New Year, New Nervous System!
Day 9: Yoga De Novo, Trauma &
The Nervous System

Hey Regulators!

I first came to yoga through the body. I had no attentional capacity for breathwork, spirituality, dharma talks, or any of the other seemingly woke ass shit that came along with the practice. I didn't consider myself in any way “spiritual.” I wasn't trying to discover who I was. Survival mode doesn't leave much room for contemplation or existentialism (very different from rumination which I was an expert at). 

Most of the days in my early twenties were spent trying not to die, trying to keep a roof over my head, and trying not to do too many stupid things that could get me fired from whatever restaurant or bar job I had at the time. Like most people, I was just getting through the day, and filled to the brim with historical garbage that seemed to be more in the driver's seat of my life than I even was. Yoga was a great place to pile drive myself into utter exhaustion. That's how I ended up on the mat in the first place. I needed a place to put my heaviness that wasn't deeper inside myself.

I'm not a Yoga fairytale. Actually, I’m probably Yoga’s worst nightmare. But Yoga is also the thing that changed my life, and gave me access to my body, and what was living inside of me for the very first time. Someone once told me they thought it was funny the town slut was now the town yoga teacher (they were talking about me lol– to my face!!). I wasn't your typical Yoga person. And I most definitely was not peaceful by any means. But still, here I am. A total Yoga success story.

I'm sharing this with you because there is a stereotype about Yoga and Yogis we have to break down in order for this practice to become even more mainstream than it is now. This practice is for real people to feel their real bodies, and to have an out of this world (or in this world) experience of themselves for maybe the very first time in their lives! We need to be in greater conversations with our bodies. Yoga is the space to do so.

It's a place to process, digest, grieve, learn, connect and grow. It's a forum that requires slowing down and feeling all the parts of us we have dissociated or disconnected from– because they’ve been too difficult to tolerate. Yoga helps us expand our window of tolerance for what we are capable of holding. It shows us there is room for both pleasure and pain. It's an explicit conversation with our nervous system, the perfect template to understand, and also renegotiate trauma and drama.

The Yoga mat is asking you to go against everything you've ever been taught out in the world. It's imploring you to slow down, to feel, to leave the matrix of Instagram, and work, and relational BS, so you can question and inquire, and develop a sensitivity inside which goes hand in hand with compassion.

Yoga asana and meditation is a distinct cultural rebellion. It's demanding you to exit the world you have known, and to enter a new one, where you are the authority. And where your felt bodily sense matters so much– it becomes the guiding light, the golden compass, that brings you home to yourself. In this practice, you get to choose how you proceed. You get to listen. You call the shots.

This practice has been my main outlet for healing trauma and renegotiating the cyclical nature of my nervous system. Within the format of one class, we have the opportunity to feel the full scope of human emotion, and the complete range of our nervous system. It's a space to practice being in all the states– a total physiological playground. Through posture and breathwork, we can activate our systems, but we can also soothe them, and slow them down.

This is what it really takes to re-educate the body from the impact of trauma. We need safe spaces, and educated guides, that can help us replicate states we will undoubtedly feel in our lives, and to assist and support us in navigating them to completion. Trauma resolution isn't about avoidance. It's about learning how to move through the full range of our humanity and to not get swallowed alive by how sensational it can be.

There is all this trauma sensitive, and trauma informed Yoga being taught out there, that's really about creating safe environments that don't trigger people. Environments where the lights aren't too bright, or where people don't get too close to you, or where there are no demands, only invitations. And yes, that's important. Safety is crucial in the trauma recovery process. But creating environments that cosset people from their own discomfort– and help them avoid exposure to anything that feels scary– just keeps us insulated from reality. It keeps us traumatized.

Life is fucking hard. It’s gross. And fucked up. And on the same day, it's incredible, otherworldly, so intensely joyful and beautiful it makes you well up with tears and emotion because it doesn't seem real. It's magic, and it's not at all. A total paradox of duality.  This life will throw you down onto the floor, and immediately following, it will pick your ass back up. And we need to be here for it. All of it. Not just some of it. Not just the parts that feel good. 

We don't get better by living small, controlled lives. We get better by exposing ourselves in new, slower ways, to the very things that have sacred us in the past. We get better by finding new possibilities and people to help us navigate that historical toughness. Your Yoga mat, and your community, can be that place for you. It can be that place for all of us. 

The entry point may be the body. But what we can find beyond that is more psychedelic than any mushroom trip we’ve ever had. What we can find is– ourselves. We can find wholeness, and joy, and fun– the very things we may have once thought could never be recovered. It's all there, still inside of us, waiting to be extracted– discovered once again.

I’m sharing this not to convince you to come to my Yoga class. Rather, I'm sharing this to encourage every single one of you to find an outlet where your body can sojourn right alongside your mind, and your heart too. These bodies are united. And so are we. This is the work we have to do with ourselves, and with each other. This is the souls work.

Practice Day 9: Yoga De Novo

Link To My Book Sh!thouse: A Memoir (if you are interested in more about this journey I've been on): https://www.amazon.com/Sh-thouse-Lauren-Dollie-Duke/dp/1955090017/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

Also, if you missed any of the emails, just head to my website. The content for the daily emails is there! Just click the day at the bottom of the page!
https://www.laurendollieduke.com/new-years-challenge
 

Love you all!
LDD