Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids

50 trauma-informed, color-coded cards—yoga poses, mindful movement exercises, and age-appropriate practices to help kids nurture embodiment, process complex trauma, and feel safer in their bodies

A comprehensive, empowering, developmentally appropriate, and easy-to-use deck that’s grounded in attachment theory, neuroscience, and trauma theory

The Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids centers that healing from traumatic experiences happens not just in the mind, but in the body—and offers tools and movement exercises to help children sense their bodies and experience safety within them.

The deck’s practices focus on present-moment awareness, rhythmic movement, choice-making, and safe, effective touch. Across the deck and the accompanying booklet, the authors underscore empowering children to be the experts on their own bodies through invitational language, non-coercion, and authentic shared experience. Designed for therapists, social workers, parents, and other care facilitators, The Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids supports:

• Practical application: With 50 color-coded cards; adaptable exercises; movement practices that can be used individually or within groups; and a focus on four paths to embodiment
• Understanding trauma-informed foundations: Explores the distinctions among PTSD, C-PTSD, and developmental trauma
• Imagination, sensory awareness, and empowered choice: Name-free, writing-free, and gender- and demographically neutral, the cards are designed for all kids to see themselves in the movement exercises.
• Agency, creativity, and empowerment: Core practice principles include non-coercion; non-abandonment; and avoidance of physical adjustments, praise, or judgment—there’s no “right” way to do any of the movements.

In addition to poses and movement invitations, the deck and booklet also include a range of games and somatic play activities suitable for individual and group settings.DAVID EMERSON is the founder and director of Yoga Services for the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute in Brookline Massachusetts, where he coined the term "trauma-sensitive yoga" (TSY). He was responsible for curriculum development, supervision and oversight of the yoga intervention component of the first of its kind, NIH funded study, conducted by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to assess the utility and feasibility of yoga for adults with treatment-resistant PTSD. Emerson has developed, conducted, and supervised TSY groups for rape crisis centers, domestic violence programs, residential programs for youth, military bases, survivors of terrorism, and Veterans Administration centers and clinics. In addition to co-authoring several articles on the subject of yoga and trauma, Emerson is the co-author of Overcoming Trauma through Yoga, (North Atlantic Books, 2011) and author of Trauma-Sensitive Yoga in Therapy (Norton, 2015). He leads trainings for yoga teachers and mental health clinicians in North America, Europe, and Asia.​

KIRSTEN VORIS (RYT-200, TCTSY-F) is a former secondary school teacher and adult educator who completed her initial yoga certification in Ankara, Turkey. Her interest in yoga as a tool for personal integration led her to Yin Yoga and the research-based Trauma Center Trauma Sensitive Yoga (TCTSY). She has facilitated TCTSY for volunteer aid workers in Cusercoli, Italy and brought TCTSY to therapists through a PESI trauma retreat in Sedona, Arizona. In addition to facilitating TCTSY for private clients in and around Tucson, Arizona, Voris has been the TCTSY provider for youth and children through a tribal health service in Southern Arizona. She offers an introduction to TCTSY to fourth year medical students and medical residents at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine.

BROOKLYN ALVAREZ is a clinical psychologist-in-training (doctoral degree expected 2021), certified Kripalu yoga teacher, and avid student of Buddhist psychology and mindfulness meditation. Alvarez's personal and professional experiences have inspired in her a fervent aspiration to specialize in the treatment of developmental trauma and, ultimately, to disrupt systemic hegemony.