A Story about Satya: Religious Trauma, Neurodivergence, and Yoga

[Note: this article is a work in progress and still being edited; please forgive errors]

Disclaimer: These thoughts are my own, offered from my singular perspective in space and time. 

Content warning: this is a story about religious trauma with themes of homophobia, misogyny, and bigotry as well as brief mentions of abortion, abuse, meltdowns, depression, and suicide. You may wish to prepare to call on your nervous system regulation tools; my go-to is to take a conscious breath in and whisper it out in a long and soft exhale, like blowing on hot soup with a sigh. Resilience-focused resources are provided at the bottom of this article.

Introduction

Safety for neurodivergent folks in yoga spaces is a conversation we’ve been exploring in our Community Connections gatherings as part of the broader conversation in the yoga world about trauma and harm that happens in yogic environments.

There’s a growing body of evidence that neurodivergent people are significantly more vulnerable to trauma and victimization, and are more likely to be groomed to be overly-trusting of others and to discount our own inner wisdom because of the ways we’ve been pathologized, marginalized, and had our competency called into question. This may be especially true for folks who are under guardianships, institutionalized, or otherwise extremely isolated, with very little access to support outside of their immediate caregivers and service providers, if they have any support at all.

In a recent meta-analysis of autistic people, for example, it was found that the prevalence rate of victimization was 44%; we’re an especially vulnerable population, and I have my own experiences to validate that. Stories from neurodivergent folks about experiences of abuse and harm are ubiquitous: Bullying, sexual abuse, extreme forms of control, lack of bodily autonomy, financial victimization, emotional neglect… it’s overwhelming. And, not all of our neurokin have access to places where they can receive community support and their voices can be heard. Their stories aren’t making it onto the internet, social media, or into environments where conversations about self-advocacy are happening. Partly for this reason, I believe that the prevalence of trauma and abuse within the neurodivergent community is grossly underestimated.

With the growing popularity of yoga and mindfulness and awareness of mental health, we know that the path of healing from any form of trauma has the potential to bring folks to the doors of a yoga studio. When we’re seeking comfort and relief, the promises of physical and mental benefits are hard to pass up, and it’s hard to ignore the abundance of peer-reviewed studies that support a great potential for traumatized people to experience life-changing benefits from yoga and mindfulness practices. 

And, not all people claiming to be yoga and mindfulness teachers have our best interest in mind. This is a hard truth that is best kept in the light.

We know from the legacy of abuse in certain yoga lineages that not all yoga spaces are safe (even those that advertise themselves as “trauma-informed”). As more folks in the yoga world turn their attention toward neurodiversity and seek to attract and support neurodivergent students, I’m feeling a responsibility to bring more education and awareness to this topic for the well-being of our community.

As a relative newcomer to this conversation, I’m sharing a few of my initial thoughts here, inspired by my own story at the intersection of religious trauma, neurodivergence, and yoga. It’s impossible for me to point to parts of my story and say “that was because of autism” or “that was because of trauma,” and that’s partly the point of my sharing; naming the source hasn’t been necessary for my healing. I invite you to approach this as a story about connection with true self. I’ll share a flow of memories that illuminate what happened within my own complex journey of religious trauma as I was systematically denied access to my own discernment and autonomy, eroding the connection to my unique and authentic perception of reality. 

#Exvangelical 

"You know, every time you remember something, your mind changes it just a little. Until your best and your worst memories are your biggest illusions."  -Joe Miller, The Expanse television series

I remember sitting in church services as a child staring up at the whirling fan suspended from the vaulted ceiling overhead, grabbing hold of one of the fan blades with my gaze, and tracking its phrenetic journey round and round and round until my vision blurred and I melted into the steady churn of light and movement. It was a task that took utmost focus and concentration, until it didn’t. Call it stimming. Call it dissociation. Call it meditation. It was all of those and more.

The chapel ceiling fans didn’t receive much notice until I graduated from Sunday School and was expected to join the grown-ups for regular church service. I don’t recall how old I was exactly when this happened; maybe seven, maybe twelve. My timeline of memories isn’t linear. It was at this point, however young I was, that I recall my first big experience of disillusionment with my parents’ religion, as members of a fundamentalist evangelical Christian church and the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a fringe religious organization that has been labeled a cult by many of its survivors. That first moment of disillusionment was as mundane as it was profound, and it set in motion a paradigm shift of epic proportions within my tiny universe.

One Sunday the church had invited a special guest pastor from the IBLP to come and give the sermon. The charismatic man who showed up was very white and very authoritative, and during his talk he presented some convoluted and flowery numerology to show how VISA (the credit card company) represented the number 666, thereby proving that credit cards were “satanic”. I remember trying to follow the man’s disconnected and nonsensical logic, and feeling confused by how it kept folding in on itself and unraveling, until I was convinced that this must be the set-up for a joke that would reveal the actual message of his sermon, maybe something grounded in Biblical wisdom, though I wasn’t able to guess at what. It all sounded unbelievably ridiculous.

Certain the punchline was coming soon, I surveyed the faces of my parents, gauging their reaction so that I didn’t laugh out loud at the wrong time. They didn’t look like they were being amused, and as I scanned the rows of people around me, I could see that the entire congregation appeared to be listening with rapt and very serious attention. Something felt very, very wrong and the energy in my body was ignited. I remember a hot pain deep in my core as it became suddenly and sickeningly apparent that there was no punchline coming, and that I might be the only person amongst the hundreds of churchgoers, my own parents included, who recognized the utter bullshit that this man was feeding us. I was consumed by questions that I wasn’t supposed to ask, and mortally concerned at the thought that my parents– adults– could be so easily duped by meaningless words.

I had no words to communicate my inner experience nor a safe person with whom to share my thoughts. My questions echoed lonely in my mind with nowhere to direct them until they generated an anxious vibration that made it difficult to turn off my brain. There was no room for questioning the teachings of religious leadership; one of the first lessons I learned in Sunday School was that everyone on the outside is wrong, and the secular world is a place of lies, deceit, and danger. I had no test for truth beyond my own intuition, which of course, was being systematically undermined by appropriated and weaponized Biblical cautionary tales about the consequences of failing to trust in God, and the importance of obedience to the men that God had appointed to deliver his messages. And they were always men; women were forbidden from preaching.

I didn’t know how to move forward from that moment; I was just a child, and I had trusted in the discernment of my parents and the leaders of the church to tell right from wrong, and fiction from fact, and now I had to call everything into question. All of the rules I’d take for granted were now subject to an intense and confused scrutiny by my developing brain, including heaven, hell, and any hope of certainty in my own salvation. 

It was just too much to process and too much disillusionment to live with. Instead of proceeding with curiosity, I gaslit myself into believing that my skepticism and critical analysis of this guest pastor’s nonsensical logic was a failure of faith, and a sign that I needed to double-down on the truths in which I had been indoctrinated in order to liberate myself from the flood of anxiety that accompanied my thoughts of doubt. And so, as I’d been taught I must, I prayed for forgiveness, and resolutely committed to being impossibly perfect in my devotion to this religion. (Of course, this was and continues to happen by design, demonstrating that there are few limits to what people will accept without question once they’ve been conditioned to shut down in the presence of information that contradicts their indoctrination.)

After that Sunday, the ceiling fan became my way out of having to face a reality that I couldn’t reconcile. I would prove my devoutness by sitting quietly through sermons, and when I couldn’t bear the cognitive dissonance of the disillusionment that accumulated, I could dissociate out of time and space and be consumed by the feeling of “falling up” into dizzying light and movement above me. I could be in the room and not be in the room. I could be in the world and not be in the world. 

Fawn, Flee, Fight, Freeze

For a time, I religiously joined my parents in the chapel every Sunday and tuned out the pastor’s messages by immersing myself in the whirling of the fan blades, but even that I couldn’t do perfectly. Soon my ability to dissociate into the light and movement faded, while the visceral and unshakeable sense that something was very, very wrong hijacked my nervous system more frequently. Words from sermons leaked into my mind as messages from the Bible were weaponized and heaved through my consciousness in the form of violent ideas about queer folks, women, and the secular world in general. 

After church on some Sundays, I was made to stand in the median of a busy highway, sometimes in freezing temperatures, in order to protest near the local abortion clinic by holding anti-choice signs with images of dead babies and pro-life messages on display for passing traffic. I was taught that AIDS was God’s punishment for “fags,” and that women are “whores” who need a husband to love and obey in order to be sanctified in the eyes of the Lord. I was unapologetically lied to, and made to fear any perspective of the world that didn’t align with the beliefs of the men in charge. As I made my way from child to adolescent, I was frequently and uncomfortably questioned by peers, the pastor, and my parents about my unusual interests, the tomboyish way I dressed, and my inability to meet expectations about how girls and women should behave. I internalized all these experiences as more evidence that I was failing at keeping my faith.

As I grew older and the ceiling fan lost its magic, my methods for avoiding sermons became more sophisticated and substantial. I went from excusing myself to the bathroom for long periods of time, to volunteering in the church nursery and Sunday School classrooms during services, to finally convincing my parents that I was too sick to leave the house as often as I could manage. When my parents stopped believing that I was sick and pushed me to go to church anyway, I experienced self-injurious, completely out-of-control meltdowns. My body was saying “no” when my voice couldn’t. Still, somehow, I continued to end up in that chapel.

My desperation to escape the constraints of the religious environment grew as layers of disillusionment continued to mount, and life became more complex. By the time I was in high school, I was experiencing increasingly severe depressive episodes along with situational mutism that left me unable to communicate, sometimes for days at a time. These episodes were labeled as weaknesses to be fixed through prayer, while the mental health care I needed was withheld because psychology was “new age” and dangerous. 

So much else was happening outside of the confines of this story. As I moved through life toward adulthood, a chaotic network of trauma responses gradually began permeating my existence— religious trauma was just one thread of a knotty tangle of maddening, crazy-making experiences and events. For a time, the only safe spaces accessible to me were in my internal and faraway fantasy worlds, and being outside amongst the trees, where I could melt deep into sensory experience. Those places weren’t enough as my presence was continually demanded elsewhere.

It probably goes without saying that autism and ADHD were as of yet undiagnosed and unsupported, and despite all else, I continued to push myself to achieve a perfect grade point average to preserve my “academically gifted” status at school. School felt like the only place I could do anything right, but although bullying became less frequent in teenage years, it was more severe and harder to avoid; I loved to learn, but school wasn’t safe, and I hadn’t been offered coping skills that weren’t enmeshed in a religion that was strangling my sense of self. When I couldn’t handle the stress of the educational environment anymore I started using my church-avoiding strategies with school, too. There seemed to be no escape from all of the places and people that felt wrong to my body, and I was exhausted. 

At a time in my life when I was meant to be enjoying the exploration of my identity and my own wishes and dreams, I was instead frantically trying to break off and bury the pieces of myself that I couldn’t reconcile with my religious beliefs and social expectations. I worried over how to do everything “right” until I was literally sick with stress over the impossibility of being myself and being true to my religion and gender role; I didn’t know how to exist on a planet where it felt like the true me wasn’t welcome or wanted anywhere. I stayed awake at night fixating on and fantasizing about all of the ways I might die at the hands of an angry God who was sure to smite me for my inability to follow his rules. As stress swelled inside my body and brain, the anxious rumination about my impending death turned into ideation of all of the ways I might remove myself from this planet by my own hand, so as not to give God the satisfaction. I was angry, in pain, and living without hope. 

In the years that followed I did eventually find my way out of religion and into the loving arms of safe people and spaces; things got worse before they got better, but that’s a story for another time. I’m glad I’m still here. Big breath. 

Satya

I know my story isn’t unique even if the details are. Trauma is trauma, regardless of where it originates, and it has a certain way of manifesting with individualized nuances showing up in our neurodiverse brains and bodies as we fawn, flee, fight, and freeze to protect ourselves. Trauma undermines our sense of trust in our own body-mind, and can change the way the world looks and feels from a place of safety to a place of mortal peril, even when danger isn’t physically present and the fear isn’t rational. 

Satya, or Sanskrit for “authentic truth” has become an identifiable bodily sensation for me after much practice and rediscovery. I’ve been reminded time and time again that my body knows and communicates truths that my brain can’t see; I know now that the intense bodily sensations I felt as a child sitting in church and being confused by lies isn’t my enemy. Neither is the earnest burning passion in the center of my chest that makes my voice tremble when I speak from my body’s wisdom. These anxious and painful feelings are uncomfortable because they make a long journey through a legacy of trauma in order to show up, but they are honest, and they are keeping me safe by telling me what’s true and what isn’t. 

I wonder how other people feel or interpret satya, and what the journey of discovery looks like; I know there’s a lot of value in just asking the question. I also know that there’s value in listening for responses. And finally, I wonder if others in the neurodivergent community need support to stay connected with their truth, too, knowing that the kinds of experiences we share can make the journey back to our authentic self an especially arduous one. Yoga offers amazing tools for this journey, if we can find the right people and practices to support us without requiring us be anyone but ourselves. Sometimes that part takes time.

At first, stepping into a yoga studio felt so far removed from Christian fundamentalism that I naively (and understandably) believed that the same systems of oppression didn't and couldn't exist in yoga spaces. I embraced the love and light and Ohm symbols that replaced the hellfire and brimstone and crosses of my past. I embraced the practice of coming home to myself through the postures and breath and community. In a lot of ways, the opportunity to reconnect with myself spiritually through yoga felt too good to be true, and of course, in time, the first familiar, uncomfortable feeling of disillusionment burst my "love and light" bubble and I realized that the yoga world is not a risk-free zone; just like anywhere on this planet, people make mistakes and can cause harm, myself included.

I’ve noticed a lot of parallels between the systematic erosion of self that happens in legalistic, high-demand religious environments and as well as in rigid, conforming yoga spaces. As I explore yoga as a way to unmask my neurodivergence and find healing from trauma, I’m aware that I may be more vulnerable than I realize. My satya is an important partner on this path, guiding me to recognize harm and seek out people who genuinely have my best interest at heart. And still, I know I haven’t deconstructed all of the ways my own experience of self and unique perspective of reality has been muddied by messages from people who were equally burdened by the confusion of abuse disguised as love. The tendency to ignore my body’s messages and dissociate into blissful ignorance as a way to hide from painful truth is still there. I need to be careful to keep my truth-seeking senses sharp and my protections close.

Closing Thoughts

Here is what I have to offer as my own truth in this ephemeral moment, drawing from my own experience of religious trauma and some of the dangers present in the world of modern yoga. Please take what serves you and leave what doesn’t.

If a teacher is selling “one right path” to enlightenment, claiming that yoga is a cure for this or that (but especially if they claim that it can cure autism, ADHD, or any other neurodivergence), it’s worth considering whose best interest they have in mind. There is no “one right path” and yoga is a practice, not a treatment.

If you can’t reconcile the truth of who you are with the expectations of your environment, it’s worth considering whether the environment is the problem. You aren’t broken and in need of fixing in order to conform to someone else’s ideals. You deserve to be your whole self and to have your differences accepted and supported.

If you struggle to discern who has your best interest in mind, it’s worth seeking the kinds of people who have no right answers to offer you at all, but are willing to ask questions and listen, and support you unconditionally while you figure it out. Be dubious of anyone who pushes you to reveal vulnerable parts of yourself before you’re ready. Your healing journey is sacred.

We’re all having our own experience on our own timeline. Satya might mean something very different to you, and that doesn't make either of us wrong or right. You might feel truth in your body, as a voice in your mind, or as a nebulous knowing outside of tangible awareness. Your true self might be revealed to you in unexpected places, in the company of messy people who are unaware of the wisdom they offer, and whose names carry no distinguishing titles. It’s worth spending time in slow, quiet corners with gentle people who expect nothing from you in return.

Thanks for reading. As you consider your place in this conversation and any painful memories or feelings that it brings, remember to start small, go slow, and be really kind to yourself along the way. Before you move on with your day, you’re invited to join me with one last conscious breath in… and a long, soft sigh out.

Related resources that I’m currently exploring:

Thrive Lifeline (crisis line): https://thrivelifeline.org/

Religious Trauma Institute: https://www.religioustraumainstitute.com/

Reclamation Collective: https://www.reclamationcollective.com/

The work of Matthew Remski: https://matthewremski.com/wordpress/

The work of Theo Wildcroft: https://theowildcroft.com/2018/04/post-lineage-yoga/