses might unconsciously echo positions of vulnerability or powerlessness. Touch—even self-touch—might trigger memories or sensations that feel unsafe.
This is why trauma-informed yoga meets students where they are, not where we think they should be. Sometimes the most healing thing we can do is simply sit together and breathe. Sometimes the profound act of staying present with discomfort for just one moment is enough to begin rewiring old patterns.
The Sacred Responsibility of Holding Space
As teachers, we become temporary guardians of other people's nervous systems. This is profound and humbling work that requires us to continually examine our own relationship with safety, power, and healing.
We must be willing to:
Acknowledge what we don't know
Stay present with difficult emotions without trying to fix them
Recognize the signs of overwhelm or dissociation
Offer resources without insisting on outcomes
Hold boundaries with compassion
Tend to our own nervous system regulation so we can remain a stable presence for others
This doesn't mean we need to be perfect or healed of all our own wounds. It means we need to be conscious of them, in relationship with them, and committed to our own ongoing growth and healing.
Building Your Own Foundation of Safety
Whether you're a student or teacher, trauma survivor or supporter, the invitation to create safety begins with your own nervous system. Notice what helps you feel grounded, present, and resourced. Practice tracking your internal responses to different experiences, environments, and relationships.
Some questions to explore:
What environments help your nervous system feel most at ease?
What practices restore your sense of groundedness when you feel scattered or anxious?
How do you know when you're pushing beyond your capacity versus growing your edge?
What does your body need when it's feeling activated or shut down?
Who are the people in your life that help you feel most like yourself?
This self-knowledge becomes the foundation from which you can create safety for others.
The Ripple Effect of Felt Safety
When we learn to create safety within our own nervous system, it ripples out in ways we might never fully comprehend. Our regulated presence becomes a gift to everyone around us—our children, partners, friends, students, and strangers we pass on the street.
As trauma specialist Dr. Dan Siegel reminds us, we don't heal in isolation. We heal in relationship, in community, in the felt sense of belonging that comes when we're truly seen and received exactly as we are.
In trauma-informed yoga, we're not just healing individual bodies—we're participating in the collective healing of a culture that has forgotten how to be safe with itself and each other. Every time we choose presence over performance, curiosity over judgment, and connection over competition, we're weaving the fabric of a more compassionate community.
This is sacred work, this creation of safety. It asks everything of us and gives back more than we could imagine. In learning to tend to the wounded places within ourselves and others with such exquisite care, we remember what it means to be truly human.
Your body is waiting for you to come home. Not the body you think you should have, but the one that has carried you through every moment of your life. The one that holds your stories, your wisdom, your unshakeable capacity for healing and awakening.
The door is always open. Safety is not a destination but a practice, not a permanent state but a moment-by-moment choice to turn toward yourself with the tenderness you've always deserved.
Are you ready to begin?
Book a free consultation with me here