All posts tagged: yoga for trauma

Changemaker of the Week

Published by Minna

We are excited to announce the we have been awarded $1000 by the Pollination Project and featured as their Changemaker of the Week. The Pollination Project feature story, authored by Liza Di Georgina, is titled Embracing Peace from Within in Sierra Leone. “Peace is not something you have outside but it’s what you have to have inside to be able to change things in the world, even if it’s very small; when you work on yourself and you create peace in yourself then you can start radiating that out,” Minna Jarvenpaa, founder of Tools for Inner Peace Read more: https://thepollinationproject.org/embracing-peace-from-within-in-sierra-leone/

Yoga as Medicine

Published by Minna

“Over the course of the year, many traumas have surfaced, providing me with the opportunity to observe and process them. This has led me to feel much calmer and more serene. I am grateful for this newfound inner space, which allows me to engage in even deeper introspection, dream bigger and take action towards my aspirations.” – Feedback from participant, Community Yoga Teacher Training, Lebanon Most of our trainees have experienced traumatic events in their lives. Many have been traumatised by their experiences of civil war and violence, the August 2020 Beirut blast, as well as more common causes of trauma that relate to childhood abuse and neglect, natural disasters and accidents, and sexual and medical trauma. This shapes their experience of even the simplest yoga practices. Trauma gets stored in the body as tensions and tightness. Easing the tension can result in being flooded by memories and re-experiencing traumatic events. One student gets triggered every time she plugs her ears and listens to the vibrations of the humming sound in Bhramari pranayama, so we

Suddenly There is Something More

Published by Minna

Shukriya, originally from Aleppo, has lived in refugee settlements in Bekaa valley, Lebanon, for the last six years. Tools for Inner Peace have been training her as a community yoga teacher for three years since 2020. She smiles when she talks about her experience, “Yoga relaxes me and brings me pleasure. The classes are really beautiful.” “I’ve been doing yoga for four years now, and so much has changed since the first class. After the third class I started experiencing big improvements. I felt changes in my breath and in my overall energy. Whatever stiffness I would feel, I would just go to the class and it would be gone. If I felt anxiety, it would just go during the class. “It became like an addiction. I had so much good energy. Every time I would come for a class, I would feel optimistic afterwards. I would feel fresh, as if reborn. It’s like every time you enter a class you’re entering a different world. You detach from the world, to a world where there

Community Yoga Teacher Training, Liverpool, 2023-24

Published by Minna

The aim of this training is to transmit, over a one year period, principles and practices of traditional yoga in order to become an effective community yoga teacher. Participants will develop their own yoga practice and learn how to safely share this experiential knowledge with friends, family and the communities they serve. Participants will acquire a solid foundation of the ancient yoga tradition and yoga philosophy. Changes will be observed on the physical, mental, emotional and energetic levels. Breathing techniques, meditation, chanting and relaxation practices will be developed throughout the training as vital for creating peace and wellbeing. Topics covered: Classical yoga postures, breathing techniques, cleansing techniques, relaxation practices (shavasana, yoga nidra) and meditation techniques Trauma-informed yoga Yogic lifestyle Yoga teaching practice Who is it for? Refugees and asylum seekers wishing to share yoga and its mental health benefits with friends, family and the broader community Yoga practitioners wishing to work with refugees or other vulnerable communities that would benefit from acquiring yoga skills for wellbeing Anyone passionate about taking yoga to refugees or other

“Sow seeds of love wherever you go”

Published by Minna

– Quote by Swami Niranjanananda Saraswati These are some personal reflections by Mantramala (Minna Jarvenpaa) on the Yoga Pura Vida teacher training that Tools for Inner Peace supported in Sierra Leone: The week before our departure from Sierra Leone was full of emotion: grief, joy, memory of old hurts, love. Over the course of the first eleven days of the training, participants had been finding their way into all the aspects of yoga, opening up, releasing tension, going deeper. Old memories were starting to come up, both tender and sad. On Day 12, we started teaching Yoga for Children and discovered that many of the participants had been orphans, street children or refugees from the civil war; some had survived sexual abuse or abandonment. Others had been pulled out of school and made to work in the streets by relatives. Several had never had the safety or care to really be children. All carried within them the inter-generational trauma of slavery on which Sierra Leone was built. Now we were asking these same people –