Yoga Therapy Completes Holistic Approach to Firefighter Well-Being

By Kendall Wood, Yoga Therapist and 500hr E-RYT

Yoga therapy is an emerging field that empowers you to take charge of your own health and well-being through the use of movement, breathwork and mindfulness. 

Traditionally, you would see one specialist for physical ailments and another one for mental distress, but today, even Western medicine acknowledges the mind and body are not separate.

Yoga therapy’s strength is that it acknowledges the interconnectedness of the mind and body. When we experience trauma, grief, or other psychological distress, multiple areas of our bodies can be affected. In other words, our bodies keep score.

Many diseases may stem from an overflow of stress, tension, or anxiety. This is especially important to take seriously in the first-responder population. Not only are first responders experiencing the regular stressors of day-to-day life, they’re also present for the most difficult and traumatic moments of other people’s lives for the length of their career.

For thousands of years, yoga has been an excellent tool for combating the negative effects of stress and anxiety. It helps bring the nervous system back to a balanced state.

Yoga Therapy is Proactive

From a physical perspective, if you’re limber and move your body in a dynamic way on a regular basis, you’re less likely to strain or tear a muscle. Yoga promotes low-impact, effective movements that stretch, tone and strengthen your body. This is essential for firefighters, who must be ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice. Supple muscles and healthy joints are both key for injury prevention.

From a psychological perspective, research shows that people with a consistent meditation practice are less likely to develop symptoms of post-traumatic stress (PTS) because they already have the tools to sort through thoughts and stop repetitive thought patterns in their tracks. 

Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk, psychologist and trauma researcher, did the first National Health Institute (NIH) funded study of yoga for PTSD and had astounding results. He found yoga was more beneficial in a highly traumatized population that any treatment had been before!

Yoga is so much more than stretching. It helps us become more aware of internal patterns that might be doing us a disservice, like worries, anxieties, and critical self-talk. Meditation gives us the tools to get out of those unhealthy internal patterns and break the cycle. 

Yoga Therapy Promotes Self-Awareness

Traumatic experiences often cause humans to dissociate from their experience in the present moment. Loss of physical sensation or body awareness is a common symptom of PTS. Yoga helps rebuild that connection. 

Proprioception is your ability to sense where you are in space. Yoga postures strengthen body awareness. As a firefighter, you must have good proprioception to stay safe on the job, especially while climbing ladders or standing on rooftops. 

Interoception is your ability to sense things happening within your body. Firefighters often need to ignore signals from their bodies when they’re on the job. For example, they may need to ignore their stress response, heavy breathing, or sore muscles while responding to a call. 

Over time, ignoring your body, including thoughts, emotions and physical sensations, can become the norm. When this happens, it leads to feeling numb, disconnected and detached. Moving and breathing mindfully helps draw that connection again and improves interoception.

Yoga Therapy Regulates Your Nervous System 

In order to regulate your nervous system, you first need to be able to tell that something is out of balance. Improving proprioception and interoception is one of the first things I focus on with my yoga-therapy clients. Once the client is more connected to their mind-body and has the self-awareness to sense something is out of whack, and the language to describe it, they can become empowered to make changes.

Breathwork, meditation, and yoga nidra are all excellent tools for combating hypervigilance and getting into a more relaxed mind-body state, so your body can heal and recover. I call them empowering tools because they don’t require a prescription or appointment – they can be done anywhere, anytime! Once you learn these tools, you can use them on your own whenever you need them.

There are types of breathwork that aim to activate and awaken, and there are others that calm and relax the nervous system. A yoga therapist gets to know each client individually and teaches them techniques that fit their unique needs. Stress shows up differently in different people. We all hold tension in unique ways. Some people struggle to fall asleep, other people sleep too long. Some shut down and feel numb, where others are hyper-aware and feel everything. 

Yoga therapy is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, it’s customizable. An experienced yoga therapist knows how to give each client what they uniquely need, and will help you navigate the numerous types of yoga, meditation, and breathwork so you can find what will benefit you.

Changing your Relationship to Traumatic Events

The traumatic experiences that we encounter in life are almost always out of our control. We can’t control the traumatic event, but we do have control over what we do in the aftermath of trauma. It’s important to log traumatic memories in the past and establish one important truth: the traumatic event is no longer happening in the present!

When we have flashbacks, or recurring thoughts about an event, our mind-body experiences the trauma as if it is happening in real-time. The physical sensations, thoughts, and emotions are brought back up to the surface. Again, the body keeps score.

Yoga strengthens your connection to the present. It takes dedication and practice, but over time you can learn to leave the past in the past and focus on the now.

Your breath is an excellent tool for presence; you can’t breathe in the past or future, so when you’re breathing, you’re present. You can’t feel your feet on the floor in the past or future, so when you’re aware of where your body is during a yoga class, you’re present.

As you become more embodied in the now, the challenges and difficulties of the past have less power. It’s not necessary to forget about or push away traumas, however, it can be worthwhile to accept and acknowledge them as a part of your story and then move into the future by creating new memories in the now. 

Meditation helps us log the trauma in the past and change our relationship to it. Yoga nidra is another tool to get the mind into a relaxed state, where your body can process thoughts and experiences and more effectively log them in the past.

We don’t forget our trauma, but we can change our relationship to traumatic events and experiences so they don’t have power over us in the present. With time, you can learn to accept the reality of the things you’ve experienced, process the feelings associated with the traumatic memory and then, begin to build a new life in the present.

Bringing Yoga Therapy to Your Department

Yoga therapy is done in a one-on-one setting. I recommend that path to individuals who want to dive deeper into their own mind-body healing journey. 

Group sessions are great for providing your department with an overarching knowledge of how to apply breathwork and deep relaxation tools to day-to-day life, to promote health and longevity on the job.

Contact Kendall Wood through her website, Instagram, or YouTube.