213 Combining EMDR & Yoga Asana | Enhancing Trauma Therapy Practices: Interview With Paula Soto

Chris McDonald: Have you ever wondered how combining EMDR with yoga could deepen the healing process and help clients open their window of tolerance? Are you curious about how mindful movement, breathwork, and body awareness can might enhance your EMDR practice and improve client outcomes. What happens when we blend the powerful modalities of EMDR and yoga?

The result is a transformative approach to trauma therapy that engages the body, mind, and nervous system in healing. In this episode, we'll explore how EMDR's focus on processing trauma through bilateral stimulation complements yoga asana's grounding and embodiment practices. Experience a yoga practice in this episode with our guest Paula Soto and gain insights on the science behind this integration and why this combination can help deepen healing for clients.

Tune in and discover how to enhance your therapeutic toolkit with these innovative techniques on today's episode of Yoga in the Therapy Room Podcast. Stay tuned. Welcome to Yoga in the Therapy Room, the nontraditional therapist's guide to integrating yoga into your therapy practice. I'm Chris McDonald, licensed therapist and registered yoga teacher.

This podcast is here to empower therapists like you with the knowledge and confidence to bring yoga into their practice safely and epically. So whether you're here to expand your skills, enhance your self care or both, you're in the right place. Join me on this journey to help you be one step closer to bringing yoga into your therapy room.

Welcome to the Yoga In the Therapy Room podcast, the Non-traditional Therapist Guide to Integrating Yoga into your therapy practice. Today we're moving into an integrative approach of EMDR and yoga. That's eye movement, desensitization and reprocessing with yoga and trauma therapy. Both of these practices have proven to be incredibly effective on their own.

But when combined, they can create a unique synergy that supports deeper healing and resilience for trauma survivors. To guide us on this journey is Paula Soto, social worker and yoga teacher. She is the owner of Intersections Wellness and Intersections Wellness Intensive Treatment. She offers EMDR intensives, adjunct EMDR therapy, trauma focused yoga instruction, consultation, continuing education, and program development.

In this episode, we'll discuss how EMDR's focus on reprocessing traumatic memories pairs seamlessly with yoga asanas and breathwork practices and mindfulness ability to connect the mind body and to help clients feel a sense of agency and empowerment through this. You'll learn how Paula uses yoga to enhance mindfulness.

EMDR therapy sessions, and she guides you through a short yoga practice. So wherever you are in your yoga journey, this episode will provide you with fresh insights to take into your practice. Welcome to the Yoga in the Therapy Room podcast, Paula.

Paula Soto: Thank you, Chris. I'm glad to be here.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, so I thought we'd start with how did you first discover yoga?

Paula Soto: I discovered it by accident. Wow. I've not heard that before. , , I was, uh, just taking my child to the school bus and there was a yoga class that was being held right then and for a little bit of contact. background, I was at the time in a really abusive marriage and despite being a therapist and having many decades worth of therapy, I was unable to set and maintain boundaries and get myself out of that, uh, situation.

I had gotten all the insight and cognitive. Skills that I thought would equip me to get out and I wasn't able to make the changes And I didn't know why I just felt pretty bad about myself But I felt pretty trapped and what I did realize At that time that I didn't put it together with yoga was that I wasn't experiencing Emotions in in a healthy way in my body.

I was very because of the trauma either numb and shut down or in completely flooded emotional states. So anytime I would try to set boundaries, I would go into a completely dysfunctional state that I learned later from some very competent therapists was an infant abandonment annihilation rage. So circling back to yoga, I started going to yoga a couple times a week.

I just thought it would give me something to do and make me feel healthier, maybe give me some social outlets. 'cause when you're in a abusive marriage, it's hard to make and keep friends. You get isolated, and I started realizing that the days I went to yoga, I was able to feel a little better. I was able to feel a little more at ease in my body.

After six months in yoga, I started being able to experience. normal emotions. I could feel my leg. I had interoception, um, did not realize I hadn't had interoception, but when you suddenly have it, it's like, Oh, that's what it feels like. How cool. And I remember doing Shavasana once just being washed over by this Just waves of grief, but they were not outside of my emotional tolerance.

It was grief that I could navigate through and using the mindfulness skills I learned in yoga, I just observed it. And it is very much in retrospect, like EMDR, just. What's going on in the body? What's going on emotionally? Is there a story tied to this? Why am I crying? And I realized I was crying for grief for a dog that had died six months ago, but I hadn't been able to access emotions then.

So I was like, well, this is really curious. Something is shifting in me to where now I'm able to access feelings. And I concurrently noticed I was better able to breathe through and regain a window of tolerance when I tried to set boundaries. So I do credit yoga with literally saving my life because as I later learned at the yoga service, Council conferences where I went for three years to learn more, got to learn from Bessel van der Kolk and Gabor Maté and a lot of wonderful, amazing yoga teachers that my window of affect of tolerance had been widened.

And. my heart rate variability had changed and that allowed me to actually tolerate things that I needed to tolerate in order to make changes rather than getting just battered around by the trauma flashbacks. So that's how I discovered it and just I just kept building on my knowledge and learning what's going on and, you know, concurrently finding community at the yoga class, finding, um, I had been, had a spiritual trauma as well.

Some of the religious things that, Had been supportive to me in the past, ended up being a big part of why I stayed in the abusive marriage longer. So finding the philosophy and the history of yoga gave me a different framework to feel grounded and to feel that I had some ability to connect with the divine and to feel connected with others.

So all in all, it was just. a really great healing avenue for me.

Chris McDonald: I love that story and how much it really helped to open you up and be able to go in with curiosity with the sensations too and not stay in the shutdown mode. It's, I see that so much with clients I integrate yoga with in sessions that they're able to tolerate things more.

And you mentioned that window of time. I think it does open the window more.

Paula Soto: Mm hmm. Yeah, it just builds that capacity to be the observer of our experience, which is I think integral to any type of therapy working well.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, what a gift that is for sure. Lifelong skill, isn't it? To be able to do that and access emotions.

So what interests you in EMDR?

Paula Soto: I kept hearing from different therapists I admired how well it works. I had heard about it way back in the 90s, but hadn't been able to access an EMDR therapist at the time. And when I finally did have an experience with someone who claimed to be EMDR trained, it was This was pre yoga.

My experience there was very re traumatizing, very harmful, and that turned me off of EMDR for quite a while. But I learned later this person obviously had not been trained by an EMDR approved training organization. But I was a great admirer, and still am, of Dr. Jamie Marich. I took the Dancing Mindfulness Facilitator training with her, and that was great.

Another really instrumental practice that helped me to heal was doing the dance and the movement and the mindfulness and finding community there. And so in the trust and admiration I built for Dr. Marich, I decided it was time to give EMDR another chance. I got trained and I had such a profoundly healing experience.

experience just in the training that I, uh, then was able to find an EMDR therapist to work with.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. No, I love that. So how did you end up integrating both yoga and EMDR? How did that come to being? Well, to me, it

Paula Soto: was just seamless. I, I just, Yoga had transformed my talk therapy practice a great deal because bringing in the somatic bottom up stuff.

So that was already helping people get better results. Adding in the EMDR was just amazing. Like it really catalyzed people's ability to heal themselves and the yoga Has been really helpful. I feel in the somatic preparation, because in my experience, I have not, you know, found it helpful to be putting people through the reprocessing stages, if they don't have a window of affective tolerance, if they don't have the capacity to be the mindful observer, the curious nonjudge judgmental observer of their.

body sensations, emotions, cognitions, images in their minds. And yoga teaches us to breathe through really intense stuff and be the observer of it. So it was really kind of, you know, there was no question that for me, yoga was an excellent tool to offer to help people prepare for their reprocessing. And, you know, of course not all clients choose that.

And I can use other mindfulness techniques and Somatic techniques to help them without incorporating yoga and like to me because if I'm using the word yoga I'm i'm including a lot of the philosophies even if i'm not directly teaching that to the client. It's in what we're doing, so It's something I love to offer and some people really take it up and love to build their own home practice.

They practice all, you know, several times a week. They learn different styles of yoga. We help them decide what what style of yoga might be helpful for them at different points in their process to meet their nervous system needs. And some people, I would say most of them like to do just brief practices, five to ten minute practices.

We've never done full classes, but it's amazing the, the results that they get out of realizing, Oh, if I do this, I have some self agency. I can meet myself where I'm at. I can pay attention to my own body signals. and know how to respond, you know, and it really gives a foundational experience of I can trust myself.

I can have some control. So it's, it's doing on a action based level. A lot of what the themes of our EMDR reprocessing are about anyway, not being helpless, not having options.

Chris McDonald: That empowerment piece is, is huge, isn't it?

Paula Soto: Yeah.

Chris McDonald: Can we back up a little bit and go back to what is EMDR because I know some listeners may not know what we're talking about with EMDR.

Paula Soto: Sure. Okay. So EMDR, the letters stand for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. Therapy and it was developed back in the I say 80s by Francine Shapiro. She was already a meditator and I hope I'm going to tell this story correctly. It's paraphrased over here. She was taking a walk outdoors and she had a cancer diagnosis and she was very distressed.

She had a distressing thought come up. She felt herself getting very activated. And as she noticed that, she started moving her eyes back and forth across the tree line rapidly. And as she did that, she was able to pay attention to the distress and the distressful thoughts and the distress. shifted. So then when she thought up that thought again, it didn't bring up the same distress.

So she took that back to her colleagues and that was the seed of it. So basically the, the eye movement desensitization reprocessing was the original name. She does say she wished she had given it a different name retroactively because eye movement is not the only way. To get those results, we're applying bilateral stimulation.

So it could be through little buzzing devices, alternating or sounds, self tapping, all kinds of things. It's thought to be similar to what is happening in your. Rem state of sleep. So it's based on the adaptive information processing model in that your brain already has the capacity to integrate anything and heal from any wound and make sense of it and learn from it.

That happens all the time for us with smaller stressors that are not experienced as. trauma. If I have a really bad day and I'm upset over somebody, you know, in business upset me, whatever, I can sleep on it. And the next day I'm not going to be that distressed about it. I'm still not going to like be happy about it, but I'm not going to be fuming.

I'm going to have a clearer head. I'm going to know how I want to move forward. I'll have better perspective. That's just what our brains naturally do for us. Just like our, if I scrape my knee, I'm My knee knows how to heal. I don't have to figure out how to regrow skin, you know. Now, if I scrape my knee real bad, I mean, I might need to go to a doctor.

I might need to get some debris washed out of there. I might need to get some stitches. I might need to get an antibiotic. So the EMDR is kind of how I see that. You know, we have to sometimes use a protocol and take these traumatic memories and the traumatic material and pare them down into smaller pieces, add in a lot of adaptive information, but your brain is the one that is putting it all together.

And so we are getting a trait shift rather than a state shift. So with other kinds of therapy, you might be able to like, Oh, if I do these coping skills, I can change my mood. I can improve my mood. I can regulate my anger. I can practice my CBT and change my thinking. And I'm pro all of that. I think these are all skills we should all have.

I think these are all therapies that are very important of being healthy. However, with The more traumatic stuff, and when we're dealing with dissociation, we need to go into other parts of the brain, and we need to process on the body channels as well. And so the trade shift is your brain's actually rewiring itself.

The memory is that is held in as a trauma. Memory has all these sensory details, all these state specific emotions and state specific thoughts attached to it. You know, that's why if I'm having a Conversation with my mother, I will get triggered back into being an angry 16 year old, even though I'm 54 and no better.

You know, there's still some, there's still some state specific memories there. And when we take these memories and reprocess them, we're releasing all the information that our brain doesn't need to hold on to anymore and restoring whatever's left of that memory in a different place. So it's no longer in the part of the brain where it's set up with all I see the brain like, um, keywords in a Google search, you know, like if a man in a plaid shirt and a cowboy hat beat me up, that memory is going to go into my trauma brain with keywords like cowboy hat.

Male plaid shirt and that way my brain will know anytime I see a plaid shirt, I better be on the lookout. Anytime I see a cowboy hat, I better be on a lookout. That kind of thing. What cologne did he have on? Anytime I smell that, I better be on the lookout. And once I reprocess that memory, I'm no longer going to get activated.

Every time I smell that cologne, see that hat, see a plaid shirt. I'll still have a memory like, oh, yeah, there was that dude and he beat me up, but I lived through it and that's not happening anymore.

Chris McDonald: So how does that work with the reprocessing? How do you help clients with that?

Paula Soto: Um, what do you like? How does a reprocessing session go?

Chris McDonald: Yeah. How does the session? Well, there's

Paula Soto: a specific, the standard protocol is what we normally use and it's. It's very scripted. I don't want to get into the whole script, but basically we're activating the memory in a certain way. So we look at an image that represents the worst part of the memory and we link that to a negative cognition or a maladaptive belief about yourself.

So say I'm using the memory with this fictional, you know, Cowboy. I don't know why I picked a cowboy. Um, I used to always just use a different example, but I feel like that example is too politically charged for today. So, maybe the image is the fist coming at me or something. And, so I hold that together with the belief, I'm helpless.

And my positive belief is going to be like, I can keep myself safe or that's in the past or I can create my own sense of safety, something like that. We're not trying to gaslight ourselves. But the problem is, every time I see a cowboy hat, I feel helpless again, even if I'm at Walmart and it's just a very nice gentleman sitting in front of me and a cowboy hat.

You know, so I need to get that. I'm helpless. I'm stuck from that memory. So we bring up the negative belief and the image, and then we notice what's coming up. What's coming up in our emotions? What's coming up in our body? Where are we feeling that in our body? And what's our level of distress? And we look at the positive belief and we think, Okay, when we're looking back at this memory, how true does that feel now?

And on a gut level, it probably won't feel very true. And so then we start adding the bilateral stimulation. And that's when we're just doing our mindfulness and observing what's happening in us. And we're going to see maybe different images come across our mind's eye. If we don't see images, that's all right.

We're going to have thoughts. We're going to have body sensations. We're going to have emotions. It might go deep. It might get very emotional. People are often very surprised at what comes up for them. We might get additional memories that are stored on that neural network of other times we have felt helpless.

We may need to contain that so we don't open up all the helplessness that we have in our brain. But it may be our brain just saying, we're going to generalize this. All of this goes in the same category. And we can reprocess this. And so basically we're just reviewing and releasing, reviewing and releasing.

And it gets awful at first. It can get really difficult, pretty grueling, but we keep going and we're starting to get more and more adaptive information to where we start. Our brain starts giving us all these evidence. Of why the positive belief is more true now. And it doesn't mean, oh, in that time I wasn't truly helpless.

It just means I'm not now that helpless all the time.

Chris McDonald: That's a big shift. I appreciate you sharing that because I know we've talked before that when we're not trained in EMDR like me and other listeners, it's like I hear it so much and I'm trying to have some kind of intelligence with it. So I appreciate you going into details.

Paula Soto: Yeah, one of my passions is helping people learn more about it, because I think It's becoming so popular that people are maybe getting a little hasty and feeling that almost over promising. You know, I, I greatly oversimplify for the purpose of this podcast, there is complex trauma and dissociation and neurodivergence considerations and all kinds of ways we need to be cautious and, and use it not as a standalone treatment, but as part of very attuned and complex trauma treatment.

But it is. To me, it's been life changing. To my clients, it's been life changing. I'm just so thrilled about it. But

Chris McDonald: I can see how that, that could be damaging if someone's not trained enough or had enough supervision with this. Can you talk about that a little bit? Like the, some of the

Paula Soto: Yeah, some of the primary dangers I see, and I've been doing adjunct EMDR for about the last year or two, and so I see a lot of very well meaning therapists sending me their clients thinking I can just, oh, yeah, Paula's just going to do your top 10 traumas and then you'll be stable.

What I'm not, I'm seeing a lot of though, is people with zero window of affective tolerance. And so we have to stop and, you know, do a lot of preparation to help them actually feel their feelings because a lot of therapies actually are about managing and suppressing and shifting away from your feelings rather than going into the feeling.

And a lot of the therapies are about, oh, if this is a irrational thought, I need to. stop having that and focus and practice the rational thoughts. Whereas in EMDR, we're like, okay, this irrational thought keeps coming up and my behavior keeps aligning with that irrational thought. And my feelings keep aligning with that irrational thought.

Maybe instead of trying to push it away, I need to be like, Hmm, why are you here? Let's heal that, you know? So there's a lot of just the Kind of cross purposes in the conceptualization. And then the other thing I see is the lack of awareness of dissociation or fear of dissociation in that I think many, many people do have an experience of themselves where parts work.

For ego state work would be very helpful, but if we are not with a clinician where we feel that, like, safe or understood, it's something that we're so used to suppressing with ourselves that will never come out. And so, you know, I just see a lot of folks that really need a lot. Some very attuned and patient and client centered ego state work, and that's just not picked up on, even though their therapist might be an amazing therapist and, you know, have done tons of professional development, if that conceptualization.

piece hasn't been something that came across their table, then, you know, we're being trained since we get out of grad school that just, oh, hey, if your client isn't benefiting, it's because they're just resistant or they're not ready to do the work yet. It's like,

Chris McDonald: um, not always.

Paula Soto: Yeah. There's a lot of other

Chris McDonald: issues, right?

There might be a

Paula Soto: part that's resistant, but there are parts trying to protect them. Let's talk to that part.

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So where does yoga come in with? EMDR was, I know all the protocols and processing.

Paula Soto: Well, for me, it's been a wonderful way to help build somatic preparation. So to build that window of effective tolerance so that we can observe our emotions instead of just shutting down or getting.

panicked. We have to be able to breathe through some really powerful stuff as we're reviewing it. And if we're not ready, then we could get destabilized or it will just keep getting stuck because we'll just keep getting like, Oh, I don't know why I feel calm after two minutes of reprocessing. Like, you know, we keep trying this and I just keep feeling calm.

It's like, yeah, you know, so I, it's. It's helpful to build the window of affective tolerance. It's helpful to teach mindfulness skills. And it's also, you know, on the clients that wish to truly delve into yoga in a more philosophical way. It can be a way to build up the adaptive neural networks too, because when we're dealing with like developmental trauma, early trauma, where we've had a lot of developmental needs not We need to learn to just even Rethink and find our self concept there.

I don't know. I don't feel like I'm getting stuck on what word I'm looking for

Chris McDonald: and do that all the time. So, I know we talked. Yeah, I heard you talk about some of the mindfulness and maybe breath work. So, is there certain yoga practices that you like to use? Is it? Any movement practices as well? And

Paula Soto: yeah, it really depends on what the person wants, but if they're willing to do movement practices, I always will offer those and I tailor those to the client's nervous system and cognitive needs.

And I think we can go more into that. Yeah, go ahead. You know, samples that you and I are going to do in brief, you know, if they're more hyper aroused, if they're more in a fight or flight place, then we're not going to be like, Oh, let's lay across this pillow and think happy thoughts as you know, focus on your breath.

They need to get that out, you know, they, so we might find something that is more strenuous and meets their nervous system where it's at allows them to get the nervous system input and the movement necessary to kind of join up with that fight or flight. And to just gently allow the body to complete any movements or release that to, so it can down regulate into, you know, your rest and digest state.

Chris McDonald: Yeah.

Paula Soto: So similarly, if, if we're hypo aroused and shut down and dissociated, you know, I might do more restorative and yin and then move somebody into a gentle movement. Because we have to kind of ease them gently back into being aware of what's going on in their body. So a lot of it is just kind of working with what they're showing up with.

A lot of times there's body pain, there's tension from bracing, there's tension from feeling emotions from the body memories coming up and so just even working with that and shifting out of those muscle memory places can be really powerful if somebody's processing and they're all Hunched over, bracing, you know, we might pause and say, do you want to take a breath?

Do you want to like, get some tea? Do you want to try moving? Do you want to move in an opposite position to how you're feeling? That might feel awful. Like, I've had people hunched up. I'm like, would you like to try opening the body? And they're like, no, I can't move. Okay, then, you know, are you able to breathe?

Can you feel your foot? Can you feel your fingertips? And as you breathe, put a fingertip down. It's, there's no one size fits all. It's really about whatever we've done in those preparation phases that has resonated with them is what we're going to draw from when we're in the reprocessing and we need to try to regulate.

Chris McDonald: Yes, I'm just thinking too, if they, if you've taught something before and that really resonated, they just are like, I really can connect with this and it helps me out a lot. And maybe coming back to that too, those practices.

Paula Soto: Exactly. And then even like when they're moving into the more adaptive material and affirming that positive belief about themselves, pairing that with different postures or movements can be profoundly Powerful and even noticing what comes up for them organically.

I've seen people just naturally take postures that then give them more insight about themselves and strengthen their positive beliefs and their resource figures. Which is part of the MDR as well, sometimes in some pretty creative ways that I never could have come up with.

Chris McDonald: I know it is. It's kind of crazy sometimes what comes up because I had one lady that recently that she was just so anxious in her arms And was what we stood up and I was like, how do your arms want to move?

And she's just like shaking her arms like going all over and so we just kind of went with it I was like whatever she's bringing we're gonna go with it and then we were able to do more calming activities, too It's just that beautiful merging right of getting the act active You Stress response out and then coming into the calmer state.

Paula Soto: I love that. I mean, I asked you a question. Did you do that with her? It sounds like oh, yeah,

Chris McDonald: I showed her how to do my belly dance arms, too We're doing snake arms Like yeah, but laughing too that co regulation, right? Yeah, absolutely. So can you share a yoga practice with listeners today? That would be helpful.

Paula Soto: Yeah Um Let me, I feel like I want to put on my lights a little bit better. And we were going to use you as the sample student, right? I'm the sample student. Awesome. So ideally, I'd have you farther from your mic so that I could see your body, but it's okay if that doesn't work for this. Okay. And then I want you to be able to see my body too.

All right. So everything's an invitation. Whatever your body and breath and attention want to do. Supersedes anything that I say, so placing your feet on the floor and just finding a nice, relaxed, neutral spine, just check in and notice how you're breathing right now. If you can notice without judging, whether it is natural and smooth and rhythmic, or whether it might be tensor or irregular.

Notice any tension in the body or any spots in the body that feel tight. Light that feels soft and relaxed. Notice the sounds in the room, and then come back to your breath, and your body. I'm gonna ask you to rate two things on a scale of 1 to 5 that'll help me decide what might be some helpful invitations for you.

So, physically first, on a scale of 1 to 5, if 5 were you have enough physical energy and stamina that you'd like to get up and run around your building a couple of times, and One is, you would like to lay on the floor and take a nap. Where would you write yourself?

Chris McDonald: Probably a four.

Paula Soto: And then mentally, if we're talking mental agitation scale, same scale, one to five.

If one is you're feeling very peaceful and zen, five is you've got a bunch of angry squirrels chasing each other around. Where are we at here?

Chris McDonald: Probably three.

Paula Soto: Okay. So that's telling me you're about moderate. We don't have to do something super crazy to keep your brain from going into bad places. And we want to maybe regulate and your nervous system physically a little bit.

So we'll go a little bit more strenuous, but also go slow. So we already did decide we were doing chair yoga. So let's just start by taking our arms up over our head with an inhale and then take them back down with an exhale. Inhale up again

and exhale down. One more inhale up. This time take the hands, interlace the fingers, take them behind the head, cradle the skull, the face of your skull, and let it kind of just lean back into your hands. And just lift up your sternum and breathe in here. And then on the exhale, hands to heart center. I'm going to take the hands down to the sides of my chair.

You can have them wherever you want. If you would like to use them to help, you can use them to help. So the invitation here is we're going to do a boat, but one One knee at a time. So one foot stays on the floor, and find your neutral spine here, and just bring up that one knee and hold it, and just breathe, and set it down, and then the other knee, bring it up, and then set it down, and then if we want to try without the hands, try holding it less, so maybe just go up on the tiptoe, And see if you can practice lifting that knee up just a little bit off the ground.

Because we're just activating into the core here, which might stimulate our vagus nerve. And we're releasing a little bit of that energy in the muscles. And then the other leg, let's try that on the tiptoe. And just experiment with. Up and down there. And then both feet on the ground and just take a breath and observe.

Alright, now, we can definitely use our hands to pull one knee up. Flex that ankle. And then cross it over above the other knee. And press your knees out. So, choice here to stay straight up or to take a forward fold. We're just doing kind of a seated figure four. And then come on back up. Reach your hands up, cross your leg over.

Good work. Just that whatever legs on top like crisscross your thighs and then just take a twist over that. I made my back crack. Awesome. And then keep the legs cross. So I, for instance, have my right leg on top. I'm going to take it my right foot behind my left calf. For like a seated eagle posture. And then I'm going to take my right arm under, left arm on top, give myself a hug.

And then if I want, if you want, you can go into eagle arms and just breathe here and check in whether you want to stay still here or whether it might feel good to move with the breath. So that if we were moving with the breath on the inhale would lift our elbows up a little bit. And on the exhale, we'll curl the elbows down towards the knees.

So just moving with your breath and noticing which feels better to you. And if it feels good hanging out curled up here, feel free to hang out there for a couple of breaths. If it feels good, With the elbows up, feel free to hang out there. It's really a very much of a choose your own adventure as you decide what feels right to me right now, stillness movement with the breath or hanging out in these different places that these postures are taking you.

And keep doing that until it feels complete. And then we'll switch to the other side. And this is how I got my memory back together after PTSD ruined my memory. It was, I'd practice like three yoga things on one side and then see if I could remember it on the other side. Let's go ahead and uncross those legs.

So this time we're going to bring this knee up, other knee and whatever one we didn't have. Flexing the ankle, cross the ankle over the knee. And for your figure four on this side, and just hang out here. This side might be different from the other side, so check back in with yourself and notice if we want to stay straight up, or if we want to take a forward fold.

And one thing I always try to pipe up and remind people is ahimsa. We, um, sometimes come up against our need to be perfect or felt sense of not good enough or whatever in our yoga practices. And I like to remind people that this is, you know, we don't get extra points or reach enlightenment quicker for being more bendy.

It's about ahimsa, non harming. So if you notice any pain, immediately move out of that. We don't push through it. And then come on up, take the arms up, crisscross the legs over, and take a twist over the other side. Nice big breath, if it feels accessible. And then coming back to center and doing your eagle legs here, your eagle arms, you can give yourself a hug, or you can take the full eagle posture.

And check in for a breath here. See whether you want to stay still or whether you want to move with the breath. Inhaling the elbows up and exhaling the elbows down towards the knees. And if you're still feeling a lot of extra energy, the additional intensity invitation is bringing the knees up to the elbow in a crunch.

Which my body is like, heck no, we don't want to do that. But you're welcome to. You can even play around with this, like sometimes hanging out down in the elbows to knee posture, taking a couple extra breaths into your back lungs can feel really good. And then come out of that whenever it feels complete.

And then the one thing I like to do that we didn't get a lot of in this, or we didn't get any of in this, it's harder with the seated. Besides like side stretching, which we didn't do too much of that, is I feel like your front of your hips is a really important thing to stretch out. That psoas is so reactive.

We sit a lot in our society and trauma and depression and stress make us clench up. So opening up that hip flexor is important. What I'm going to invite here is just go sideways on your chair and Do a little, just like we were doing a, a lunge or something, but feel free to let that hip drop and hold your foot.

Chris McDonald: Can't do this with my chair. It's too slippery.

Paula Soto: Then yeah, do not slip off the chair, especially podcast

Chris McDonald: episode.

Paula Soto: Yeah. So one thing, if you want to stand up, we can just do a little lunge and do it holding onto your desk. We're not doing this for balance purposes. We're doing this to open up the front of the hip.

Or even just standing at the desk and doing a little king dancer, whatever feels good for you. If we were in the same office, I'd be working much more with attention to your own anatomy and what works best for your anatomy right now. I'm like, going off the cuff.

Chris McDonald: No, that was fabulous. I appreciate you sharing that.

I hope listeners got something out of that as well. You know, it was interesting, the twist when you, I've never done a twist seated crossing the leg over. That was wow. I just can say, wow, that was really powerful. Very cool. So can you share just one last thing about what is some success you've seen with clients with integrating EMDR and yoga together?

Paula Soto: I have, that's when I see the most success. That's when I see the least amount of ab reaction in terms of a lot of times and I do intensives too. So some of my intensives are, you know, between 2 to 5 hours worth of trauma work a day and it can get, you can get nightmares, you can get it. Migraines, body pains, you can get digestive issues, sleep issues.

And I find that the people that have really gotten into the yoga practices have less of that. And I think it's because their nervous system is Much more able to regulate and, and shift out of whenever it's getting a trauma activation, they're able to, you know, also just be aware of like, oh, this is what's happening.

And I, I know how to take care of my body and my nervous system in it, like, even myself right now, the last couple of weeks. to be completely honest and I decided I'm going to show up honoring Satcho, which is truthfulness. Like I've been nauseated. I've been dizzy. I've been very tense and there is no yoga practice that is shifting me back down to feeling ventral bagel these days.

And that's okay because I'm at least able to know, oh, I can watch my breath. I can make sure that my breath is slow and regular, even though my heart is beating really quickly. I'm able to control my breath. Oh, and when I'm able to control my breath, I'm able to pause and think and not react and make things worse for myself by going down some scary thoughts or.

Angry thoughts. So I think just yoga has given me the skills to take care of myself as a person who has a trauma history, who's done a significant amount of EMDR. It doesn't mean that my brain and body are back to a state as if I'd not had trauma. Yeah. So I, yeah, I just, I see it really, really helping a lot of people and helping them to, I don't want to give like just one particular story because I don't want to tell people's stories.

Besides I'm happy to tell mine, but. Being able to pause during their reprocessing when it gets very intense and use some movements or use some breath or mindfulness that they've done to help regulate and then be able to continue reprocessing. So I just, I see it, the yoga is a great foundation to get the most out of reprocessing with the least reactions.

And I also think with lowering the chance of re traumatization. Afterwards, you've made your nervous system stronger.

Chris McDonald: Yeah. I appreciate you sharing that. And I like how you did the yoga philosophy in there too, with some of the, I don't know if it was the yamas or niyamas, I always get them mixed up, which is which, but, but I think that's really powerful too.

And a good, good lesson for listeners and clients to be able to have that, the practice of not harming self and being aware of that, you know, I think that's really powerful. But I think it goes back to that empowerment you mentioned, too, with, uh, giving clients that agency that, I mean, that's, that can't be underestimated.

That's huge.

Paula Soto: Yeah, when I first, like, started training on yoga, this is before I even became a, an EMDR therapist, but I started doing trauma informed. Yoga for clinicians and yoga teachers, because at that time it was new in the yoga field too, but those are my two main points. I'm like, this is such a complex topic.

If you remember two things, embodiment and empowerment are the two things.

Chris McDonald: Yeah, for sure. What's the best way for listeners to find you to learn more about you?

Paula Soto: My website is www. intersectionswellness. com. Okay, great. And I'm not too much on the socials these days. That's okay. Starting a sub stack. Um, I have a lot of different irons in the fire.

So the website is going to be for now the, the best place to get in touch with me and the best place to see what I have going on

Chris McDonald: currently. For sure. And we will be updating the show notes too, once she gets the sub stack rolling, right? We will definitely do that. It's always a moving, changing thing. So, but thank you so much for coming on Yoga in the Therapy Room podcast.

This has been wonderful.

Paula Soto: Thank you so much, Chris. It's been a real honor to share. I enjoyed our conversation.

Chris McDonald: And a big shout out to my listeners. Thanks for being here today. I invite you to join my bringing yoga into the therapy room. Facebook group. This free group is for non traditional counselors and therapists who are interested in bringing yoga practices into their therapy room.

This is a supportive space where you can connect with other like minded people. You'll get access to exclusive content including somatic mindfulness and yoga practices that you can use with clients, in session, or for yourself. Monthly Q& A, lives with guests, yoga challenges, and so much more. Don't miss out.

Join us at hcpodcast. org forward slash yoga in therapy group. That's hcpodcast. org forward slash yoga in therapy group. And that'll be in the show notes as well. This is Chris McDonald sending each one of you much light and love till next time. Take care. Thanks for listening to today's episode. The information in this podcast is for general informational and educational purposes only.

It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are given. Giving legal, medical, psychological, or any other kind of professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. Yoga is not recommended for everyone and is not safe under certain medical conditions.

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