Breath is the doorway to the nervous system, meaning that yogic breathing techniques can change the way we feel quickly. Many times in yoga these breathing practices can be meant for calming or revving up the nervous systems to gain energy. For those who have suffered from trauma, it is important to tread lightly when approaching breath.

Trauma informed breathing is meant for interoception – being able to feel or notice that your breathing to help heal and balance the nervous system system through interoceptive pathways from body to brain. However, because breath is so sensory and can greatly effect a person – it can also be triggering for those who have been through complex (more than one trauma or re-experiencing) or developmental trauma (trauma started as children). Triggering means that the person can feel great fear, become highly anxious or a trauma response could kick in.

Another aspect around breath is how quickly and strongly it can change your nervous system. Many survivors of trauma are already hyper vigilant with revved up nervous systems and it usually isn’t beneficial to continue to raise energy even if it feels “good” in that moment. When we are using breathing techniques that are not meant to up regulate the nervous system if the breath work is practiced incorrectly due to teaching or embedded automatic breathing patterns due to trauma these “calming” breath practices could also up regulate your nervous system causing dysregulation like panic attacks, severe anxiety, difficulty sleeping or insomnia – just to name a few.

You might start adding in breath work to your class or with your clients by noticing the breath in movement or connecting movement and breath. Remember just showing up and noticing or feeling their body is a lot for those who have been through trauma. Other trauma informed breathing practices could be added in after some time as a higher dosage.

So the point of this blog is to tread lightly and understand how to facilite trauma informed breath techniques – our clients deserve that kind of seriousness and deep ahimsa practice from us a practitioners.