Befriending the Body to Heal Trauma

"To all the souls who had to navigate through the world being nested in bodies bearing guilt, shame and trauma that they were never meant to carry."

Memories of certain experiences can lose its rawness in our minds with time, but they hold space in our bodies long after the experience has ended. In my pre-adolescence years, I had an experience of such kind, the experience of childhood sexual abuse. The statistics are disturbing. Let's take the United States for example, according to RAINN, an anti-sexual assault organization: "Every 92 seconds, an American is sexually assaulted. And every 9 minutes, that victim is a child."

I know, it's revolting.

And I can tell you from my personal experience, it's not so different in the rest of the world. I have had numerous friends who were sexually abused by some caregiver growing up and they never spoke out about it until someone opened up to them about their own sexual abuse story. Keeping silent about abuse is one of the most energetically choking experiences. It feels like you are buried in shame and guilt about simply existing. You constantly question your worthiness and self-doubt becomes second nature. All while you have no vocabulary to express that pain with, at least where I'm from anything relating to sex was never a topic of discussion and was rather frowned upon. It wasn't shocking that the necessity of healing from such experiences got no attention from my society.

Today I'm writing from the intention of healing. I know that even this process of writing about my journey on public space is an act of healing. Everything that challenges us has a way of making us grow as human beings, only if we chose to learn its lesson. And when it comes to being sexually abused, the lesson is learning to recognize the innocent sacredness of our own bodies again.

B E F R I E N D I N G   T H E   B O D Y

Memory is a malleable thing, but the body has the power to quite literally remember traumatic experiences. There is an entire line of therapy called Somatic therapy that studies the relationship between the mind and body in regard to psychological past. Coming across this explained much of my past inner conflicts involving guilt, fear of not being loved, fear of being used and the shame that coursed my veins after any intimate experience. It was as if my body vividly remembered what abuse felt like and it had strongly associated intimacy(in my relationship with myself or others) with those feelings.

This explains our current society where big money is made from selling hope of being loved to a generation of insecure young adults who aren't able to love themselves as they are. It made me wonder, what if this is the manifestation of childhood trauma that was never healed? If 1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is sexually abused as a child, how many victims have you met in till today? And how many of them have never spoken about their experience? Here lies an unfathomable amount of collective shame and guilt that needs healing. And this is where yoga comes in.

So how can yoga help? 

Reaching adulthood I finally had my own space and solitude for much-needed self-reflection and in search of a tool that could help me find acceptance, I found Yoga. Yoga is the practice of uniting body, breath and awareness. It taught me to occupy my body as a sacred home, space where my soul resides. Observing our experiential reality reveals two distinct parts: Our inner world - Including our bodies and our mental space. And our outer world - containing everything that is not us. The inner and outer world are interconnected and when our body carries unhealed memory of trauma, it can alter our perception of ourselves and our experiential reality.

Yoga helps to reshape our relationship with our bodies and in turn release the stagnant energy residing in us from past experiences, one breath at a time. Here is how the daily practice of yoga does this:

1. Mind-Body Awareness: Our bodies are magnificent self-generating creations that nest our awareness and energy. It is our sacred home before any other physical space. When we don't have mind-body awareness we navigate through our lives guided by our unconscious mind. As yoga is a form of moving meditation, it has the potential to teach us to ground our presence in our bodies and occupy it with a mountain of awareness like a child engrossed in every colour that embraces their sight, every sound, taste, smell and emotion that appears in their experience. Mind-body awareness can bring back the childlike sense of innocence and joy about simply being alive.

2. Energetic hygiene by Conscious Breathing: In yoga practice, you will often hear "Breathe like you love yourself." It might sound like a wishy-washy thing but each breath contains in it the elixir of life: Oxygen. Every deep conscious inhale is like sending life force to the furthest reaching cells in our body, if that isn't loving yourself I don't know what is. While maintaining a grounded presence in breath and body, Yoga prepares us to let post-traumatic emotions rise and fall so we can pass through them instead of suppressing them.

3. Rewriting the Narrative: What we tell ourselves about our trauma has a lot to do with how our trauma controls us. When we see ourselves as the victim of an unfavourable situation, we give power to the situation. Yoga helped me tremendously in rephrasing my story. I knew my longing for a deeper connection with myself came because of a lack of connection. Through this longing, I came across yoga, meditation, tantra and spiritual connection to life itself, turning my curses into gifts. Yoga also taught me to see the abusers as souls lacking awareness, perhaps carrying unhealed past experiences of their own. With this new outlook we can let go of victimhood, cultivate empathy for forgiveness and turn our traumas into the precursors for immense growth and spiritual insight.


Befriending my body through yoga was like being born again, starting with a clean slate and finding that innocence that my inner child was robbed of. When I think of the lack of accessibility to therapy and healing that many parts of the world still has, it creates bitter resentment in my heart. I don't know how long it will take for our global society to take the matter of childhood sexual abuse seriously. Knowing that the abused has a likelihood of becoming the abuser creates more problem for future generations. I can anchor myself in some hope knowing that for the first time ever, we have the accessibility of information at our fingertips like we never did before. There is a global conversation going on about this topic and if we have had encounters with sexual abuse we must join that conversation to free ourselves from the shackles of silence and help others do the same. If you are one of those people, I salute you for your courage and I'm humbled by the fact that you are reading this. Know this my dear one, we are on this path together and you are never alone. I'm here and I will be honoured to hear your story.

- With Loving Awareness