Body and Breath Workshop – REBIRTHING YOGA

The body keeps the memory, even when we no longer remember. Dr. Gabor Maté, a physician who worked for twelve years with people suffering from severe addictions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, showing that every addiction—whether to heroin, shopping, work, food, or the wrong person—grows out of early pain.

Among other sources, he draws on the ACE study by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda from 1998, published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, which included 9,508 adults. The study found that a child who experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences was seven to twelve times more likely to develop an addiction to alcohol or drugs.

Maté explains that the brain’s reward systems—the endogenous opioid system and the dopamine system—are built during the first years of life, depending on the quality of the relationship with the caregiving figure. When the relationship is insecure, when the mother is stressed, depressed, or insecure herself, the baby’s brain receives fewer endorphins and less dopamine, and develops fewer receptors. That child will grow up seeking the missing substances elsewhere: in a substance, a behavior, approval, or adrenaline.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist and professor at Boston University, collected forty years of trauma research in the book The Body Keeps the Score. In 1996, together with Scott Rauch, he published a well-known PET study in the Archives of General Psychiatry, in which they scanned the brains of people with post-traumatic stress. When scripts describing their personal trauma were played to them, Broca’s area on the left side of the brain—the area responsible for turning experience into words—simply shut down. At the same time, the amygdala and the right-side paralimbic regions, the brain’s alarm and emotional centers, lit up as if the danger were happening now. The body did not know that twenty years had passed.

Trauma is not stored only as a memory, but primarily as a pattern in the autonomic nervous system, the muscles, breathing, and automatic responses. Dr. Peter Levine, creator of the Somatic Experiencing method, adds the evolutionary biological component. In his book Waking the Tiger, he described how animals in the wild freeze when faced with a predator, and then, when the danger passes, tremble, shake their bodies, and release the survival energy that has accumulated.

Human beings, because of our developed cortex and social conventions that teach us not to tremble, cry, or scream, suppress this natural response. The energy of flight or fight, which did not have time to be expressed at the moment of danger, remains frozen in the tissues, muscles, shallow breathing, and chronic tension in the shoulders, jaw, and diaphragm. Whenever something resembling the original danger happens—even if it is not truly dangerous—this energy awakens again. The body tries to complete what was left unfinished.

In van der Kolk’s randomized controlled study of yoga as a treatment for post-traumatic stress, published in 2014 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, fifty-two percent of the participants in the yoga group no longer met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress after only ten classes, compared with twenty-one percent in the control group.

A 2023 meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports, part of the Nature group, examined twelve randomized controlled studies with 785 participants and found that breathing practice significantly reduced reported levels of stress, anxiety, and depression.

It is not enough to talk about trauma; it is not enough to understand what happened. We need to speak with the body in a language it understands: the language of breathing, movement, and sensation.

In the workshop, we work with conscious, connected breathing that makes it possible to bypass the logical brain and reach directly what is stored in the tissues; with principles of Somatic Experiencing that help us listen to bodily sensations and release survival energy at a safe, gradual pace; with trauma-sensitive yoga that restores the feeling of being at home in the body; and with a meditation on the eight energy centers based on the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza.

The body remembers, and it can also learn anew.

A body and breath workshop, Rebirthing, yoga, and meditation on the eight energy centers based on the work of Dr. Joe Dispenza.