Understanding the body’s natural ability to recover and heal through body-mind connection

When you think of a traditional yoga class, you might first imagine the teacher demonstrating poses at the front of the room, sometimes walking around to see if students need some adjustment. What if you are a student who has experienced violation of boundaries, abuse, grief, toxic intimate relationship, discrimination, or violence? Some instructions might sound like an order, expecting students to follow the teacher without questioning. Being told what to do without options can recreate a feel of power imbalance that mirrors past experiences of helplessness or coercion.

While trauma-informed yoga, which offers students safe spaces by not using trauma triggering language, giving different pose choices, and avoiding hands-on assistants, might be a supportive environment for the 60 minute class, practitioners are seeking a lasting relief - not just temporary during class. The class might allow you to feel safe in the moment, but the teachers might fail to explain why a certain pose feels calming to your nervous system. 

What Is Somatic Healing Yoga?

This emerging approach is rooted in a deeper understanding of how the nervous system, fascia, emotions, and energy interact. It incorporates gentle movement, breath, and mind-body connection to support healing in more holistic ways.

This practice gently guides your body into safety - by understanding how to regulate your nervous system, releasing stored emotions, and restoring energetic balance.

Do you ask these questions to yourself?

• Why does resting or slowing down feel wrong/intimidating?
• Why do certain body poses or movements make me feel exposed or uncomfortable?
• Why do I get emotional when it’s not expected and what do I do with that? 

Then somatic healing yoga might have the answers for you.

The Science and Mechanism: How Somatic Yoga Regulates the Nervous System

At the heart of somatic healing yoga is an understanding of the autonomic nervous system. Developed by Dr. Stephen Porges, Polyvagal Theory explains how our body and brain work together to respond to stressors that are a part of everyday life. 

When our nervous system senses threat—real or perceived—it shifts us into states like fight, flight, or freeze to protect ourselves. These reactions aren’t just in our minds, they are also physiological. Your breath gets shallow and short. Your muscles tighten. Your digestion slows because your body says it needs to attend to this threat. If you live in an environment that leaves you in this state often enough (conscious or unconscious), over time, this chronic stress can leave the body feeling stuck like it’s always looking out for danger, bracing for impact.

In somatic healing yoga, simple things like paying attention to your current breath and consciously slowing your exhale, noticing how your body responds stimulates the vagus nerve, activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and shifting your body from survival mode towards rest-and-digest. 

Rather than just offering modifications, somatic yoga educates practitioners on the mechanics of regulation—so they can gently guide themselves back into a felt sense of safety, connection and social engagement.

 

Key Elements from Neuroscience: 

• Long-held poses in Yin yoga like supported backbends or seated forward fold activate the parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” state), signaling to the body that it’s safe to soften.
• Breathwork, especially a long exhale slows the heart rate which is directly linked to emotional regulation, reducing anxiety and relaxation. 
• Proprioception and Interoception (the body’s sense of itself in space and inside the body) helps bring awareness back to areas that may have been shut down due to trauma.

When you understand why a particular yoga pose or technique works—down to the neural or physiological level—it shifts your practice. Somatic healing yoga becomes not just experiential, but educational. You will have the agency to make choices and to take action towards your own healing journey. 

The Ancient Wisdom: How Yoga Understood the Body

Long before modern science could prove the mechanisms of somatic healing, ancient yogic traditions had a way of explaining the subtle intelligence of the body and described similar patterns using different language.

Ancient Insights We Still Appreciate in Yoga: 

• Emotions were thought to be stored in specific organs—grief in the lungs, fear in the kidneys, anger in the liver, which can be addressed in somatic yoga by focusing on these body parts.
• Meridian lines (energetic channels) align with modern fascial trains, suggesting a deep intelligence in how energy and tension move through the body. 
• Chakras are the seven subtle energy centers that run along the spine, related to specific organs and body parts. In yoga philosophy, each chakra needs to be open and aligned for energy to flow properly throughout the body. Blocked flow of energy in the body affects our emotional, spiritual, and physical health.
• Yin yoga in particular was designed to nourish deeper layers of tissue, release stagnation, and open up inner channels of flow. It also teaches patience, listening to your own body, and being present with the bodily sensations that arise.

These traditions have been passed down over thousands of years. Ancient wisdom still lives in yoga today and it guides our practice, from poses, breathwork and meditation for better holistic wellbeing. 

Somatic Healing Yoga Offers Both 

Through Somatic Healing Yoga you can understand the why—the logic behind your body’s reactions—and the how—practices that have continued to be effective for years.

When you know how a three minute gentle back-bend pose helps calm your vagus nerve, you approach it with a clearer mind, and can just let your body do its healing work.
When you understand why the Daoists taught that grief lives in the lungs, your breathwork takes on a new layer of care.
When you blend science and ancient wisdom, yoga becomes not just healing—it becomes a holistic experience.

What It Feels Like to Practice

Imagine practicing one of the Yin yoga poses, a seated forward fold with both legs straight in front of you, for three quiet minutes. The upper body folds over your legs, and you just let gravity do its work.

First you might feel the stretch in your hamstring, lower back and neck. You start being conscious of your even, smooth and quiet breaths. 

With deeper exhales, your breath softens. Your attention turns inward. 

Searching for body parts you can relax, your jaw unclenches. 

Your body softens as you hold the pose and the stretch deepens an inch.

Somewhere inside, your body realizes: “I don’t have to hold tension right now, I am safe.”
This is not about achieving a shape. It’s about retraining your nervous system to feel safe enough to soften. 

The process of bending forward encourages practitioners to focus on what’s going inside their bodies, fostering a deeper mind-body connection.

Final Thoughts

Understanding that you are able to bring your body to a state of relaxation through mindful movement, breath, and interoception, the practice invites you to realize that you can be in control of your emotions through regular practice. What you did on the yoga mat can be transferred in real life situations, offering yourself freedom from survival mode. This sense of agency is what somatic healing yoga can offer.