If you are not aware of what your body needs, you can’t take care of it. If you don’t feel hunger, you can’t nourish yourself. If you mistake anxiety for hunger, you may eat too much. And if you can’t feel when you’re satiated, you’ll keep eating. This is why cultivating sensory awareness is such a critical aspect of trauma recovery. Most traditional therapies downplay or ignore the moment-to-moment shifts in our inner sensory world. But these shifts carry the essence of the organism’s responses: the emotional states that are imprinted in the body’s chemical profile, in the viscera, in the contraction of the striated muscles of the face, throat, trunk, and limbs.17 Traumatized people need to learn that they can tolerate their sensations, befriend their inner experiences, and cultivate new action patterns.

In yoga you focus your attention on your breathing and on your sensations moment to moment. You begin to notice the connection between your emotions and your body—perhaps how anxiety about doing a pose actually throws you off balance. You begin to experiment with changing the way you feel. Will taking a deep breath relieve that tension in your shoulder? Will focusing on your exhalations produce a sense of calm?

Simply noticing what you feel fosters emotional regulation, and it helps you to stop trying to ignore what is going on inside you. As I often tell my students, the two most important phrases in therapy, as in yoga, are “Notice that” and “What happens next?” Once you start approaching your body with curiosity rather than with fear, everything shifts. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Trapped inside my body with all the excrement of childhood traumas I continually mistook my mind and body as the enemy. No matter how hard I tried to “just let go” in order to please people who found discomfort in my refusal to “just be happy now” I could not escape myself. If love could conquer all it would have seen me free to live a life with my children, watching them grow, being there in the present moments of their lives. But even love could not disintegrate the hold my childhood had on me. Trauma does not work like that. I did not know.

For decades I rode the roller coaster of intermittent peace, therapy, medication and so many times I felt elated at a new recovery path, a new drug, a new perspective only to see my hopes dashed and depression settle back in. By 2017 I was as closer to hopelessness as I had ever been,

That is a longer story to be told another day. For now one particular day in September brought me to Dialectical Behavioral Training, mindfulness, and yoga.

How many years I saw my body and mind as my enemy. They held the memories, the words, scent, and feel of traumatic events that I could neither shake off, bury, or escape from. I could liken it to a puppeteer pulling my strings to make me go this way or that. I felt defective, weak minded, stupid, and “inherent evil” for all the people my behaviors harmed.

I have now been in twice a week training for 2 years to learn how to embrace all of me, all of my thoughts and feelings, and begin to take control. It is working. After decades of drugs and therapy and failure, capturing this little spot of peace is remarkable to me.

My mind and body no longer own me, we are friends, partners in this new enterprise that is me. It is bittersweet success, however, at 66 years old I finally learn to own the reality of my childhood and it sets me free.