IYM: How did you get interested in Yoga for the treatment of PTSD?
Bessel van der Kolk : I began my own practice six years ago. I was looking for a way for people to regulate the core arousal system in the brain and feel safe inside their bodies. My interest came from doing research that discovered how trauma affects the brain. Yoga turned out to be a way to get people to safely feel their physical sensations and to develop a quiet place of stillness.
Lots of yoga cites claimed that yoga could change basic brain functions, but that was based on intuition, not scientific investigation. So I decided to see if Yoga can positively affect the core regulatory mechanism in the brain. Some trauma-sensitive people can feel frightfully unsafe experiencing the sensations that are evoked by certain asanas. What most people don't realize is that trauma is not the story of something that awful that happened in the past, but the residue of imprints left behind in people's sensory and hormonal systems. Traumatized people often are terrified of the sensations in their own bodies. Most trauma-sensitive people need some form of body-oriented psychotherapy of bodywork to regain a sense of safety in their bodies. More from the interview here.
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