ABSTRACT
Meditation and yoga emerged from rich Eastern spiritual traditions which offer multifaceted pathways of training including practice, study, and ethics. Yoga arose from the Hindu Vedantic tradition more than 5000 years ago, and mindfulness meditation developed out of the Buddhist tradition more than 2,500 years ago. These practices have spread across many different continents and cultures and have recently become more mainstream, so that people suffering from trauma are now regularly seeking meditation courses and yoga classes. Interest in these approaches has been driven by clinicians and researchers who have become concerned that conventional treatments often fail to fully address the complexities of trauma. Some of these difficulties include loss of experiential awareness in the present moment, somatic disturbances, affect dysregulation, inability to experience satisfaction and pleasure in life, and an overall lack of integration between the sense of self and the body (West et al., 2016).
