02/10/2025
Why Collaboration Matters in Trauma-Informed Yoga Training
When we set out to design and deliver a trauma-informed yoga training, one of the first choices we made was to teach collaboratively. Rather than one voice leading the entire course, we chose to bring together a team of teachers with different experiences, skills, and perspectives.
This wasn’t just a logistical decision. It was a conscious choice rooted in the very principles of trauma-informed practice.
1. Safety Through Shared Leadership
In trauma-informed yoga, we emphasise that safety is co-created. The same applies to training. When there is more than one teacher in the room, students don’t have to rely on a single authority figure. Instead, they see safety modelled as something that is held collectively. Multiple facilitators mean more support, more attunement, and more capacity to notice when someone needs care.
2. Empowerment Through Choice
Trauma-informed practice is all about offering choices. In collaborative teaching, trainees experience different teaching styles and perspectives. They get to see that there is no one “right” way to hold space — just many ways that can be equally valid. This models flexibility, creativity, and empowerment.
3. Diversity of Perspective = Richer Learning
Trauma is complex and shows up differently in every body and every context. No single teacher can embody all the knowledge and lived experience that trauma-informed practice demands. By teaching together, we bring in varied lenses — from yoga therapy to psychology, from lived experience to clinical insight. This not only enriches the training, but also mirrors the reality that trauma-informed work is interdisciplinary by nature.
4. Modelling Collaboration, Not Hierarchy
Trauma often leaves people feeling powerless, voiceless, or “under” someone else’s control. In a collaborative teaching environment, trainees witness teachers sharing power — listening to one another, respecting each other’s expertise, and weaving together knowledge. This in itself is a trauma-informed stance: showing that leadership doesn’t have to be hierarchical or authoritarian, but can be relational and co-created.
5. Holding Each Other in the Work
Finally, teaching trauma-informed yoga can be emotionally demanding. Just as we encourage practitioners to work in community rather than isolation, as teachers we also need one another. Collaboration allows us to check in, ground ourselves, and share the responsibility of holding space for a group. That mutual support strengthens the container for everyone.
🌿 Trauma-Informed Training Is How We Teach
By collaborating, we’re not just talking about trauma-informed practice — we’re embodying it. Our way of teaching reflects the same principles we want trainees to take into their own yoga spaces: safety, empowerment, choice, diversity, and collaboration.
Because ultimately, trauma-informed yoga isn’t just about what we teach, but how we teach it — together.
