Healing from Anxiety
How can we find inner peace and lessen our anxiety even in times of chaos? Guest Hala Khouri, therapist and yoga teacher, discusses practical strategies to understand our body’s signals so we can release stress and find healing.
Hala Khouri, MA, has been teaching yoga and movement for over 25 years and has been doing clinical work and trainings for 15 years. Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, she has dedicated her life to the study of trauma and building resilience on a personal, interpersonal, and systemic level. Hala is a co-founder of Off the Mat, Into the World, a training organization that bridges yoga and activism within a social justice framework. She is a sought-after speaker and trainer on the subject of trauma, yoga, and social justice and author of the book we are discussing today, Peace from Anxiety; Get Grounded, Build Resilience and Stay Connected Amidst the Chaos.
THE YOGA HOUR TEAM COMMENTS: A wonderfully encouraging conversation. I resonate with Hala Khouri’s emphasis on the need to go beyond our inner work in order to make peace with trauma and anxiety. She relates that the feeling of warmth and belonging which comes with developing a relationship ecosystem provides a necessary support for healing. "It helps you feel like you are held by something bigger than you." I also like Hala’s vision of changing our stress impulse from the fright-flight-freeze reaction to a tend and befriend response. She considers it a "radical act of social justice" to move our stress, anxiety and trauma response from a stance of strength and power to one of understanding and assisting. Particularly powerful is her concluding message of positivity: to find joy in the journey without letting trauma and anxiety get in the way.
DR. TRUJILLO’S COMMENTS: I enjoyed our conversation about healing from anxiety, and appreciated that Hala Khouri says that healing needs to go beyond the personal to the interpersonal and global levels. She says that one of the first ways to transform our trauma into personal growth is to look for support, and that this support can come from our networks of connections which can include our neighbors and work colleagues in addition to our core relationships with family and close friends. Hala shared an important practice, that of orienting ourselves: noticing what we notice when we look around our environment or when we look within ourselves, and how often we notice the negative ( for example; what needs to be cleaned, where in our bodies we are holding tension) rather than what is beautiful or working well. This orienting or noticing can be part of how we feel the support that we need when dealing with anxiety.