Beth Jones is a yoga teacher who specializes in the trauma sensitive yoga (TSY) method. This week, she joins Alex to talk about her insights regarding trauma related current events, from Covid to the Olympics, and shares her experiences working with youth, women in recovery, and veterans throughout Maine.
Beth has established TSY workshops and classes for youth, women in recovery, and veterans throughout Maine and also teaches creative writing at Thomas College.
Podcast Transcript:
AS 00:06
Thank you so much for joining us for this very special episode of Serra Speaks. We are joined today by Beth Jones, who is a trauma sensitive yoga instructor as well as a regular yoga instructor and a college writing teacher. So Beth, thank you so much for joining us.
BJ 00:27
It's great to be here, Alex. Thank you so much for asking.
AS 00:30
I really started this podcast because I was so interested in women from all professions, and hearing their stories and their journeys. And we've heard from insurance brokers and elected officials and people in the media and one area we haven't gotten to yet, and you are the first of what I hope will be several, are women who are working in the helping fields. And you with your work, it's so relevant. Your work is so relevant in what some of the public narrative is today.
01:25
Yeah. Well, you know, I'm a Maine native, and I grew up in rural Maine. And both my parents are in the helping professions, they were. My mother was an old school nurse trained at Mercy Hospital. And my dad was in public relations and went into social work, and worked with people with chemical dependencies. And so I always had a model for the helping field. And I got into yoga, probably 30 years ago at a writing retreat, somebody there was teaching yoga, and I just fell in love with it. And it became an obsession, and then it became my medicine. And I started to attend a training at Kripalu, which is in Massachusetts. And I did that for a couple years and became a teacher through Kripalu and I got a hold of a information about something called the trauma center down in Brookline, Mass. And they had just started a yoga program for people who were dealing with trauma symptoms. And there was there was a lot of preemptive work through Bessel van der Kolk, who is one of the specialists in trauma. Brilliant, brilliant researcher, and psychologist. So, through his program, and through this new yoga program, they develop trauma sensitive yoga in Brookline in that program. And that's why I decided to do it because I had been working with a lot of families with special needs kids, and was impacted by how much of the event of living day to day in with medical health needs and so forth impacted mental health. I really saw that and I started thinking about, well, how can yoga help because yoga helped me so much. How can it help? So David Emerson is my mentor to this day, and he was my first teacher in this work.
AS 03:42
So tell for the folks who are listening who don't know, tell us a little bit about what Kripalu is, because not everybody knows Kripalu. I have been to Kripalu and I've done a workshop there and it was life changing for me.
BJ 03:53
Yeah.
AS 03:54
Tell everyone a little about it.
BJ 03:55
The Kripalu center was an ashram in the 70s and Swami Kripalu who's an actual guy, he came over. His name means compassion. And they developed a at this this ashram in the Berkshires, they developed a kind of yoga that was using the hatha shapes, the hatha forms of yoga, but kept pushing the idea of inquiry. So the yoga student would be meditating while doing the forms, which was a little unusual, and from there, choosing on their own, what to do next. So we call it a movement inquiry. That's a great base for trauma sensitive yoga, because you're putting the emphasis on your own agency, you know, your own mind body connection, like oh, I want to do this instead of just the straight up triangle, you know, what have you. Kripalu was really about finding your own energy, your own prana, listening to your own voice and your voice. It was a very empowering model of yoga.
AS 05:02
One of the things that I should mention is that one of the reasons that I'm so interested in this is I actually became a yoga teacher during my Eat, Pray, Love visionquest. I worked for a wonderful company and left. And really, I think it was 36 or 37, was burned out. I'm one of those women that just worked and worked and worked until I dropped. And so I took 18 months off. And one of the things I did was go to yoga school, and really delved into the practice, which has benefited me to this day, and really helped define me for this kind of second half of my life. And I've taken your classes and I've, you know, taken all kinds of wonderful teachers. And for me, yoga has been just a guiding light for me, it's always there. I can walk away from it if I need to for a little while, or I can go back to it whenever I need to. But it's a tool in my toolbox.
BJ 06:03
Tool in your toolbox. It really delivers.
AS 06:06
It really does. And it is total mind, body, spirit connection. And I don't know anywhere where you get all of that other than in yoga.
BJ 06:17
And the funny thing is, it isn't at the studio, it's internal.
AS 06:20
Yeah. If we look at the recent headlines, I mean, we've heard so much about, you know, trauma in the media from veterans, right, and veterans coming back and especially now that we've fully pulled out of Afghanistan. And there's so many of our warriors who have now come back and are going to be dealing with PTSD in great huge numbers now, that we may or may not be prepared for as a country. But also, if you look in a different way, Simone Biles or any of the Olympians that you know, drew or athletes recently that have drawn lines and said no, this moment is not good for me. Simone Biles is a trauma survivor herself and has said, I want to define what role I'm going to play and that won't be being on stage right now. That will be a different role. That must have been, I'm going to assume, encouraging to you as someone that's in that line of work. Was it surprising to see that?
BJ 07:27
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, there's so much on the line. And what she did was she broke with history, you know, the history is to suck it up, Buttercup, and just keep going and push yourself. And that's, by the way, is is a way to disembody, you know, and she was aware mid air. I was reading about her last night, mid air, she realized, I'm going to hurt myself again, she kept leaving her body. And there's a picture of her where she's looking askance. She's in mid vault air. It's brilliant. And she's looking. And then she lands but she, I guess she just barely lands. And she has a thought, I have to stop this for my team. I can't compete. I'm not available. Basically, that was her recognition. And I'm paraphrasing, but I mean, that is a huge moment for everyone watching her. How does that happen? You know, and then, but the next thing is she took right action for herself. So she was enacting this idea of agency, in the middle of everything in front of millions.
AS 08:29
And what a lesson because so many of the women we've spoken to already and then I'm you know, talking with in advance of new episodes we'll be doing, you know, women drive themselves into the ground until they hit a breaking point. The role model has been go until you drop. Jinx buy me a coke.
BJ 09:26
Yeah, that's right, and go until you drop. But that like I said that that is an actual, you're kind of enacting or reenacting your traumas to just ignore the symptoms of burnout, ignore the symptoms of need, trauma, which could be you can't keep the thought together for very long there. There is a whole bunch of red flags. You start to hurt yourself. You make choices that are harmful, whether it's addiction to something whether it's addiction to drinking, smoking, coffee, sex, or hitting the vault all the time, you know doing athletics. You could consider that kind of removing yourself.
AS 10:09
Food addictions, shopping, gambling...
BJ 10:12
All ways to kind of keep you from actually sequestering inside internally and taking care of your mental health, which affects everything, your body, your relationships, they usually suffer the outward, the outward stuff usually suffers and leaves its mark. Yeah.
AS 10:33
So where do you think the place of yoga and trauma yoga intersects with business? I know, that's a broad question.
BJ 10:44
So I over the years, I've been asked to come in and do in services, in offices and at the VA as well, for the therapist working with women vets and the men. And I think that's been helpful in terms of, you know, the thing is about trauma sensitive yoga, it's an it's an, it's called interoception. That's the experience that you were kind of working with. Interoception is the invitation of the mind to focus on sensation in the body in the present moment. That's really it in a nutshell, that's really hard to do. It's meditation. And if physical sensation is triggering to you, if it's not a comfortable thing, if it actually agitates you, or makes you panic, or break down into emotional recall, these are reasons to not want to do anything present moment, right? Oh, stove hot. No, I don't want to go in there, right? So in an office, in a workplace, or with a veterans counselors, and therapists, I was working in a way of just kind of training them, like, this is what we're doing in this trauma sensitive yoga so that they could refer the veterans, but what I found was that it is so individualistic, that anybody can do it. But they realized how difficult it is to to stop everything and go inwards, and hold that moment within the body and notice how you feel. And but how restorative it could be, the calming effect of that, because they live with vicarious trauma. You know, and I don't know anyone right now, who isn't living in some state of absolute fear, you know, whether they're gonna lose their job, whether or not they're going to get COVID, the variant whether or not their best friend, their loved ones, their daughters, their sons, are going to get COVID whether or not I mean, I think we could talk about children in particular, and the mental health that teachers are seeing, the mental health shifts. I was told yesterday by a teacher said, you know, I'm looking at psychiatric beds for children in seventh and eighth grade. You've got to be kidding. You know, this COVID thing has had, it's had quite an impact.
AS 13:04
So tell me, what can businesses do? What can professional associations do for their members, for their member businesses? What can companies do to be fostering an environment that is sensitive to people with trauma, which is a very high percentage, I'm sure. And what can, what are best practices? Can you talk through best practices or resources that should be provided?
BJ 13:34
Only in the limited way that I know, you know. Through David Emerson in the work that I've been doing, studying the trauma center, which is now the center for trauma and embodiment, or embodiment and trauma. But there are certain things that tenets for our practices in those little 45 minute classes. We have to use language that's accessible.
AS 14:00
Explain what that means.
BJ 14:01
No Hindu, no airy fairy stuff, you know, to use language that's accessible. So you could trance transpose that as language that might be, you know, if you're, if you're a boss of somebody, and you're using highfalutin words, so to speak, you're kind of talking down patronizing language is something that could be seen as an authoritative pull, you know, power pull. The thing that identifies trauma most is a power dynamic. Alright, somebody feeling like they don't have any power in their position and is the boss or authority or authority being using power, kind of abusively or potentially abusively, you know, leading them into things that may not be appropriate or safe. Those are those are really basic things in any any relationship. You can put that you transpose that on to an intimate relationship. The power dynamic is a really important thing to look at. And how do you ameliorate that? Because there is always a boss, there's always an authority.
AS 15:14
So it's incumbent upon the leaders of organizations to actually do some reflective work.
15:20
Yeah. I mean, there's always title nine, and I think is that correct? For sexual harassment and there are really good aides. I've noticed, through my teaching at Thomas College, we always have to have these trainings about just that very thing, power dynamics, sexual harassment, HIPAA, all those other privacy rights and so forth. And they come through a software program that offices could get. And it's just, it's a nice edification because then you go, oh, this is what can happen in an office. And it could be as simple as, how come that person never gets picked to go lead a conference?Or how come that person, you know, has great ideas and this this manager or boss isn't listening to them? What is that? You know. Mindfulness, right?
AS 16:12
Absolutely, yeah. Tell me about some success stories that you've seen. Tell me about how you've seen the work that you do, or someone do the work that you...
BJ 16:22
Without crying?
AS 16:23
No, not without crying, crying is part of the process from what I believe. But, anyway, tell me about people who've gotten through the woods, you know, and changed their lives. Tell me some of your either anecdotally, or.
16:37
Well, I have a couple of people that come to mind and several but I'll focus on one who's a boy. I have been teaching trauma informed yoga, not really the very strict guidelines of trauma sensitive yoga, because these, these are boys of Day One. The Day One recovery program, which is a kind of a special program that sits inside of a school district. And I was teaching up at the Hinkley campus for almost 10 years before they closed through COVID. They couldn't find people to work with them, with the boys, which just about broke everybody's heart. But that's another cost of the COVID thing. So but this one boy, it's a six month program. And this one boy whose name I'll call Ben, I'll call him Ben, he was probably 16. He came from a situation where he was chronically using drugs, opiates, whatever it was, and may have had a model at home and his parents were probably users and so forth. And so this six month program was a residential program where he could kind of unlearn what he learned at 16. And he didn't believe in anything about himself. He was just sort of brought to his knees by the fact that he couldn't go back to his old life. He couldn't see the drug dealer friend anymore who had groomed him to be his best friend. His whole identity was changing. And he was young at this formative age. And I watched him work through it and any hated yoga. And I think he was the one who came, who, who got kicked out and then came back. He came back into the program a few months later. And I watched and transform through my little window, my little lens of yoga, I watched him start to make choices on the mat that were all his if that makes any sense.
AS 18:45
Well as a yoga person, it makes sense to me.
BJ 18:47
It's a huge thing where he identifies with his body, his movements, and isn't asking is this right? You know, because most of them start, I don't know how to do this. You know, I hate this. And how do you do this? They also had an incredible clinical person who would practice with us, but this kid Ben was growing week to week after he just hit his stride. And he graduated. He graduated. And then I saw him in a school program somewhere else. He'd been mainstreamed and he saw me, he dropped his books and he ran over and hugged me. He goes, I'm doing it, I'm doing it, everything's great, it's so great to see you Beth. And I just....
AS 19:38
Of course, I mean.
BJ 19:40
Right. It was just a huge moment for me because I realized this stuff works. Even just a little doses of yoga each week. You know, these these wraparound programs really work. As long as they're trauma informed, and the power dynamic is clear. And we keep pushing choice, and agency, and independence on on them.
AS 20:03
What should somebody do if they have someone in their family or someone they work with or a friend that they know has had trauma in their lives and really believes they could benefit from this kind of work? How do they reach out? How do they find people in this line of work? I know in Hallowell, Maine where you are a practitioner, Google Beth Jones, Hallowell, Maine but and look for Beth. But if you're in Kansas or in San Francisco, how do we help people? What do you say to them? What's a few resources?
BJ 20:35
I tell people to go to the website traumasensitiveyoga.com. And that's my teachers website. And there's, we're up to over 250 facilitators from around the world. And he's got them all listed out. So yeah, you can find a facilitator through that.
AS 20:55
That's so wonderful. Yeah. Is there anything that I haven't asked you that I should have asked you, anything you want to say?
21:01
No, I but I, well, maybe maybe, you know, there. I'm very aware through the work I do. I work with young women now through Day One, and who are survivors of sexual abuse, and we're online, which is a whole different thing. But I'm also at Thomas College, teaching college writing to kids and the president there has...they do such an incredibly trauma informed presentation of what's happening and they keep us all up to date. They've had trainings called the kids are not all right. The kids are not alright, that should tell us everything. There's this real shut down this because we're taking agency and, and all those choice making opportunities, we're really kind of trimming them away from what should be a stage of incredible bursts of growth. So kids are getting depressed. And I think for us to be aware of that. And just to offer choice, whatever, as parents, you know, step parents, maybe older siblings just understand choice is an elemental thing. And when it's taken away, we risk traumatizing and going into that power dynamic, you know.
AS 22:13
So in helping kids choose, literally, I've heard if a little kid wants to be put down and you're holding them put the kid down, because that's helping them right. Have agency over their own body, right? What are some other just kind of examples of things that are choice oriented? Is it we don't necessarily want the kids to decide what the whole family is having for dinner, right? Because that's, you know, it might be cupcakes. But give me some healthy examples of choice and how we can facilitate choice in our families or in our lives?
BJ 22:42
Oh, gosh, do you want to help with dinner? Kids? We're talking about kids? Maybe? Do you feel like cooking today? You know, or just questions instead of demands. The thing is, you have this idea of, you know, you also have to have the rigor of of chores and that kind of thing. But I mean, anytime where there's a sensible choice, where, you know, do you want to work on math today or this hour? Or do you want to work on English this hour? Since there's a lot of homeschooling happening right now. I'm really not sure. You've kind of asked me a question that could be anything. Because do you want to wear this color or that color? You know, if you're working with really little kids color choices can be, you know, food choices. You don't have to sit next to this person or, you know, I don't know there are just certain things. I was really moved by Simone Biles story, because there was so much of grooming happening with this this, Larry?
AS 23:46
Nasser Zetas, Nasser? Yeah, Nasser.
BJ 23:50
And he was so clever. That he impacted the parents to believe that it was okay to bring their daughters to the basement of his house in this suburb, and he was never paid. So choices like are you uncomfortable? You know, could you ask the child could, hey, does this make you uncomfortable in any way? It was just sort of like they're athletes, they just go in and they do what they're told. I know, I know that veterans are in that situation. They're not asked. So when they come back to a healing situation, it's very important to be able to give them the sense that you matter, what you have to, what you're feeling matters. That's what Simone Biles did. She showed the override, I matter. And my team matters. She did that for her team as well. But those choices, those little infinitesimal moments where, geez, maybe you don't where's that interoceptive feeling? That gut feeling that maybe it's not cool to go into this guy's basement. And you know what happened? Right?
AS 24:53
Oh yeah.
BJ 24:53
You know, it's just yeah, I mean, maybe that maybe ask your child or stop yourself and say maybe that isn't a good idea.
AS 25:01
And believe your child.
BJ 25:04
We have to get out of this sort of robotic I got to do this so that my my kids successful thing. What if your kid doesn't want to go to college? But it's just, they're not wired that way, right? You know, this whole idea of neuro diversity is brilliant, you know. I've learned a lot from from being with young people who live in a different world, from what I grew up in. And it's humbling, because their minds are really out in many different directions. And there are so many choices, but they're making them. A lot of them are making them no to that, yes to this.
BJ 25:41
giving your kids the freedom to make their own choices, with the knowledge they will have value in success, if that's what they follow. Not if they follow what everyone's script.So much of what we struggle with as adults is living up to the script of not what everyone else thinks we should be. But what we think everybody else thinks we should be, right? Like we put ourselves in a prison of a perception that we have created that other people have of us if that makes any sense.
BJ 26:16
And they don't want to let people down. That's a big thing.
AS 26:19
And no one else actually expects those things. That's the funny part, right? Like no one expects that every single person they meet is going to become president of the United States. But so many people believe.
BJ 26:28
There are a lot of young people under the pressure though to achieve.
AS 26:32
Yeah.
BJ 26:33
And they, they really are to get to get to college, get the degree, not only get the degree but get good grades. There's a lot of reward in doing all that. But a lot of pressure from families. Or you know, peers, you know, you don't know.
AS 26:50
You don't. Beth Jones, thank you. This has been a very enlightening half hour, and I can't thank you enough for making time in your day to do this.
BJ 27:01
Pleasure. Thank you very much.
AS 27:02
Thank you.
BJ 27:03
Great to see you.
AS 27:03
Good to see you too. Thank you for joining us for this special episode of Serra Speaks.
AS 27:16
Thank you for joining us for this episode of Serra Speaks where we talk with women about business, not about women in business. Please be sure to hit subscribe and stay tuned for upcoming episodes.