This is the 3rd article in honour of our Yoga Retreat: Feel to Heal Fri 21/3/25 – Sun 23/3/25. It was Eckhart Tolle who said: Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of ego. When you surrender, a new dimension of consciousness opens us.
Surrender is a tricky word. In Western culture the idea of surrendering is akin to giving something up, losing, stepping down from your position. This is the ego. Surrendering in yoga though, is a form of release. It could be a dumping of something you have held onto for a long time and watching it seep away or even more radically, it could be you acknowledging and making room for that trauma and the energy around it, to make you complete. The act of surrendering in Yoga is a gateway to freedom.
Our bodies can only safely handle a limited number of stressful events. These can be single damaging events such as a car accident or ongoing lifestyle stressors such as a dysfunctional childhood or a horrible job. Trauma results whenever an experience exceeds your ability to cope with that stress. This overload event halts your body’s instinctive fight or flight response. Perhaps you were trapped in the car for hours, or perhaps financially you cannot leave that destructive job. So instead of being able to fight back or run away, your nervous system gets overloaded and stores the traumatic energy of that terrible incident in your muscles, fascia and organs. Whenever we store trauma in our tissues, our brain disconnects from that part of the body to block the experience, preventing the recall of that traumatic memory. Any area of our body that our brain is disconnected from won’t be able stay healthy or heal itself. The predictable effect of stored trauma is degeneration and disease.
You’ll know if you have trauma stuck somewhere in your body: that ongoing pain, the autoimmune, the organ dysfunction or a myriad of confusing signals. Most often these physical challenges have their roots in a traumatic incident or complex trauma (ongoing). In the world of Yoga, we start to view the body as our autobiography. The older we get, the more the ego, the trauma, the habits and what’s held in your heart, is reflected in your body.Think of the fascia or connective tissue in your body. Fascia connects your toes to your forehead and your heart to your collarbone in one uninterrupted sheet of fascia. Fascia is a graphic expression of how we feel and think, it dictates our basic body shape, and our upbringing, physically and psychologically. Therefore, the fascia expresses the movement within us as well as our trauma and our lifestyle.
Fascia shrinks and toughens in response to any kind of stress; physical, environmental or psychological. If there is injury or trauma stored in the fascia this results in blockages to the flow of energy through the body and the result is pain, numbness, stiffness and swelling of the joints and muscles. Fascia contains numerous cross energy currents and needs to be moist to allow the free flow of energy. Metaphysically, fascia dysfunctions can leave us feeling restricted, helpless, fearful, frozen, angry, frustrated, brittle. In many cases it’s as if we’re stuck and no matter how hard we try, we can’t seem to move forward. Fascia grips and hardens wherever we have repressed an emotion. Stiff or rigid muscles indicate stiff or rigid thought patterns.
You don’t have to stay stuck. Movement therapies like somatic yoga give you tools to bring awareness to the part of your body storing that traumatic memory. Somatic yoga is not just about the physical posture, it’s also about how that movement makes you FEEL. It’s an internal awareness. So instead of looking outwards: How do I look? Am I doing this pose correctly? No, instead you look inwards: How does this feel? Could I adjust this pose to access even more spaciousness, even more openness in my body? It’s a profound leap in your yoga journey to learn to pay attention and observe how your body, as these layers of feelings, memories and traumas peel away, bit by bit, becomes even more fluid, freer and more joy filled.
From Joehle: The Universe is saying: Allow me to flow through you unrestricted, and you will see the greatest magic you have ever seen. It’s going to be a fabulous weekend! Love and namaste Margot