Healing trauma through ‘shaking yoga’

ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE Church workers and seminarians  take part in one of first laughter and shaking yoga sessions in the country. —PHOTOS BY MATTHEW REYSIO-CRUZ

It was Christmastime last year when Paolo Trinidad, founder of Pinoy Laughter Yoga (PLY), administered one of his signature sessions to a restless rabble of children at Baigani, a community group and haven for survivors of unspeakable loss.

A young boy struck Trinidad as being particularly rowdy. After the session, the child told him a story void of holiday cheer.

First, there was a knock. Then came the police officers, forcing his father to kneel on the ground.

A gunshot then rang out, splattering all over his chest fragments of his father’s shattered head.

“He said he wanted to become a cop so that one day, he could find the man who killed his father. So he could have his revenge,” Trinidad said.

One year later, the run-up to Christmas has gripped the public with stories that, while seemingly new, are mere additions to a long-running, national experience of violence — from the chilling bullying tactics of a junior high school student to the killing of a Bicol congressman as he gave gifts to senior citizens.

Tool for unity

Trinidad, however, brought something this year into the Philippines that he believes might begin to “unite a wounded nation,” as Sister Mary Grace, a Carmelite nun and his spiritual director, once told him.

After eight years at the helm of PLY which primarily reaches out to trauma victims, Trinidad has expertly decoded the language of grief.

Faced with survivors of flood, disease or the war on drugs, he has found a universal way — breathing exercises, facial expressions and chants, all meant to evoke laughter — to reach them.

But lately, he felt the sessions were also growing stale. His yearning to incorporate something into PLY that was both new and fitting in these unsettling times took him to the ashram of Ratu Bagas, a healer in Bali, Indonesia.

Finding his groove

Ratu Bagas had founded something called “shaking yoga” which Trinidad first encountered on YouTube years ago.

“I thought it could be combined with PLY because the shaking naturally led to laughter” and vice versa, he said.

This year, Trinidad underwent a five-day retreat at Bali to master the practice.

He was required to shake various parts of the body — head, arms and knees — for at least nine hours each day.

Trinidad, who is Catholic, initially struggled with the spiritual element of the sessions, like being asked to shake in front of images of the Hindu god, Vishnu.

But with a rosary hidden in one hand, he slowly found his groove.

“It’s all about activating and getting in touch with your soul,” he said.

The next challenge was fashioning what he described as an almost cultish practice into something palatable to Filipinos, and crunching nine hours of shaking a day into two-hour sessions.

As it would turn out, it was the church that proved the most willing and receptive laboratory as Trinidad reshaped and refined the Balinese practice into something more akin to Christian worship.

“I adjusted the chants to be like calling on God, calling on the Holy Spirit,” he said.

He asks people to close their eyes, as if in prayer, as they shake. He exhorts participants to raise their hands as if they were blessing a fellow parishioner.

Pilot testing grounds

Trinidad’s first testing grounds for shaking yoga were St. Vincent Seminary in Quezon City and San Roque Cathedral in Caloocan City where participating seminarians and church workers wholeheartedly embraced it.

It’s no coincidence that the two churches are also heavily involved in social justice activities, working with either drug dependents or the families of victims of extrajudicial killings (EJKs).

To them, the rehabilitative work they were accustomed to was just like shaking yoga — a form of healing.

More holistic

Fr. Bong Sarabia, St. Vincent Seminary rector, felt that Trinidad’s decision to infuse the latter half of his traditional laughter yoga sessions with a series of various shaking movements and poses had made the impact “more holistic.”

“Laughter will always be positive but the reality is that some of us have baggage that we need to shake off,” he said.

Sarabia added that after the sessions, “I observed that more seminarians would now be able to sit down and really be more attentive to prayer, and the messages that God is giving them.”

Unlike typical yoga sessions, PLY is not an unbroken line of successive poses, but a series of vocal exercises and hand and

facial movements — sometimes mixed together — interspersed with technical explanations from Trinidad about the science behind it.

Because while observers might see yoga as a principally intuitive, emotional practice, it’s clear that Trinidad, who is also a family counselor, understands it as a craft that requires technical mastery.

“Bessel van der Kolk (the renowned clinical psychiatrist) revolutionized the perception that when people have heavy trauma, the cure is solely psychotherapy,” he said. “The effect of trauma on a person is not only in the brain but also in the body. Trauma stays in the body.”

According to Trinidad, movement is one way to shake that off. He said he was interested in proceeding with evidence-based studies that would elevate shaking yoga into a practice, something medical workers could support and prescribe.

“All rehabilitation needs some form of exercise, some form of release,” Trinidad said.

Viable treatment

“This is something new and very powerful,” he told the Inquirer. He’s also not the only one who sees shaking yoga as a viable treatment for victims of trauma, who have ballooned since President Duterte’s bloody crackdown on drugs.

Mia Lapis, a mental health worker at the Diocese of Caloocan, attended one of the inaugural shaking yoga sessions and came away convinced that it would help those she worked with—drug surrenderees, prisoners, families scarred by EJKs—to overcome their anguish.

“Even personally, I felt the change in my body afterwards,” said Lapis, who is a certified healer. “The tension in my head melted away. I had been feeling knots in my back that just disappeared.”

Hector Salvo, who works at the ministry on justice, peace and human dignity for the Diocese of Caloocan, also views shaking yoga as a social justice tool.

He said they had surveyed the 18 barangays under the jurisdiction of San Roque Cathedral and saw that “this type of therapy is really needed.”

“Especially for those who had lost family members to violence,” Salvo said.

Cathartic exercise

For an exercise that involves frenzied and unfettered shaking and laughter, it seems only natural that it would prove cathartic for participants. But there also seems to be something deeper at play.

Sarabia found that the power of shaking yoga was not just in what you could gain by looking inward — as most meditation practices emphasize — but what you gain from letting go. For victims of trauma who have lost homes, livelihoods and loved ones, that could be key to survival.

“Many times we are too rational and because we are too rational, we fail to feel and connect with our deepest sentiments, desires and needs, and the needs of others,” he said. “[During PLY], you are clearing your mind and letting go of fixed views and perspective. Thereby you become open.”