Where There Is Courage, There Is Happiness: Bringing Yoga to the Ukrainian Front Lines
by Shanti Shanti Kaur, published in Yoga Therapy Today, Summer 2024 Issue
In late May 2023, I had a conversation with a kundalini yoga teacher trainer in Ukraine. He described missiles dropping daily into the major cities, towns, and villages, destroying homes, hospitals, and electric and water supplies. He described how men, women, and children endure the violence and atrocities of war. He wanted the new teachers he was working with to have additional skills to help meet the challenges of acute and complex trauma.
Within 3 weeks of this conversation, the faculty of the Guru Ram Das Center’s International Kundalini Yoga Therapy Professional Training formed the Resourcing and Sustaining Ukrainian Resilience Program, a 5- to 7-year initiative to bring trauma-responsive yoga therapy training and support to Ukrainian teachers.
The curriculum for the posttraumatic stress training our team has delivered since 2011 was not applicable here. We developed an entirely new 4-day training specific to a war zone and delivered it to 120 Ukrainian kundalini yoga teachers, including Major General Vitalii Butuzov (ret.). This initial group practiced seven core skills crucial for teaching yoga in environments of acute and complex trauma:
- self-regulation to restore/maintain a teacher’s calm presence,
- co-regulation in a group class,
- cultivation of student self-regulation
- use of trauma-responsive language
- design of trauma-responsive classes
- application of grounding mudras, and
- returning an activated student to calm presence.
Soon after, yoga teacher Olesia Stoyanova, one of the Guru Ram Das Center’s representatives in Ukraine, began leading a rehabilitation protocol daily for troops in a military hospital in Kyiv. This protocol focuses on stabilizing prana through the tattvas (elements of reality), building vitality and stability that will hopefully be maintained for months following the classes when these troops return to the front lines. Preliminary data from 2 months of daily classes (June–August 2023) confirmed these results: All participants noted improvement in well-being, mood, state of health, and life satisfaction. Most practitioners said they were better able to fall asleep and that their emotional balance had increased.
The troops were reluctant to practice on the first day, Olesia said. Tuning in, the asanas, the movement, the breathing—it was too unfamiliar. Yet by day five, they were so engaged in the yoga they asked her to come to where they were going: 7 kilometers from the front lines. She is now a trauma-responsive yoga teacher in rotation for their unit and described the initial situation this way:
Students come to regular yoga classes knowing why they are going to yoga, and it is their choice to practice. In the military this is different. Most of the soldiers are not interested in yoga. There is a big prejudice among men against yoga and mantras. For them it is something too feminine or too philosophical. They don’t see yoga as a tool that can help them recover. Also, most of the troops believe that they do not need psychoemotional support or a tool for self-healing. That’s why the unit commander brought everyone who was free from direct duties at the time to the first class.
Olesia sees promising effects of the classes, especially once she had earned the students’ trust. One of the ways she did this was by avoiding practices she knew they might find too esoteric—like mantra—and choosing those she thought would provide immediate practical benefit. “I started with exercises for spinal health [because] the soldiers spend a lot of time wearing body armor, which affects the condition of their backs,” she explained. “I also taught pranayama to relax the nervous system and build prana. It was both challenging and fun for them at the same time.” In October we followed up with a 3-day training in acute trauma protocols designed to meet the needs of women and children in military families, troops in military rehabilitation, those recovering from traumatic brain injury (TBI), and amputees.
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***Originally published in Yoga Therapy Today, a publication of the International Association of Yoga Therapists (www.iayt.org). Shared with permission.