Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Transforms Lives: An Interview With Hala Khouri [HuffingtonPost.com]

Omega: How do you define trauma?

Hala: Trauma is anything that overwhelms our capacity to cope and respond, and leaves us feeling helpless, hopeless, and out of control. Trauma is a continuum, and this general definition includes what we call “big T” traumas and “little t” traumas.

Big T traumas are the things we typically think are traumatic, like abuse, violence, a car accident, natural disasters, war, or witnessing violence. Trauma can also be divorce, immigration, and even other overwhelming things we don’t typically think about. A little t event might not seem traumatic from the outside but can overwhelm someone, especially a child.

I often joke that I have hair trauma because I grew up with really curly, frizzy hair in Miami, Florida. When you’re 13, a bad hair day is overwhelming because for adolescents, social acceptance is an important part of that developmental stage. Even though I would never compare that to someone who was abused, it’s an experience that shaped my identity and, at the time, was intolerable—it made me feel isolated and depressed. To an adult, a bad hair day may not be a big deal, but for an adolescent looking for acceptance from her peers, it’s a lot.

Omega: What makes yoga such a powerful practice for working with trauma?

Hala: The yogic practice of finding presence with our sensations is the key to learning to self-regulate, which is the goal of dealing with trauma. We define self-regulation as being able to be grounded, centered, and in present time. Our body is our GPS system, and in order to let it guide us in the proper way, we have to be willing to feel it and not just try to manage it. We have to be able to tolerate uncomfortable sensations and know that we can move through them.