Methods of Self-Empowerment in Uncertain Times
- Kula For Karma
- May 16
- 6 min read
Updated: May 28
Lea Landaverde, a social justice advocate, finance expert, and queer, first generation Latina, has been feeling the stress of these uncertain and upsetting times throughout her body. The stripping of our rights, social oppression, and the dehumanization of groups of people has a devastating impact on our mental health. What have you noticed lately about where you have been feeling the impact of each day’s news?
Feeling tightness in our throats can be a result of feeling unheard, or the sense that our voices and unique experiences and needs don’t matter. Tension in our chests can indicate feeling heartbroken, uncared for, shut down and disempowered. Pain or nervousness in our stomachs can mean we feel threatened, fearful and unsafe.
In short, many of us feel traumatized these days. Traumatized by specific ways we are being impacted by what’s going on, like economic losses and losing health choices and safety nets. Traumatized by losing important rights, services and protections. Traumatized by the language being used and the actions being taken by those who are supposed to ensure the freedom and liberty of all people.
All perfectly normal reactions to what is happening in our world. But there are exercises we can do to soothe our nervous system, calm emotional dysregulation, and help ground ourselves to move through each day with more confidence, strength, and self-appreciation. Living from a place of resilience and resolve is how we will make change.
Kula (“community” in Sanskrit, the ancient language of yoga) believes that all human beings deserve the space, resources and tools to understand, manage and improve their mental health to reach their full potential. No matter what.
Try the exercise that Lea was describing in her video! Notice how you feel before, and after. (The Spanish version is directly below and the English version is at the bottom of the page.)
Mental health isn’t just in our minds - trauma actually lives in the body, and real healing starts there. Yet, so many people have been made to believe that healing isn’t possible without relying on inaccessible, inequitable, unaffordable and broken healthcare systems that may not always have our best interests at heart.
We recognize that mental health can feel out of reach for many, whether it’s because these topics weren’t openly discussed growing up, or because of financial or cultural barriers. But there’s a different path: learning simple, body-focused, heart-centered techniques that put you in control of your own healing and give you the power to uplift your community.
This is about resisting the systems that profit from pain and struggles, and instead embracing self-care that empowers your mind, body, and spirit on your own terms.
At Kula, we realize that being educated about exactly what “mental health” is – and being taught lifelong skills and tools that give us control over our own mental health – is the indispensable foundation for everything else we do in life: our work, economic sustainability, raising families, contributing to our communities, and fulfilling our purpose. Also, fighting tyranny.
This vision for more community-led and self-empowered mental health is deeply supported and cultivated by our programs, and we invite you to join us!
When it comes to mental health care, we’ve been given two main options: therapy or medication. While Kula believes in the value of both of those things, relying on just those two is kind of like trying to balance on a two-legged stool - it doesn’t provide the stable foundation for full healing. What really completes the picture is recognizing how much our bodies impact our mental health, and making somatic, or body-focused, practices a regular part of our mental healthcare.
According to scientific studies and experts like Dr. Peter Levine –who discovered a healing approach to trauma called somatic experiencing –the combination of movement, breath and awareness is what our bodies and minds require to heal and thrive. Kula develops exercises that combine these in the form of gentle and restorative yoga movements, controlled breathing techniques, and mindfulness practices that help release trauma from the body and spark deep healing of our mental health struggles.
We have tens of thousands of neurons in our bodies, including in our gut and our heart. The heart sends more signals in a day to the brain than vice versa. So it’s not just poetic to say “the heart knows”, it has its own special intelligence, and can guide us if we connect with it. And we all know that “gut feeling” that steers us away from danger and toward safety and fulfillment. In many ways, our body doesn’t just have a mind of its own, it is a mind of its own with its own purpose in our mental health journey.
Trauma experts have recently noted that most mental health conditions are precipitated by trauma. Perhaps that word feels like it’s becoming overused, but that’s because we’re coming to realize that many experiences initiate post-traumatic stress symptoms. A job loss, the loss of a loved one, the end of an important relationship, a big move, an accident or a difficult illness. Abuse, neglect, assault, witnessing or experiencing violence. Social oppression, being denied our worth by the society we live in.
Talk therapy is a great help, but therapy alone doesn’t bring us full circle. That’s because trauma is not effectively processed by the thinking mind. Traumatic experiences naturally bypass the reasoning “frontal brain” and go straight to the brain’s seat of fight or flight and survival. This biological response helps us protect ourselves, and keeps us alive under unthinkably stressful and dangerous circumstances.
And yet once our nervous system gets triggered in fight or flight, it creates an energetic imprint that gets stored in the body, down to the cellular level, even as the trauma doesn’t fully register in the reasoning brain. That’s why memories of trauma are often blurry, fragmented and out of order, or the memories remain hidden for years.
But as Dr. van der Kolk said in the title of his seminal work on trauma, “The Body Keeps The Score”. The “memory” stays in the body, and causes us to feel symptoms like anxiety, depression, anger, grief, helplessness, and pain. Eventually, we often start to act in uncharacteristic ways or turn to habits that don’t serve us in an attempt to dull the sensations in our bodies. But our bodies are simply trying to alert us to the need to bring attention to these feelings, give a loving response to the body, and engage in methods of trauma release.
If the body is left untreated, it results in a constantly overstimulated nervous system, emotional dysregulation, chronic and seemingly untreatable symptoms of mental health conditions. We cannot leave out the body, and the “mind” that is located there.
Yoga, controlled breathing, and body awareness exercises have been scientifically shown to help regulate our emotions and stabilize our nervous system in the moment. And when practiced regularly, these body-focused mindfulness techniques can actually rewire our brains leading to lasting changes in how we think, feel, and act. Remarkably, they can even influence gene expression, helping to address the intergenerational traumas and related fears, beliefs and behaviors passed down through our ancestry.
Mindfulness practices help us become aware of the sensations in our bodies, where they are located, and what they are trying to tell us. This awareness allows us to understand ourselves, be compassionate with ourselves, and give ourselves what we need to heal.
Breathing techniques help calm the mind and reduce anxiety and stress by overriding our body's survival response. Breathing deeply creates alignment between the heart, mind, emotions and physical systems that creates health and a sense of wellbeing.
Yoga movements reduce cortisol levels, reduces the excitability throughout the nervous system, and increases heart rate variability - meaning the body more easily adapts to change. People with high heart rate variability are typically less stressed and happier.
Based on this science, Kula equips people with tools to:
Identify where our feelings show up in our bodies
Recognize the effects of trauma on our behavior
Connect to the safety of the present moment
Choose our best path to well-being in any situation
Employ self-regulation through breathing, awareness and accessible movements
Make better decisions for our self-care, and
Learn to foresee and address situations that trigger stress.
For these reasons and more, Kula’s unique mindfulness-based mental healthcare programs not only create lasting change, but also serve as a form of resistance - empowering individuals to take our healing into our own hands and move beyond systems that haven’t always served us.
Now more than ever, tending to our mental health is a crucial step in fighting for ourselves and our communities. Join us on the journey to powerful healing by signing up for our blog notifications and newsletter, and learning these tools and skills along with us.
Try our Strong Heart exercise by clicking the video below!
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