Yoga teachers have a special responsibility to handle all their interactions with students with great care. However, honing the special skill set required to work with students who have faced trauma requires a thorough understanding and special sensitivity of the unique needs of these courageous people.  Veterans Yoga Project is teaming up with the The Samarya Center is offering an extraordinary opportunity for intensive training in a proven, mindful approach to teaching yoga to veterans and others who are struggling with posttraumatic stress and other trauma-related psychological difficulties.

Mindful Resilience for Trauma Recovery (formally Mindful Yoga Therapy) is an evidence-informed, clinically-tested yoga program that was developed specifically for veterans recovering from posttraumatic stress and other psychological difficulties.  It is an evidence-informed, in that practices have been chosen and adapted based on clinical and neuro-scientific knowledge about posttraumatic stress and its treatment.  It is clinically-tested, in that it was developed based on feedback from hundreds of veterans and active-duty service members receiving treatment at residential and outpatient treatment programs.  Mindful Resilience has been successfully integrated into mental health and addiction treatment programs for veterans and active-duty military across the US and Canada.

In the Level One teacher training, you will explore:

• The development, course, and consequences of trauma-related disorders
• The psychotherapeutic treatment of trauma-related disorders and how yoga fits into an integrative treatment approach
• Special considerations and cautions when providing yoga therapy to veterans and other trauma-affected individuals
• Specific practices, guiding principles, and resources found to be helpful for veterans coping with trauma, including a detailed treatment manual with an empirically-informed, clinically-tested 12-week protocol.

This Veterans Yoga Project training consists of a balance of practice and lecture/discussion.  At the end of the training, participants will understand the symptoms of post-traumatic stress and other trauma-related disorders, how those symptoms are related to underlying neurobiology, and how to use this understanding to most effectively teach individuals recovering from trauma.

Your guide on this journey through the Mindful Resilience yoga teacher training program is Daniel J. Libby, PhD.  Daniel is an author, a licensed clinical psychologist and yoga teacher specializing in the mindful integration of evidence-based psychotherapies and complementary and alternative medicine practices for the treatment of PTS(D) and other psychological and emotional distress in active-duty military and veterans.

Friday, July 18, 2014        5:00p-8:30p
Saturday, July 19, 2014  10:00p-5:30p
Sunday, July 20, 2014     10:00p-4:00p