Julie Brown Yau - The body awareness workbook for trauma : release trauma from your body, find emotional balance, and connect with your inner wisdom

The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places, Ernest Hemingway wrote. In The Body Awareness Workbook for Trauma , Julie Brown Yau provides practical advice based in solid science on how the broken places can become stronger, and how they can heal. This book should be read widelyfor who hasnt experienced psychological or physical trauma in our tumultuous world?

Larry Dossey, MD , author of One Mind

As a clinical psychologist and teacher for those experiencing trauma, I understand how trauma can disconnect us from ourselves, others, and the world around us. Im therefore truly grateful for Julie Yaus new offering, The Body Awareness Workbook for Trauma , in which she provides us with skillful exercises and tools for being able to meet, greet, proactively respond, repair, and heal through trauma. Julies workbook is valuable and powerful for enabling us to both heal through trauma, and feel connected within ourselves wherever we are, whomever were with, with whatever circumstances are arising in our body, mind, world, and relationships.

Richard Miller, PhD , founder and chairman of the iRest Institute, and author of The iRest Program for Healing PTSD

This is an unusually intelligent and intricately helpful book. Unusually intelligent in the evidence it gives of its authors familiarity with the complex territory of trauma and its effects on our lives, as well as her ability to write about it with grace and skill. It is intricately helpful because the author gives so many highly refined methods for helping oneself navigate the ravages trauma wreaks on our lives and relationships. The Body Awareness Workbook for Trauma is an inspiring blend of grounded theory and effective practice.

Don Hanlon Johnson, PhD , professor in the department of somatics at the School of Professional Psychology and Health at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, CA

The Body Awareness Workbook for Trauma is an incredible resource for anyone working through trauma, especially childhood trauma. Julie Brown Yau expertly: 1) Creates a frame of safety, compassion, and hope. 2) Identifies virtually every important component of trauma recovery, which allows people to successfully take small yet meaningful steps toward positive change. 3) Integrates a unique blend of practices from mind-body and spirit to directly help people to improve their lives. While this workbook is written for the general public, every therapist who works with trauma should read it. I highly recommend it.

Robert Schwarz, PsyD, DCEP , author of Tools for Transforming Trauma , and executive director of the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology

I dont see any way through the labyrinth of life without incurring developmental and/or shock trauma. Julie Brown Yaus new book is a powerful and effective way to uncover, heal, and transform through the conscious engagement with your personal trauma. This is an extraordinary fusion of science and spirituality, a work with tremendous value for anyone wishing to become free and live life to the fullest.

Ron Hoffman , founder and executive director of Compassionate Care ALS, and author of the memoir, Sacred Bullet

In recent years, more of us are discovering the centrality of presence in establishing a balanced and meaningful life. But what is not always understood is how much the existence of traumatic issues in our history can thwart or shut down our ability to stay present. Julie Brown Yau has been exploring this topic for many years, looking at what has been most helpful for people, and seeing how different kinds of trauma respond better to different approaches and therapies. Julie provides a compassionate and practical overview of the diverse forms of trauma, and findings on the most effective methods for working through them. I predict this book will become a classicboth for lay readers seeking help in working through their own difficulties, and for professionals seeking a more complete understanding of this emerging field. Highly recommended.

Russ Hudson , coauthor of The Wisdom of the Enneagram and Personality Types

The Body Awareness Workbook for Trauma focuses on the essential missing piece: Spirituality. Trauma is an existential crisis as much as it is psychophysical. The spiritual component is the fulcrum of healing that synthesizes the coherency of self and existence. With this focus, stable, long-lasting healing and transformation is possible.

Uma-parvathinatha Saraswati , spiritual lineage holder Shri Vidya, an ancient integrated system of consciousness development based on Vedic science

In this comprehensive and deeply insightful guide, Julie has synthesized her vast knowledge and experience in working with trauma with a profound sense of grace and compassion. This is not a dry, theoretical book about trauma, but rather an essential companion for an inner inquiry into all the aspects in which trauma might be coloring the experience of ourselves, others, and the world. This is a step-by-step guide for reclaiming our inherent aliveness and feeling at home in our bodies while authentically expressing our essential self.

Zaya Benazzo , cofounder of Science and Nonduality

Publishers Note

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books

Copyright 2019 by Julie Brown Yau

Reveal Press

An imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc.

5674 Shattuck Avenue

Oakland, CA 94609

www.newharbinger.com

Cover design by Amy Shoup

Interior design by Michele Waters-Kermes and Tracy Carlson

Acquired by Elizabeth Hollis Hansen

Edited by Kristi Hein

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

Contents

Foreword

I know Dr. Julie Brown Yau through the beautiful work she does for Compassionate Care ALS. She developed the Cultivating Compassion Education Series and offers counseling support for people affected by ALS and other traumatic diseases. Her thirty-year skill set in psychological, somatic, and spiritual practices blends in a unique and wonderful way to aid others to resolve trauma, reduce suffering, and find joy.

As a writer who has spent a good deal of time over the past fifteen years with people living with fatal neurodegenerative diseases, Im familiar with the trauma sustained by these kinds of diagnoses and journeys. Alzheimers, Huntingtons, and ALS have no disease-modifying treatments. There are no cures. There are no survivors.

In addition to the physical burdens of these diseases, there are the psychological, emotional, and spiritual ones. People with diseases of the brain are often excluded from community, feared by those who fear their illnesses. The diagnosed become other-ized isolated, alienated, stigmatized, shamed, disconnected. Whether due to the limitations imposed on them by their disease or the rejection by others who fear and ignore them, people diagnosed with these neurodegenerative diseases lose their jobs, freedoms, friends, passions, identities, independence, dreams, and ultimately, their lives.

And yet, without donning rose-colored glasses, I also see what can be gained. Sometimes, remarkably, people find hope in the most hopeless of situations. They let go of grudges. They forgive and ask for forgiveness. They rewire their thinking, focusing their minds only on what matters nowloving the people they love, helping others while they still can, no longer sweating the small stuff, enjoying one more Christmas, one more sunny day at the beach. A friend of mine, devastated in a million ways by an unexpected diagnosis of young-onset Alzheimers, once said to me, There are gifts that come with this disease, if you choose to open them.