Crash Course

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NU: I think we're all trained to stop listening to it.

MS: That's right. We all have a mind-body problem. But age introduces that same silence into the mind-body that my paralysis did. One of the things that yoga does is refine the quality of the presence we experience within our bodies.

NU: So what does this presence have to do with trauma?

MS: When trauma is not transformed over time, you become less present. You end up being kind of a shell of yourself. You don't take in the world with pleasure, you don't let it flow through you and you don't let it out. When you lose that presence, you lose connection to the world. That's when trauma turns into depression, and the more you become separated from the world, the deader you become.

Trauma registers in both mind and body. For example, I was asleep in the car when the accident happened. I have no memory of that day. But 12 years after the accident, when I started to do yoga, I started to have flashbacks, like posttraumatic syndrome flashbacks. My body was having memories. The echoes of the original accident were finally coming through. Part of the reason it took so long is that my mind was not ready to deal with what my body had witnessed. When I was 13, I learned to disassociate from my body to avoid pain. As I regained presence through yoga, these stored memories began to dissolve.

NU: These are all personal processes, but is there a role for the wider community in healing trauma?

MS: That's important. My experience is that trauma does not happen to one person, or even one family. It happens to a whole community of families. I missed the funeral for my father and sister because of my injuries, but there's something incredibly collectively healing about a funeral, to be around all the love for a lost one. It's part of the cleansing and healing. When we are in community-with other bodies and hearts-that spurs another level of cathartic release.

There are many types of collective trauma, too. We can never go back to before 9/11. The world will be different from now on. And of course the world's always had violence in it, there's always been anger. But our collective trust in the world and the security of the nation got shattered. So the question is, what do you do? How do you respond? Hitting back after an insult is one way to do it, but ultimately we're not going to transform this trauma by trying to violently counteract it. That's not going to work. I'm not saying 9/11 is a good thing, just as I'm not saying that my being paralyzed is a good thing, but what trauma does by challenging your assumptions is force you to see the world as more open. The challenge is to try to see it in a way that makes you love the world more. Essentially, to be open and compassionate.

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