When the Body's Wisdom Leads: Reflections on Embodiment and Trauma Sensitive Yoga

I remember hearing Thich Nhat Hanh say something like, “If you haven’t cried in meditation, you haven’t really started meditating.” At the time, it settled somewhere in the background of my meditation practice.

Years later, after an emergency caesarean, it came back to me through my body.

I was in a yoga class, in child’s pose, crying. Something was moving that needed room. My body had been guided through survival, and afterwards there was still a lot unfolding.

The teacher didn’t interrupt. What was happening wasn’t named or held in any particular way; it simply occurred within the space. For me, that was enough.

That moment marked the beginning of something. I stayed with what was there. I allowed myself to feel in that setting. The shift was quiet, but it mattered.

At that point in my life, I had begun practising yoga, Vipassana meditation, and inquiry for many years. I knew the language. I understood the forms. My body had learned how to move within those spaces with a great deal of skill.

What I began to notice, slowly, was how much adapting was involved. How easily I could shape myself to the tone of a room, the expectations of a practice, the unspoken limits around expression. That adapting wasn’t wrong. It had served me well. It allowed me to belong.

And at the same time, my body was communicating something quieter, something less organised. A sense that there was more available than I was letting myself feel. Not more intensity — more truth.

I wasn’t turning away from yoga. I was beginning to listen more closely to what my body was already responding to.

This reflection isn’t an attempt to define embodiment. It’s a tracing — shaped by lived experience, long practice, and deep listening — of how I’ve come to understand embodiment as something that emerges when we stop adapting long enough to stand in our own bodily truth.

Over the years, I’ve also been curious about how embodiment is described in the research literature — particularly writing that explores yoga as an internal, lived experience rather than a set of postures to perform. What resonates for me in this work is the understanding of embodiment as something relational and changing, shaped by context, safety, and history, rather than as a state to achieve.

This mirrors what I’ve come to know through my own body.

When I was studying and practising yoga, there was often an unspoken sense that some part of me needed to be contained — disciplined, refined, changed. Different traditions offered different gifts. Iyengar yoga gave me form and precision. Satyananda yoga opened the door to more inner awareness. And over time, I began to question where form actually sits in the embodiment process, and whether structure was always supporting awareness, or quietly taking its place.

Ashtanga yoga clarified this for me very quickly. My female body simply said no. Not as resistance, but as discernment. The pace, intensity, and insistence on pushing through didn’t meet my system in a way that allowed presence to deepen. The qualities my body was asking for — receptivity, surrender, nurturing, space — weren’t available in the way the practice was being held.

Rather than stillness, my mind became more active. Rather than meditation, there was effort. As a sensitive body, I don’t organise well around force, even when that force is disciplined or well-intentioned. My body wasn’t failing the practice; it was communicating something essential.

At a certain point, it became clear that embodiment doesn’t deepen through form alone.

Something else was being asked for — a listening that allows the body to organise itself from within. When sensation, impulse, and rhythm begin to lead, learning happens as experience rather than idea, understanding arriving already integrated.

This is where my relationship with asana began to change.

Allowing movement to arise organically became less about freedom and more about respect — respect for the deeper awareness that is already present and witnessing. In those moments, posture isn’t imposed or chosen; it reveals itself through attention and relationship.

That listening eventually led me toward trauma-sensitive yoga — not as a new style to adopt, and not as a replacement for tradition, but as a dynamic expression of the yoga that was already moving through me. Here, choice mattered. Pace mattered. Inner sensing mattered. The body wasn’t asked to conform to an ideal, but invited into relationship.

Practices like Yoga Nidra and inner meditation didn’t create this shift so much as they made space for it. By offering enough safety and stillness, they allowed the body’s language to come forward, and embodiment stopped feeling like something I was trying to do. It became something I could stay with.

What I understand now is that embodiment is less a practice and more a relationship.

It deepens when the body is allowed to organise itself, when movement arises from listening rather than will, and when awareness stays close enough to sensation to be informed by it.

In a world that continually pulls us into thinking, striving, and overriding ourselves, the body offers a different kind of knowing. Quiet. Responsive. Deeply intelligent. Not something to master, but something to collaborate with.

A Reflection for You

As you read this, you might find yourself reflecting on your own experience of yoga.

You may notice ways it has supported you to feel more present, more connected, more at ease in your body. You may also notice moments where something felt constrained, rushed, or left unspoken — where your body adapted, even while asking for something else.

There’s no right way to answer these questions.

Often, simply noticing how your body has experienced these spaces is already part of the embodiment process.

Exploring Trauma-Sensitive Yoga

For those who feel drawn toward a more body-led, choice-oriented approach, Trauma Centre Trauma-Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY) offers a deeply embodied framework.

Developed through the Trauma and Embodiment Center, TCTSY is a clinically validated intervention for people living with complex trauma and persistent PTSD. Rather than focusing on form or performance, it centres safety, agency, and inner sensing — allowing the body to move at its own pace and speak in its own language.

This approach doesn’t ask the body to push or override itself. It creates the conditions for embodiment to emerge through relationship, repetition, and choice.

If you’re curious to explore this work further, you’re welcome to learn more about my trauma-sensitive offerings here.

Reference

Piran, N., & Neumark-Sztainer, D. (2008). Yoga and the experience of embodiment: A discussion of possible links. Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treatment & Prevention, 16(1), 3–17.https://doi.org/10.1080/10640260701773393

Some of the reflections in this piece are informed by research exploring yoga as a lived, embodied experience rather than a performance-based practice.