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Summary
On episode 410 of 40+ Fitness, Coach Allan sits down with Beth Shaw, president and founder of YogaFit Training Systems, the leader in mind-body education, which has trained more than 200,000 fitness instructors on six continents.
Beth talks about her book Healing Trauma with Yoga and how yoga can be used therapeutically to address both emotional and physical trauma, starting with the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) test as a way to understand your own risk.
The conversation covers how trauma physically changes the brain, why consent matters in hands-on adjustments, and the seven core principles behind YogaFit’s approach.
Links
- https://yogafit.com
- https://bethshaw.com
Key Takeaways
- Trauma isn’t uniform, and resilience varies from person to person. Shaw says we’re “all like snowflakes” in how we process trauma physically, mentally, and emotionally, so the same adverse experience can affect two people very differently.
- The ACE test flags trauma risk in under 10 questions. It asks about abuse, household violence, parental loss, witnessed trauma, and head injuries. Scoring above five yes answers correlates with higher risk of addiction, suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety.
- Trauma physically rewires the brain. It overstimulates the amygdala, making people hypervigilant and threat-focused, raises cortisol through the hippocampus, driving inflammation and a chronic reaction state, and shrinks the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s decision-making center, so survivors aren’t always making their best choices.
- You don’t have to disclose your trauma to benefit from yoga. Shaw says you can walk into a class and simply practice. The exception is hands-on adjustments, since unexpected touch can retrigger someone with a history of physical or sexual trauma.
- Consent-based touch is now a core teaching standard at YogaFit. Instructors are trained to ask permission before any hands-on adjustment and give students an explicit option to decline, a direct response to reports of instructors overstepping physical boundaries.
- Yoga calms the nervous system by raising GABA. Regular practice lowers blood pressure and heart rate and is one of the few natural ways, short of a pharmaceutical, to boost GABA, the brain’s calming neurotransmitter, without the emotional blunting a drug can cause.
- YogaFit’s seven-step foundation centers on presence, not performance. The core principles are breathing, feeling, listening to the body, letting go of judgment, expectation, and competition, and staying present, treating the practice as an ongoing process rather than a one-time fix.
- Workaholism can be its own trauma coping mechanism. Shaw, who describes herself as a workaholic, points out that overworking or over-exercising can mask pain just as effectively, and just as unhealthily, as substance use.
- Beth’s three strategies to get and stay well: listen to your body, set an intention and action plan and actually follow it, and stay a little flexible.
“Sometimes even workaholism can be just another way of escaping one’s pain.”
Beth Shaw
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